Week 253

We kicked off the week with a review of the lat­est sprint on Stand­ing. The app now has a com­plete­ly new look. Aside from a few final tweaks we deemed it ready to ship. For the next sprint we decid­ed to focus on get­ting the web site aligned with the new look.

That same day I pre­pared and deliv­ered a This hap­pened talk on Rip­ple Effect. It was fun to dig through the archives and col­lect arte­facts from the game’s pro­duc­tion. Many of the pro­jec­t’s team were present and after­wards we agreed it had been one hell of a ride.

On Tues­day I head­ed to Free­dom­Lab in Ams­ter­dam for a closed work­shop with Eric Gor­don on what he calls “engage­ment games”. The Mobile City had col­lect­ed a diverse group of thinkers and mak­ers and it was a plea­sure to spend the bet­ter part of a day reflect­ing on issues that have been part of our work ever since Hub­bub started.

Alper left for Barcelona on Wednes­day, from where he would spend the remain­der of the week doing main­te­nance work and sam­pling the city’s many delights.

On Thurs­day, I vis­it­ed TU Delft on invi­ta­tion of Ianus to attend the final pre­sen­ta­tions of a group of BA indus­tri­al design stu­dents who had cre­at­ed phys­i­cal games and toys for Id‑8. Many designs fea­tured inno­v­a­tive use of mech­a­nisms or mate­ri­als while remain­ing sim­ple and afford­able to produce.

The week end­ed for me with anoth­er playtest of KEGANI, this time at the Dutch Game Gar­den, with a cou­ple of sea­soned game pro­fes­sion­als. Alper had done a test ear­li­er in the week with his new­ly mint­ed “game design­ers anony­mous” meet­up group. This sec­ond iter­a­tion was an improve­ment over the first and the idea is still received with great enthu­si­asm. Nonethe­less, based on the test out­comes I would say we have our work cut out for us; many dif­fer­ent direc­tions appear equal­ly promis­ing from here on out.

A final note on logis­tics: Kars will be in Berlin work­ing from our Kreuzberg stu­dio togeth­er with Alper.