Week 285

The best news last week was the go-ahead on SHACHI. We’re excit­ed to start work on that in the new week.

Work on the next ver­sion of Cam­parc has start­ed for the STRP bien­nal.

Kars ran a work­shop at Beren­schot togeth­er with Jeroen van Mas­tright. As research for the work­shop I looked to find dilem­mas in games and had a hard­er time than I at first would have thought. This scene from the Walk­ing Dead is a clas­sic exam­ple but many oth­er large scale games are some­what dilem­ma free.

For KLM Kars pre­pared copy and sent the work by Hedge­field to the client for feedback.

I talked with Sebas­t­ian Quack about the Play­ful Com­mons project. I also met Güven Çatak of the BUG Game Lab at Istan­bul Bahçeşe­hir Uni­ver­si­ty.

Kars wrote this high­ly nec­es­sary post of what it exact­ly is that we mean when we say “play­ful design” and why that is an impor­tant way of look­ing at design.

We had very stim­u­lat­ing update calls with our asso­ciates Sebas­t­ian and Ianus as well this week.

Because we are in between offices in Berlin I am now tem­porar­i­ly resid­ing in the Rain­mak­ing Loft. It’s a fun and inter­est­ing change of scene though I haven’t found a place in the area yet where I want to have lunch a sec­ond time.

We’re explor­ing sep­a­rat­ing ship­ping costs from Bycatch’s cur­rent price so we can recoup the mon­ey we lose on inter­na­tion­al ship­ping (so get it now while it still includes ship­ping!). We’re also going to repack­age the game to fix a minor print­ing error.

You can now see the game on dis­play at the Vecht­club XL.

I demon­strat­ed Bycatch at the table­top game design­ers meet­up here in Berlin’s Spiel­wiese game cafe and left behind a copy there for inter­est­ed peo­ple to try out. I gave an inter­view for the Dutch Design mag­a­zine dude about my career in design with a heavy focus on Bycatch.

On Fri­day evening I met Mar­cus Richter and Den­nis Kogel of Super­lev­el to record a pod­cast about Bycatch where I talked about the game, explained it and played it with my co-hosts in Ger­man. I look for­ward to lis­ten­ing to the result.

Next Tues­day I will be talk­ing at IXD­S’s pre-work talks about design­ing for Bycatch and privacy.