Week 294

Here are some brief (belat­ed) notes on last week.

Project SHACHI saw good progress. I pinned down the game design for the first beta in a bunch of screen sketch­es on index cards and some state mod­els on white­board. Alper con­tin­ued to do soft­ware devel­op­ment on the pro­to­type in Uni­ty while Tim fur­ther devel­oped the artwork.

I reviewed the high fideli­ty pro­to­type for BANKEN and also joined Bureau Drop for a pre­sen­ta­tion to the client.

Lekha, Alper and I had anoth­er call about Bycatch in which we planned the offi­cial launch, which I am hap­py to report will be at TWO5SIX. A fuller announce­ment will fol­low in due course but you heard it here first!

Alper pre­pared and gave a pre­sen­ta­tion at Coun­ter­Play in Århus. He reports: “The con­fer­ence was a lot of fun and I met a lot of peo­ple who think play is the future.”

Final­ly, I attend­ed the first Hack­ing Habi­tat lec­ture. Sask­ia Sassen talked on the theme of “How to Be Seen”. She described how high finance has the ten­den­cy to make cer­tain groups of peo­ple super­flu­ous. They are pushed out and no longer offi­cial­ly account­ed for. Zih­ni Özdil pro­vid­ed a brief response in which he argued that crit­ics of neolib­er­al­ism should make an effort to com­mu­ni­cate their con­cerns in plain lan­guage. Oth­er­wise, the peo­ple affect­ed by it the most are sim­ply not reached.

The lec­ture was fol­lowed by a two-day event in which par­tic­i­pants from var­i­ous groups of con­cern worked togeth­er on solu­tions to the issues raised in the lec­ture. Our Play­ing with Rules work­shop for­mat was one of tools they used. It was also a first step for us towards “open sourc­ing” the for­mat, because facil­i­ta­tion was han­dled by Hack­ing Habi­tat. I received some encour­ag­ing reports from the organ­i­sa­tion on how it was received.