Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Author Archives: Kars

Slides and notes for ‘Limits of the Imaginable’ – a lecture on the future of applied game design

By Kars | Published: November 3, 2010

Last week I found myself in the gor­geous sur­round­ings of the Roy­al Dutch Acad­e­my of Sci­ences (KNAW) to talk about my views on the future of applied game design at an expert meet­ing orga­nized by the Nether­lands Study Cen­tre for Tech­nol­o­gy Trends (STT). I was one of four speak­ers, the oth­ers being David Shaf­fer, Jeroen […]

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Cheating by the rules in Pirateball and Illuminati

By Kars | Published: October 18, 2010

One of the design­ers of the game Pirate­ball describes it as “extreme­ly stu­pid”. I recent­ly ran it at a games fes­ti­val and dis­cov­ered that it’s also craft­ed quite clev­er­ly. Pirate base­ball To poten­tial play­ers I always say that it’s base­ball as pirates play it. Then you get an idea. That’s the first trick: the name […]

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PLAY Pilots is live

By Kars | Published: August 5, 2010

We’ve launched a first ver­sion of PLAY Pilots; a web site we’ve been work­ing on the past few months. It is the next phase of our engage­ment with the city of Utrecht on cul­tur­al inno­va­tion through play, which I allud­ed to in this post.1 At this point, the site allows you to see what cus­­tom-made […]

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So yeah we’ve moved

By Kars | Published: July 30, 2010

If you look in the foot­er of this web­site, or on its con­tact page, you’ll see a new address. Neude 5, Utrecht, NL. We’ve been hap­py renters at the Dutch Game Gar­den for almost two years now so when they announced their move to a new loca­tion of course we want­ed to stick with them […]

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Join us for a game of Bocce Drift

By Kars | Published: July 23, 2010

So we have five sets of boc­ce balls lying around (or jeu de boules, as we like to call the game in the Nether­lands). They’re left over from our lit­tle stint at NU Grounds. We were plan­ning to run Boc­ce Drift there, but did not get around to it. So let’s play it any­way, in […]

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Games we ran at NU Grounds

By Kars | Published: July 9, 2010

On a scorch­ing­ly hot Sat­ur­day after­noon sev­er­al agents of Hub­bub descend­ed on the Utrecht area of Lei­d­sche Rijn to run a num­ber of phys­i­cal social games at the NU Grounds fes­ti­val. We played a mix of games designed by stu­dents of the Utrecht School of the Arts and games tak­en from the excel­lent Ludoc­i­ty web­site. […]

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You don’t put a game in a computer; my first column for Bashers

By Kars | Published: June 22, 2010

Here’s the first col­umn I’ve writ­ten for Bash­ers, the pre­mier source of games jour­nal­ism in the Nether­lands. I’m plan­ning to devote sub­se­quent columns to dis­cus­sions of oth­er per­va­sive games. Many thanks to Niels ‘t Hooft for indulging me. Do you know a game called Cru­el 2 B Kind? It works like this: the goal is […]

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An interview with Kars in a book on Utrecht creatives

By Kars | Published: June 16, 2010

A few weeks ago Xpert CMKB pre­sent­ed a book on cre­ative entre­peneurs in the city of Utrecht at Kun­st­gras 2010. I’m quite flat­tered to have an inter­view with myself includ­ed. Below are pho­tos of the pages in ques­tion with links to high res­o­lu­tion shots on Flickr.1 Read about why I start­ed Hub­bub and what it […]

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Slides and notes for ‘The City Is My Games Console’ at CIID

By Kars | Published: June 11, 2010

A few weeks ago I had the plea­sure of doing an open lec­ture at CIID; the Copen­hagen Insti­tute for Inter­ac­tion Design. Below you’ll find a selec­tion of the slides I used, plus a rough tran­script of what I said.1 Not includ­ed is arguably the most fun part of the after­noon, which was a playtest of […]

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Join us for playful meanderings through Leidsche Rijn this saturday

By Kars | Published: May 31, 2010

I’ve always found neigh­bor­hoods under con­struc­tion curi­ous places. There is a strange ten­sion between the place as planned and the place as exe­cut­ed and sub­se­quent­ly lived in. Lei­d­sche Rijn is a new neigh­bor­hood being built in Utrecht (which is my home­town and also where Hub­bub’s stu­dio is locat­ed). When it is fin­ished in 2025 it […]

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