Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Author Archives: Kars

Play Matters

By Kars | Published: February 26, 2015

When Miguel Sicart’s Play Mat­ters was pub­lished in August of last year it imme­di­ate­ly went on my to-read list but it took me a while before pick­ing it up. When I did I was imme­di­ate­ly hooked. Not since The Well-Played Game have a I come across such a thought­ful treat­ment of play. Play Mat­ters is also […]

Posted in Articles, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 286

By Kars | Published: February 16, 2015

We made some good progress on sev­er­al projects this week. The big one is Home Rule. Alper and I kicked it off with some plan­ning for the next two weeks. Then we imme­di­ate­ly start­ed crack­ing on things. Alper got a pro­to­typ­ing set­up in Uni­ty up and run­ning, includ­ing iBea­cons inte­gra­tion, and pro­ceed­ed to do some […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

An Outline of Playful Design

By Kars | Published: February 4, 2015

In the sum­mer of last year we announced a new direc­tion for the stu­dio, which boils down to us no longer fram­ing our work as game design, but as play­ful design. We are inter­est­ed in design­ing a wide range of play­things, and we are also inter­est­ed in design­ing things that aren’t pri­mar­i­ly meant for play […]

Posted in Thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 284

By Kars | Published: January 30, 2015

A large chunk of my time this week was tak­en up with con­tribut­ing to E‑Motive Day, a con­fer­ence organ­ised by an inter­na­tion­al net­work of organ­i­sa­tions work­ing on social change of var­i­ous kinds. We were asked to demo Stand­ing, and talk about our per­spec­tive on play­ful design for activism. Peo­ple said nice things about both and […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 282

By Kars | Published: January 16, 2015

A large part of this week was tak­en up by our annu­al OKR review and sub­se­quent reori­en­ta­tion of OKRs for 2015. An inten­sive exer­cise, but seri­ous­ly worth it. The tech­nique helps us build learn­ing into our tiny organ­i­sa­tion, and that’s very valu­able. We’ll share some out­comes of this review in a sep­a­rate blog post soonish. […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 281

By Kars | Published: January 12, 2015

To make the most of the first full work­week of the new year Alper arrived from Berlin to work with me at the Utrecht stu­dio on a num­ber of things. We kicked off our sec­ond project with KLM on Wednes­day. I went over to “build­ing 600” on Schiphol Noord to share our pre­lim­i­nary ideas for […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 275

By Kars | Published: December 1, 2014

We were plen­ty busy this week, but much of it was “behind the screens” kind of stuff. So I will keep these notes short, for a change. Alper had a bunch of meet­ings, ran anoth­er Game Design­ers Anony­mous, did some devel­op­ment on Stand­ing, and planned mar­ket­ing of Bycatch. Kars also had his fair share of […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Week 274

By Kars | Published: November 24, 2014

At the start of this week Alper was still in NYC after enjoy­ing anoth­er excel­lent edi­tion of PRACTICE. He did some work on Bycatch with Sub­alekha and oth­er­wise enjoyed the city before head­ing back to Europe on Tues­day. While he was mak­ing the cross­ing, I par­tic­i­pat­ed in the first Tegen­licht meet­up in Utrecht. We watched […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 270

By Kars | Published: October 27, 2014

My week start­ed with the sec­ond day of the Asia-Europe Cul­ture Min­is­ters Meet­ing (ASEM)‘s work­shop on play­ful cities. It was a huge plea­sure spend­ing two days with tal­ent­ed peers from Europe, many of whom’s work I admire great­ly. It was equal­ly great to meet Asian prac­ti­tion­ers and hear about the big dif­fer­ences in their local […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 268

By Kars | Published: October 13, 2014

After a false start on Mon­day due to a lin­ger­ing head cold I was back in action on Tues­day. We made good progress this week on KUMA (our project with KLM on game-based learn­ing) and on Bycatch (our card game about drones sur­veil­lance and remote war­fare). Let’s start with KUMA. We processed the out­comes of […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed