On Monday I got several visits from friends, family and colleagues, all curious about my new workspace. It was enjoyable—we even played some Animal Upon Animal with Eelco’s kids—but not conducive to much productivity. I mainly did financial and administrative tasks.
Alper, meanwhile, returned from a much-deserved long weekend relaxing (and drinking coffee) in Oslo. He spent the day catching up on current affairs.
We reviewed the past week’s sprint for AJI the next day. We’ve been working in short, one-week sprints. This is a good way to stay nimble and only focus on the most pressing matters. Later that day, Simon joined us to plan the upcoming sprint focussing mostly on the website accompanying the app.
During most of this Kelli was present to observe how we work by listening in on our calls. I also spent another few hours talking to her about other projects such as CHUTORO and just generally about our take on gamification. She’ll be doing more research and then get to writing (a task I do not envy her, it’s a lot to chew on). I look forward to seeing her article in Vrij Nederland.
Alper discussed business over lunch, and I spent the afternoon trying to tame the Email Beast.
We started Wednesday with a call about a possible new project related to reuse of vacant real-estate. Alper buckled down to work on AJI while I headed over to Jeroen’s new workspace in FreedomLab to go over the schedule for a workshop about a new festival for games and game culture.
The next day, Alper continued work on AJI. I was particularly amused and impressed with the press release he put together explaining what the app does in “Oprah-speak”. Meanwhile, I prepared for and subsequently delivered a lecture at the HvA. This was followed by a critique session in which I got to play a ton of prototypes made by the students in GameMaker.
That evening, I had a ball playing a super villain caught in a bureaucratic nightmare, in a short larp made by former Hubbub intern Arjen. Short larps are an interesting phenomenon—the limited duration coupled with themes diverging from the typical scifi and fantasy fare is inviting to people who’d normally not participate in a weekend-long game.
On Friday, Simon, Alper and I had another call about AJI, going over the website screens I’d sketched. We managed to whittle my proposed set of designs down to even more of a bare minimum. The minimalism was offset by some exciting interactions that I hope we’ll manage to pull off. They’re quite dramatic.
Alper had another meeting over lunch, and later that day we joined in one more call exploring a possible future collaboration between us and a kindred spirit in NYC. I ended the week with my very first “Bierclub” (Friday drinks) at Vechtclub XL, which was nice and convivial and included locally brewed craft beer.
So yeah, a good week. It involved a lot of talking and setting up of things for what will hopefully be interesting future projects. It was a bit of a challenge to get my bit in for AJI in between all the meetings and such. I hope to make up for it this week.
Week 241
An intense week, not in the last place because of Alper’s physical presence at the Utrecht studio for the whole week. It was time for another OKR review and we prefer to do those live in meatspace. As always, we graded ourselves, came to some harsh realisations and adjusted course accordingly. Building an applied game design studio unlike any other is no picnic, I can tell you. But still totally worth it.
(Actually, the day before, Sunday, I had also spent working. I assisted with getting the European project proposal about climate change for which we are a consortium partner ready for submission.)
On Tuesday we tested the tolerance of our studio-mates Tupil even further by bringing in Simon to spend a full day reviewing and working on AJI. We are so close to a beta release candidate I can smell it, but as always the final touches take the most effort. It was good to have the whole team onsite, though. We made real progress and got into some of the more gnarly bits of the thing’s design that really require close collaboration between all disciplines involved.
Continuing the trend of touching base with all the folks involved with our operation, we had our first conference call with our associates on Wednesday. Once we managed to get everyone into a Google hangout—which was more trouble than it should be—we had a very productive session sharing our plans for the immediate future and hearing about the same from Sebastian, Ianus and Joris. It’s pretty amazing having such a brain trust to bounce ideas off of. I look forward to seeing what we’ll do together in the future.
That evening we were visited by a group of young Dutch art critics who operate under the name Vuurlinie (“firing line”). Over the course of three hours we had a very stimulating debate about games, play, “digital culture” and so on with our work serving as background. We also demoed AJI and got some very encouraging responses.
The next day, Alper and I spent some time thinking about what direction to take in our collaboration with our NYC contact. Later that day we had another conference call, shared our ideas and decided we had come to the point where we are ready to outline one more formally and make it ready for grant application. We’re working on some pretty heavy subject matter in this project so it’s been a challenge to find an approach that is respectful but engaging at the same time.
We also had a visit from Niels to evaluate our work together on KAZUNOKO. Looking back on projects with clients and collaborators is a habit I think is important to maintain because it often leads to great ideas for how to do things differently the next time around. This session was no different.
Satisfied with our progress, Alper and I decided we could afford to take Friday off. We spent a few hours in The Village drinking too much coffee and playing Netrunner. Alper caught on quickly (this was his first game) and ended up snatching victory from me at the very last moment. Afterwards I needed an hour to come down from the adrenaline rush as a result.