Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Week 185

By Alper | Published: March 11, 2013

We’re host­ing a run of Code 4 these weeks which is prov­ing to be stim­u­lat­ing. All in all we’re rather hap­py how well the project is hold­ing up. For a two year old code­base, it does­n’t show much vis­i­ble signs of aging at all.

For KAIGARA we got the team filled out accord­ing to our heist method­ol­o­gy. Con­spir­a­tors old and new will tack­le this project which should keep most of the stu­dio hum­ming for the first half of 2013.

We’ve been writ­ing and sketch­ing every­thing up for deliv­ery on FURAPPA. One of the series of game con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion projects pass­ing through the stu­dio.

SAKE is being vet­ted now by De Gids (you can sign up for launch). As an intro­duc­tion we asked the bril­liant James Bri­dle to write a piece about lit­er­a­ture and games for the mag­a­zine which was trans­lat­ed and pub­lished:

Reading @jamesbridle in Dutch

Niels wrote the fifth Recess! and knocked that one straight out of the park. I was expect­ing some­thing like this to hap­pen dur­ing this ser­i­al, but this is way ahead of my most opti­mistic pro­jec­tions. Kars is up this week and our expec­ta­tions are high.

Kars went to Mov­ing Sto­ries on Fri­day to give a talk about game design for muse­ums and to mod­er­ate a pan­el. We love to work in this field but we still find ample mis­con­cep­tions about how to apply games in a muse­al con­text. Kars’s talk is one more step towards fix­ing this (online soon).

My blurb on gam­i­fi­ca­tion for TNW Mag­a­zine was pub­lished online for eas­i­er perusal.

Dur­ing the week­end Kars had a game night which I’m afraid I missed, but I gath­ered with Berlin friends on Sun­day to have a NotAt­SxSW BBQ din­ner.

Candidates for tonight's 6-player board game session.

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Week 184

By Kars | Published: March 5, 2013

Alper was asked to con­tribute some words on ‘gam­i­fi­ca­tion’ to TNW Mag­a­zine, which appeared the begin­ning of this week. With some amuse­ment we took note of the oth­er con­trib­u­tors to this piece. Let’s just say a diverse range of per­spec­tives is cov­ered.

On Mon­day Alper and I worked on adapt­ing Code 4 for play with­in an orga­ni­za­tion oth­er than the tax admin­is­tra­tion. We’d start­ed work on that the week before and shipped it by the end of the day.

The next day Simon, Alper and I spent one more full day of work on the SAKE release can­di­date.

On Wednes­day we signed the con­tract for KAIGARA’s sec­ond phase. An occa­sion to cel­e­brate, which we will do soon—see below. We also con­tin­ued work on SAKE.

I dis­cussed progress on FURAPPA with Alper on Thurs­day. I pro­vid­ed feed­back on the slide deck he’d draft­ed con­tain­ing over ten ideas rang­ing from the prag­mat­ic to the slight­ly insane. Next, I’ll sit down to sketch some quick sce­nar­ios to fur­ther illus­trate the ideas.

That same day, we shipped the SAKE release can­di­date. A pre-launch page went up, offi­cial­ly unveil­ing the project as Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie—a col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing game which will run for 10 week start­ing April 8th. If you enjoy open-end­ed cre­ative play, like read­ing and writ­ing, and under­stand Dutch (sor­ry) you should join us.

And final­ly, on Fri­day, Alper had break­fast with the Silikot­ti crew, post­ed his Recess! post—for which we also received a nice shout-out from our friends at Mud­lark—and fin­ished The Quan­tum Thief which he rather enjoyed. Mean­while, I announced the sec­ond install­ment of our FRIDAYS AT 7 which if you’re read­ing this you should feel free to join.

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Week 183

By Alper | Published: February 25, 2013

Kars start­ed last week by giv­ing a lec­ture to indus­tri­al design stu­dents at my alma mater. He walked stu­dents through Beesten­bende and shared with them the fin­er points of inter­ac­tion design for hybrid games. That week we also dis­cussed next ver­sions of Beesten­bende with the Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty Muse­um.

We received this paper from a game about shrink­age in Dutch com­mu­ni­ties we’re advis­ing:

Received a newspaper from the future

Kars also wrote his first Recess! post, which means I am up again this week. Look­ing for­ward to that a lot. All three of us have found the open for­mat to be very refresh­ing. On Tues­day I gave an inter­view as a pre­view for a con­fer­ence where I’ll be talk­ing about the cre­ative prac­tices of our stu­dio and how the way we work influ­ences what we make and vice ver­sa. I hope to share both the inter­view and details about that con­fer­ence in the very near future.

We’re devel­op­ing Code 4 into a more repeat­able ver­sion which is tak­ing less time than expect­ed thanks to the solid­ness of Djan­go. Speak­ing of which I attend­ed the Berlin Djan­go meet­up gra­cious­ly host­ed by our friends over at the Gidsy office.

Kars and Tim are also work­ing on a new game with the work­ing title ‘Fields of Dark­ness’. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly their pre­vi­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion The Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise was played at GEEK 2013 last week.

Sander van der Vegte moved in over at Utrecht to be our first stu­dio res­i­dent. We are immense­ly pleased to share the space with some­body of his out­stand­ing track record in games and we look for­ward to many­fold pleas­ant inter­ac­tions in the future. His K.K. Slid­er is already stand­ing proud­ly:

K.K. Slider has joined us in the studio

The end of the week was most­ly busy wrap­ping up SAKE both in soli­tary sprints as well as a full day one on Fri­day. It is sat­is­fy­ing to see that game being pared down to its essence and receiv­ing its fin­ish­ing touch­es. And we end­ed Fri­day in Berlin with an impromp­tu FAT7.

Besides all of this also lots of bor­ing stuff to keep both stu­dios run­ning. More pub­lic speak­ing logis­tics: next week Kars will speak at Mov­ing Sto­ries about how musea can use dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences to engage their audi­ences. We’d love to see you there.

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Week 182

By Kars | Published: February 18, 2013

On Mon­day Alper got good news about our sub­mis­sion to the gam­i­fi­ca­tion research net­work work­shop at CHI. Our posi­tion paper was accept­ed, which means we’ll be there to con­tribute to the dis­cus­sion. Alper has promised me he’ll talk a bit more about our sub­mis­sion here soon.

Mean­while that same day, I spent some time fine tun­ing the phys­i­cal pro­to­type for HIRAME, which we’d come up with the week before.

At it again. Prototyping HIRAME this time.

Tues­day, Alper worked on SAKE. He’s been work­ing down a long list of improve­ments to make before we can push out the release client a few weeks from now.

I pre­pared and sub­se­quent­ly ran a HIRAME work­shop togeth­er with Her­man on site at the client. We played through the pro­to­type and from the respons­es we got it looks like we’re at least head­ed in the right direc­tion. I love being able to play some ver­sion of an ini­tial idea with clients at such an ear­ly stage. After­wards, the char­ac­ter of all con­ver­sa­tions imme­di­ate­ly changes, because peo­ple can all of a sud­den imag­ine them­selves play­ing it. Noth­ing else can evoke a play­er expe­ri­ence as effec­tive­ly.

On Wednes­day Alper con­tin­ued work on SAKE. Also, Niels pub­lished his first Recess! post. After Alper’s ini­tial sal­vo on Pro­teus, we’re now deep in fairy­tale coun­try with Niels’ rumi­na­tion on Ni No Kuni.1

That day, I spent some time sketch­ing for FURAPPA, explor­ing design impli­ca­tions of the var­i­ous ideas Alper and I came up with ear­li­er.

On Thurs­day I had the plea­sure of Simon’s com­pa­ny at the stu­dio again. We were joined by Alper over (an amaz­ing­ly sta­ble) Google+ hang­out. Togeth­er, we put in some seri­ous work on SAKE. I’m real­ly enjoy­ing the way were all work­ing in the same code base—myself mock­ing up UIs in HTML just light­ly pep­pered with Boot­strap markup, Simon going in and apply­ing his graph­ic design mag­ic using LESS and final­ly Alper hook­ing every­thing up to the Djan­go app. We’re col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly shap­ing the game, con­tin­u­ous­ly play­ing with it using the local ver­sions run­ning on our machines. I would not trade this way of work­ing for any reg­i­ment­ed kind of ‘tra­di­tion­al’ design process I can think of. It is more effec­tive, and more fun.

Team SAKE hard at work

Alper pub­lished Water­snake on Sat­ur­day, which is the fruit of his labor dur­ing Swhack Berlin. Water­snake is a Djan­go app that does “major­i­ty vot­ing on sin­gle pro­pos­als with sup­port for del­e­ga­tion”. It is part­ly inspired by Liq­uid Democ­ra­cy and to me rep­re­sents an inter­est­ing area of future research—applying game design and cre­ative soft­ware engi­neer­ing to issues around deci­sion mak­ing and gov­er­nance.

Final­ly, on Sat­ur­day & Sun­day I pre­pared a lec­ture for sec­ond year TU Delft indus­tri­al design stu­dents, about the design process behind Beesten­bende, which serves as an intro­duc­tion to inter­ac­tion design. And I also edit­ed my Game­ful World chap­ter, which is now in its third iter­a­tion and close to being sub­mit­ted for a peer review.

Mean­while, back in Berlin, Alper played boardgames…

King of Tokyo - awesome game if you're into monsters (and who isn't?)

  1. This week I’m up, so keep an eye out for that over at Kit­sune. [↩]
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Week 181

By Alper | Published: February 11, 2013

Such a full stack last week that I’m a bit unsure what to start with. Lots of new busi­ness being dis­cussed too vague­ly to write about, but we can say 2013 is off to a good start. Though Berlin is still rather cold:

Ghostly in the metro

Kars spent a large part of the week prepar­ing the HIRAME playtest togeth­er with Her­man. That will hap­pen this week, so a good kind of ten­sion is build­ing.

Working with Simon and Alper on SAKE

The team for SAKE (Kars, myself and Simon) spent a full day sprint­ing to work towards the release ver­sion which is smash­ing fun across two stu­dios. The syn­chronic­i­ty makes it so much eas­i­er to bang out lots of good work. I catch myself wish­ing that we would do noth­ing else, but a stu­dio revolves around many more kinds of work which all have to hap­pen (un)fortunately.

We got this hand as a sou­venir from Simon’s upcom­ing short movie The Light­house:

Posable hand

We’re col­lat­ing notes and sketch­es on FURAPPA to head for deliv­ery on that short engage­ment. We hope to be able to fol­low up on it because it is such a ripe ter­ri­to­ry for lots of play­ful and social exper­i­ments.

Prepara­to­ry work on KAIGARA con­tin­ues and forces us to con­sid­er lots of things before actu­al pro­duc­tion which is very use­ful even though it may not be our usu­al agile modus operan­di.

Wednes­day I post­ed the first install­ment of ‘Recess!’ an episod­ic cor­re­spon­dence series on games between myself, Kars and Niels. We all write a lot about games in var­i­ous con­texts, but we felt that more free­dom would result in more cre­ativ­i­ty. With­out any edi­tors breath­ing down our necks, in Recess! we will be writ­ing about what­ev­er strikes our fan­cy. This week Niels —hav­ing fin­ished his book draft— is up. I’m look­ing for­ward to his con­tri­bu­tion a lot.

Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly my Recess! was about Pro­teus and Fri­day my review for the nrc.next was pub­lished about it. I try to com­bine game crit­i­cism and ideas from the sci­ences and the arts in my reviews as far as that is pos­si­ble in 250 words. You’ll have to read it your­self to see if I’ve suc­ceed­ed:

Alper's review of Proteus in nrc.next

Fri­day also Kars went to Ams­ter­dam to present our progress on SAKE to the Gids and make sure we are all aligned for final descent.

The Utrecht stu­dio may receive rein­force­ments rather soon if you remem­ber the call we made for res­i­dents. We are look­ing for high­ly capa­ble peo­ple who do their own work but also enrich the stu­dio’s prac­tice by their pres­ence. We have received some bril­liant appli­ca­tions and we’re excit­ed to see where this lit­tle sce­nius is head­ed.

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Week 180

By Kars | Published: February 4, 2013

I had the plea­sure of spend­ing most of this week work­ing at our Berlin stu­dio face-to-face with Alper.

Alper's workplace at Praxis

A large part of our time was tak­en up with work on FURAPPA. We spent sev­er­al ses­sions over the course of the week gen­er­at­ing ideas. We’ll go over those next, pick the best ones and devel­op them a bit fur­ther so they can be pre­sent­ed. This is a short engage­ment, but we hope to be asked to devel­op some of these con­cepts fur­ther in the next phase. For sure, we’re already rather excit­ed about some of the more out­landish ones.

Anoth­er rea­son for my trip to Berlin was the slight­ly belat­ed strat­e­gy ses­sion that was still on our list. We spent an after­noon think­ing out loud about the near and slight­ly more dis­tant future of our prac­tice, punc­tu­at­ed by a few games of darts and hand-ground cof­fee rit­u­als.

Since the num­ber, scope and scale of projects we are tak­ing on has increased quite a bit, we decid­ed to set up a resource plan­ning. As with all these admin­is­tra­tive tools we strive to keep things light-weight but effec­tive. Alper, who is now firm­ly in the sad­dle as our sec­ond man­ag­ing part­ner, put togeth­er just the thing and I am enjoy­ing the added insight into the busi­ness already.

Alper squeezed in work on a con­fer­ence sub­mis­sion, which will con­tin­ue our inves­ti­ga­tion into games-as-rit­u­als and also include not just talk­ing but also doing. I am sure reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog know that is some­thing we feel strong­ly about.

All of this was punc­tu­at­ed by a num­ber of Skype calls with poten­tial clients, friends and pos­si­ble future col­lab­o­ra­tors. Con­tract nego­ti­a­tions for the sec­ond stage of KAIGARA also got under­way in earnest.

And so on Sat­ur­day, I hopped on a train back to Utrecht. Dur­ing the six-hour ride I had the plea­sure of look­ing back on what can only be described as Yet Anoth­er Good Week.

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Week 179

By Alper | Published: January 27, 2013

This will be some short notes where I had been floored by flu over the week­end and Kars spent most of his time in Utrecht push­ing every­thing along for the con­cept pre­sen­ta­tion of KAIGARA.

Since this week you can also reg­is­ter for updates on the Game­ful World, the book Kars is con­tribut­ing to.

In between every­thing there was ample cof­fee with co-con­spir­a­tors both in Berlin and Utrecht. Kars and Tim Bosje, who you might remem­ber from Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise, even thought up a cof­fee themed card game over cof­fee. Lots of stuff brew­ing (no pun intend­ed) and a lot we would like to share, but not just now.

And then we fin­ished the week with a FRIDAYS AT 7 at our local De Bas­taard because we and stu­dio friends had rea­son enough to cel­e­brate. Niels ‘t Hooft—who we col­lab­o­rat­ed with in Code 4—finished his book draft:

And Arjen de Jong—a for­mer intern—graduated:

First FRIDAYS AT 7 with friends of Hubbub.

A final note on logis­tics: next week Kars will be in Berlin at Prax­is for a plan­ning ses­sion and work on FURAPPA.

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Join us in Utrecht for FRIDAYS AT 7

By Kars | Published: January 22, 2013

So it’s time for a new thing, some­thing that will pos­si­bly turn into a irreg­u­lar­ly recur­ring get-togeth­er for friends of the stu­dio. We’ve bor­rowed the name—FRIDAYS AT 7—from the drinks Urban­scale orga­nizes in NYC. With per­mis­sion, of course, as can be told from this exchange on Twit­ter:

So, the low­down: this Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 25, we’ll be at De Bas­taard from 7pm onwards. Join us for a few drinks, some shop-talk or just to shoot the breeze. There’s a Face­book event too, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I should men­tion we’re well aware of the Glob­al Game Jam hap­pen­ing the same week­end. Last year we were hap­pi­ly jam­ming along with Dutch friends in Berlin, this year var­i­ous oblig­a­tions pre­vent us from doing so again. All the more rea­son for a few beers, right?

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Week 178

By Kars | Published: January 21, 2013

So it’s been a snowy week here in Utrecht—and I’m pret­ty sure it’s been more than chilly in Berlin too. We start­ed the week ear­li­er than usu­al, on Sun­day, with myself plug­ging away at a revised chap­ter for the Game­ful World book—trying to cram in as many ref­er­ences as I could, and gen­er­al­ly clar­i­fy­ing and stream­lin­ing my argu­ment.1 I was joined by Alper who had been in NL the past few days. We paid a vis­it to Plof for some fries—can’t get prop­er Dutch fries in Germany—and The Vil­lage for some cof­fee, and by the end of the after­noon Alper hopped on a train back to Berlin.

Those small Utrecht rituals #wander

Mon­day I’d planned to spend most of the day fin­ish­ing the chap­ter, but I was rude­ly inter­rupt­ed by a Dutch tele­vi­sion news crew, who asked my opin­ion on what turned out to be a real­i­ty game gone awry. Most of these were begin­ner’s mistakes—such as a too-seri­ous theme—that could’ve been eas­i­ly avoid­ed by read­ing a few bits of Per­va­sive Games. If you’re inter­est­ed (and under­stand Dutch) here’s the short item they pro­duced from inter­views with myself and the stu­dents that were tar­get­ed by the game.

Video by NOS op 3, 15 Jan­u­ary 2013.

Most of the rest of the week was tak­en up with fur­ther work on KAIGARA. Alper pro­duced a tech­ni­cal memo and I cre­at­ed a one-slide pre­sen­ta­tion of the game con­cept. The two togeth­er are used to get buy-in inside the client orga­ni­za­tion.

Aside from this, I spent some time with Her­man on Thurs­day talk­ing about HIRAME, which is on the back burn­er for the moment but will shift back to the fore­front mid Feb­ru­ary in all like­li­hood. We also dis­cussed the sec­ond phase of KANI, for which you might remem­ber we did con­cept devel­op­ment mid-2012. It took a while, but it now looks like we will be asked to actu­al­ly build the thing.

All of which means the first half of 2013 is start­ing to look busy. Good.

Back in Berlin, Alper also worked on a posi­tion paper that will hope­ful­ly lead to us par­tic­i­pat­ing in a game­ful-design-relat­ed work­shop at an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence. Being non-aca­d­e­mics this is always a slight­ly painful process for us, but the orga­niz­ers explic­it­ly reached out to prac­ti­tion­ers which we find com­mend­able so we’ve giv­en it our best shot.

Final­ly, and hap­pi­ly, on Fri­day con­tracts were signed for the first stage of FURAPPA, which is con­cept devel­op­ment also, for our very first Ger­man client. This is some­thing Alper has been busy with for some time. I’m real­ly excit­ed about this and I hope it will be the first of many more clients out­side of the Nether­lands.

View from Neude square looking down Voorstraat, with snow and finger in front of lens

  1. You can now sign up to receive an email once the book is avail­able. [↩]
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Week 177

By Alper | Published: January 14, 2013

Kars said it was my turn to write wee­knotes, so here I am. I’ll be tak­ing them up more reg­u­lar­ly from now on. At the start of the week we put up a notice about open­ings for res­i­dents at our Utrecht stu­dio. If you’re inter­est­ed in shar­ing the space, ideas and cof­fee, feel wel­come to reply.

Kars spent most of the week doing a game design sprint for KAIGARA after last week’s set­up. We also had to fur­ther elab­o­rate on the hard and soft tech­nol­o­gy frame­works the game will be devel­oped in. The rest of the week it was more calls, more doc­u­men­ta­tion and game design, game design, game design.

Prototyping KAIGARA

Kars man­aged to squeeze in an inter­view with Wired UK about wild play (see ‘The Strange Things Peo­ple Play’) and why we think it is a good alter­na­tive for games that nei­ther want to be casu­al nor instru­men­tal.

To clar­i­fy our alter­na­tive stance, I start­ed draft­ing one page posts for the con­cepts of gam­i­fi­ca­tion and seri­ous games. We take issue with both of those phras­ings but because they do have cur­ren­cy, we think it is worth while to reach out to any­one who does want to cre­ate mean­ing­ful results.

The Dutch Game Gar­den of course also had their New Year’s drinks which were a ton of fun. I trav­eled to Ams­ter­dam on some oth­er busi­ness on Thurs­day and we took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to syn­chro­nize work for what was left of the week.

On Fri­day Kars went to the Hague to test the KAIGARA pro­to­type he built this week and talk more about our tar­get audi­ence. By all indi­ca­tions every­thing went well.

Chilling out with der Franz on a Friday afternoon #wander

Lat­er that after­noon he joined me at the esteemed offices of the Groene Ams­ter­dammer where we had a meet­ing with De Gids about SAKE. We decid­ed to add some more test­ing because the hol­i­day peri­od had been too busy for most and we now also have a bet­ter idea about the launch stag­ing.

One of the rea­sons why I was in the Nether­lands was to be able to see the final play in the mightyso­ci­ety series. We have an active pro­fes­sion­al inter­est in the­ater that is tied up with our skep­ti­cism about the medi­um’s future in a dig­i­tal­ly inter­ac­tive world. I’ll be writ­ing more about that in Dutch else­where.

On Sun­day we had anoth­er work ses­sion ses­sion at the Utrecht stu­dio, aid­ed by the excel­lent cof­fee and atmos­phere in the Vil­lage. Kars con­tin­ued iter­at­ing on his book chap­ter and I was busy writ­ing some odds and ends. I played a bit of the Luftrausers beta on a spare lap­top and destroyed my poor plane in short order. At the end of the after­noon I caught a train back to Berlin from which I am now writ­ing these wee­knotes.

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