Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Become a Hubbub Utrecht studio resident

By Kars | Published: January 8, 2013

Become a Hubbub studio resident

Look­ing for a new work­space? If you’re a design­er or tech­nol­o­gist work­ing in the areas of games, design, urban­ism or social change we’d love to have you as a res­i­dent. We have two work­places avail­able in our Utrecht stu­dio and would like to make them avail­able to inde­pen­dent cre­atives who share our inter­ests. You’ll work inde­pen­dent­ly on your own projects, but we’ll also explore collaborations—for clients & for self-com­mis­sioned work. In any case, phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty will ensure we share ample ideas and expe­ri­ences.

This is not a coworking/desksharing scheme. You’ll have your own per­ma­nent spot in the stu­dio. Your own desk, some shelves, and your very own pin­board. You’ll basi­cal­ly have every­thing you need to do actu­al design work, as opposed to ‘cloud work­er’ type stuff you’d also be able to do in your local cof­fee house.

The going month­ly rate for a work­place is €250,- (exclud­ing 21% VAT). We’ll pro­vide you with a decent chair and a hand­made desk designed by Pony Design Club. Inter­net etc. is includ­ed, as well as use of our big meet­ing table. We’re res­i­dents of the Dutch Game Gar­den, so you’ll also ben­e­fit from their facil­i­ties and net­work. Beat that!

If you’re inter­est­ed, send an email to kars at this domain. We’ll set up a meet­ing to get acquaint­ed, show you the space and fig­ure out if things will work for the both of us.

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Week 176

By Kars | Published: January 4, 2013

And we’re back. Hope you had a good Christ­mas break. In between the usu­al fam­i­ly vis­its, I most­ly sat on the couch and read comics—while occa­sion­al­ly receiv­ing mis­sives from Alper, who dis­cov­ered Berlin effec­tive­ly shuts down over the hol­i­days.

Or has he put it on Twit­ter:

Good thing he was ill for most of his break.

So, this week was a short one, as it start­ed on Wednes­day. I got right back into the sad­dle thanks to an inten­sive KAIGARA ses­sion with Her­man in which we reflect­ed on the first work­shop and made plans for the sec­ond one.

To off­set the excite­ment of a num­ber of unin­ter­rupt­ed hours of being cre­ative, I fin­ished 2012’s finan­cials right after.

On Thurs­day I got back into my Game­ful World chap­ter, hav­ing received feed­back from the edi­tors as well as sug­ges­tions from Alper. I’ve got my work cut out for me—rewriting is much slow­er going than doing an ini­tial draft—but it is clear to me the whole thing will ben­e­fit from the effort tremen­dous­ly.

Today, I got back to KAIGARA, try­ing to nail down the basic game con­cept that will form the basis for a first phys­i­cal pro­to­type. After a few pomodor­os of sketch­ing, and a quick call with Alper in Berlin, I think we are on to some­thing. Now to give it hands and feet.

Back to my usual thing (want to do more sketching in 2013)

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Week 175

By Kars | Published: December 21, 2012

And with that, my last work­ing day of 2012 comes to an end. We’re clos­ing shop for the next week and will be back in the sad­dle on Jan­u­ary 2nd. But before I go, one last set of notes on what we did this week.

The vast major­i­ty of my time was tak­en up by KAIGARA. Togeth­er with Her­man I final­ized our agen­da and built a deck of slides for the first work­shop, which hap­pened on Wednes­day. Walls were plas­tered with post-its by the time we were fin­ished, giv­ing us a nice map of the game’s aims, con­text of use and audi­ence. The sub­se­quent days we processed them, look­ing for the key themes and actions that will be the basis for the game design as we move for­ward.

Alper was over in NL this week so we sat down to dis­cuss the state of the busi­ness on Thurs­day. We looked ahead to 2013 a lit­tle and con­tin­ued to tin­ker with our part­ner­ship struc­ture, look­ing for the best fit for our dis­trib­uted bou­tique agency with an inter­na­tion­al out­look.

That’s it. Have a love­ly christ­mas, and see you on the flip side.

Hubbub Christmas greeting

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Week 174

By Kars | Published: December 17, 2012

The penul­ti­mate work­week of the year turned out rather packed with work on two new projects—the afore­men­tioned HIRAME and now also KAIGARA, for which con­tracts were signed mid­way through the week.

KAIGARA is game con­cept devel­op­ment for a multi­na­tion­al company—our biggest client to date in fact, so I am quite pleased. I’ll wait with shar­ing par­tic­u­lars until we’re fur­ther under­way. But what I can say is that a first col­lab­o­ra­tive design work­shop is due to hap­pen this Wednes­day. So the past week I spent some time devel­op­ing the agen­da for this in coor­di­na­tion with the client.

Work with Her­man on HIRAME con­tin­ued. We had a client meet­ing dur­ing which we pre­sent­ed some ini­tial game ideas, and also talked about a set­up for a first work­shop. Those all went down quite well, so it’s now time to plan the work­shop in more detail. That is sched­uled to hap­pen some­where in Jan­u­ary of next year, so we have some time still.

We tran­si­tioned SAKE into dor­man­cy for the upcom­ing weeks while the De Gids edi­tors play with the dig­i­tal pro­to­type and col­lect issues and ideas for improve­ments. We’ll sit down to go over those in the new year and then start work on a next iter­a­tion.

The week end­ed with rather enjoy­able Christ­mas drinks. I was pleased to see so many peo­ple join us, all with very dif­fer­ent con­nec­tions to the company—collaborators and clients, friends and fam­i­ly, etc. Drinks were had and games were played.1 One can’t ask for much more, right?

Wrap­ping up, let me just say I’m hap­py I man­aged to make it to Den Bosch for the tail end of Play­ful Arts Fes­ti­val on Sun­day. Zurai­da did an excel­lent job col­lect­ing some of the best local mul­ti­play­er games from the past year or two and pre­sent­ing them in a fun and acces­si­ble way. I hope there will be a next edi­tion.

  1. To wit, Spaceteam, Ascend­ing Empires and Cards Against Human­i­ty. [↩]
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Ignite Berlin on New Games and Wild Play

By Alper | Published: December 11, 2012

Before I went on my trip to Chi­na and Aus­tralia I had an Ignite to give here in Berlin. To do that I threw all of our think­ing of the past cou­ple of years on the floor (lit­er­al­ly because my post-its would­n’t stick to the wall behind me) and syn­the­sized it into some­thing that reflects where we stand right now.

photo.JPG

Kars gave a dif­fer­ent New Games for New Cities pre­sen­ta­tion a while back at FutureEv­ery­thing and we think we have got­ten most of the think­ing in on this sub­ject that we are going to. What remains now—and where all of the work & val­ue is at—is to actu­al­ly do it.

Video by Peter Bihr / The Wav­ing Cat, orig­i­nal­ly on YouTube.

For this Ignite and the con­cept of non-West­ern cities I was able to draw from my own child­hood expe­ri­ences which were spent most­ly on a hill­side gecekon­du in the Mamak dis­trict of Ankara. Some­thing so nat­ur­al to me that I had ignored it but prob­a­bly quite alien to most of those in the audi­ence. I imag­ine most of that area has actu­al­ly been bull­dozed after the rezon­ing, but it would be good to see what it looks right now.

In the talk I also reflect­ed on our per­spec­tive on both gam­i­fi­ca­tion and seri­ous games. We have expe­ri­ence with both but to say that we are uncom­fort­able with the uncrit­i­cal dis­course play­ing out around us would be an under­state­ment. We are aware that this ter­mi­nol­o­gy makes games easy to swal­low for those who would not touch it oth­er­wise, but that same eas­i­ness makes it hard­er to make games that are actu­al­ly fun to play.

With regards to gam­i­fi­ca­tion Kars is writ­ing a chap­ter in a book that will offer a final word on the sub­ject, but in short: peo­ple employ­ing gam­i­fi­ca­tion try to reduce the rich­ness of real­i­ty to the sim­plest of game mechan­ics with immi­nent fail­ure as a con­se­quence. Many seri­ous games on the oth­er hand go at it from the oth­er way: they try to use very nar­row and incom­plete game mod­els to extrap­o­late con­se­quences in the real world from. These games are not only sus­cep­ti­ble to the ludic fal­la­cy, they are hard­ly ever fun.

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Week 173

By Kars | Published: December 10, 2012

Last week Alper vis­it­ed Moscow to par­tic­i­pate in Urban Forum. He tells me he talked about “data and gen­er­a­tiv­i­ty as a prac­tice for inno­v­a­tive cities.” Mean­while I sol­diered on in the Utrecht stu­dio with half a jeal­ous eye on his Insta­gram feed.

On Mon­day I act­ed as sound­ing board for Zineb and Chris. As men­tioned ear­li­er, they are devel­op­ing a game-like inter­ven­tion for an area of the Nether­lands fac­ing pop­u­la­tion shrink­age, as part of the Stu­dio for Unso­licit­ed Archi­tec­ture. We most­ly talked about pro­to­typ­ing strate­gies for col­lec­tive intel­li­gence games—which is what they’re lean­ing towards, think World With­out Oil. Next for them is test­ing some ini­tial assign­ments, I’m curi­ous to see how that’ll turn out.

Work with Her­man on HIRAME continued—we filled up a few white­boards with con­cep­tu­al mod­els and the like. Next step is a first work­shop with the client team, which’ll hap­pen this week.

Simon and Alper worked to get a dig­i­tal pro­to­type of SAKE out the door—with a bit of help from me. I demo’d the out­come for the De Gids edi­tors on Fri­day and then set up a fresh game. They’ll play it for the com­ing weeks, after which we’ll make an inven­to­ry of issues and pos­si­ble improve­ments and kick of a sec­ond iter­a­tion. That will most like­ly hap­pen in the new year.

And final­ly, I wrote up Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise for our port­fo­lio, and announced the Christ­mas drinks we’ll be hav­ing at our Utrecht stu­dio this Fri­day. If you’re read­ing this, con­sid­er your­self invit­ed.

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Week 172

By Kars | Published: December 5, 2012

Woah, almost fell off the horse there—it’s Wednes­day and I haven’t writ­ten up last weeks notes yet. So real quick, let me tell you what hap­pened.

Most notably, I fin­ished writ­ing my Game­ful World chap­ter. I then added ref­er­ences and col­lect­ed images. After one last proof­read I sent it to the edi­tors one day short of the dead­line. It’ll be peer-reviewed and I’m told I can expect feed­back some­where begin­ning of next year.

It’s a tra­di­tion of sorts for us to have wrap-up drinks with a client after we fin­ish a project. So we head­ed to Ledig Erf to do just that with our friends of the Uni­ver­si­ty Muse­um to cel­e­brate Beesten­bende.

I had numer­ous meet­ings about pos­si­ble future projects. Devel­op­ment on SAKE con­tin­ued. And I kicked off a new project with Her­man code­named HIRAME. It’s con­cept devel­op­ment for a game aimed at fos­ter­ing cer­tain cul­tur­al val­ues with­in a big con­sul­tan­cy.

Over the week­end I had the plea­sure see­ing some very excit­ing acts per­form live at Le Guess Who?—my favorite annu­al music fes­ti­val and maybe the best thing to hap­pen to this city in the past five years. High­lights includ­ed Matthew Dear, Fuck But­tons and Destroy­er. Give them a lis­ten.

And final­ly, on Sun­day I treat­ed myself to an after­noon of ‘brain train­ing’ at the annu­al Nexus con­fer­ence. The theme was How to Change the World? and the pro­gram includ­ed a keynote from no-one less than Alain Badiou. His argu­ment and the ones that fol­lowed in the intense pan­el dis­cus­sions for me boiled down to the fol­low­ing:

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‘New Games for a Resilient Society’ at TEDxUtrecht 2012

By Kars | Published: November 26, 2012

A few weeks ago I pre­sent­ed at TEDx­Utrecht. I talked about crises, unknown-unknowns and the notion of anti-fragility—how we might be bet­ter able to deal with the unpre­dictable if we were to hone our impro­vi­sa­tion skills. To this end, I sug­gest a spe­cif­ic class of games as train­ing grounds, for which I bor­row the term ‘new games’. I also explain why seri­ous games and gam­i­fi­ca­tion won’t do for the class of prob­lems I am inter­est­ed in, because they are pre­scrip­tive in stead of gen­er­a­tive. Famil­iar stuff if you’ve been fol­low­ing our think­ing here over the past few years. But it’s con­densed into just nine min­utes and I think it came out rather well.

I am not writ­ing up the whole talk but in stead I am post­ing the video and the bare slides. This is a diver­gence from my usu­al prac­tice, but I hope you’ll excuse my lazi­ness. I have how­ev­er added links to all the sources implic­it­ly ref­er­enced. For pho­to cred­its, please refer to the links in the slides them­selves. As always, if you’ve enjoyed this, then you might want to have a look at these pre­vi­ous talks.

Video

Video by TEDx Talks, orig­i­nal­ly on YouTube.

Slides

New Games for a Resilient Society (TEDxUtrecht 2012), first slide
New Games for a Resilient Soci­ety (TEDx­Utrecht 2012) (PDF, 14 MB, 15 slides). Slides by Kars Alfrink, orig­i­nal­ly on SlideShare.

References

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Week 171

By Kars | Published: November 26, 2012

This week start­ed with a two-day work­shop with Jeroen van Mas­trigt of WLYW for a start­up. We played and eval­u­at­ed their game, and sub­se­quent­ly sug­gest­ed a redesign con­sist­ing of the same parts but recom­bined to be more dynam­ic and gen­er­a­tive.

Writ­ing on my Game­ful World chap­ter con­tin­ued. There was a slight hic­cup on Tues­day but I got right back into it on Wednes­day (and have since fin­ished a first draft).

On Wednes­day evening I attend­ed the penul­ti­mate Vis­i­ble Cities, which fea­tured a love­ly line­up. DUS Archi­tects talked about their Kamer­mak­er project—an enor­mous 3D print­er with which they are inves­ti­gat­ing the impact of dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion on archi­tec­ture. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked their mus­ings on the pos­si­ble emer­gence of a new Ams­ter­dam School and a return to orna­ment. Dig­i­tal­ly fab­ri­cat­ed build­ing mate­ri­als might require more orna­ment for struc­tur­al integri­ty, in con­trast to their indus­tri­al coun­ter­parts.

MVRDV pre­sent­ed a cou­ple of future sce­nar­ios for decen­tral­ized, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry urban plan­ning that ranged from the utopi­an to the anar­chist.

And Ben Cerveny—finally able to vis­it Ams­ter­dam again after wrap­ping up his adven­ture with Bloom—shared his mus­ings on the impli­ca­tions of our new shared infor­ma­tion­al space for the way we use, per­form and even play the city. I was most struck by his sug­ges­tion to start think­ing in terms of ‘instruments’—essentially tools that allow urban­ites to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly bet­ter see (instru­ment in the sense of for instance a tele­scope) and per­form (instru­ment in the sense of for instance a piano) the city.

On Thurs­day I pre­sent­ed on Pig Chase at Game in the City. This includ­ed the new mate­r­i­al first shown by Irene in Brus­sels. Being at Game in the City was also an oppor­tu­ni­ty to catch up with many peo­ple in the Dutch games scene. And of course I made sure I played some games—most notably Monoban­da’s new exper­i­men­tal audio game Remem­ber­ing, which real­ly does stir mem­o­ries, and Luftrausers by Vlam­beer, which just keeps get­ting more ridicu­lous­ly awe­some.

The rest of the week was tak­en up by busi­ness devel­op­ment. We final­ized a pro­pos­al for some game­ful design con­sult­ing with an edu­ca­tion start­up, and I met with an inter­est­ing new prospect for a game instal­la­tion in the cor­po­rate health space.

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Week 170

By Kars | Published: November 19, 2012

So anoth­er week has passed. It dawned on me this week­end that for me, there are four more work­ing weeks left in the year. That’s a bit of a shock, but then work will just con­tin­ue on hap­pen­ing in 2013, so it’s odd near­ing the end of the year still feels like a thing. Any­way.

Last week start­ed with me attend­ing TEDxBrus­sels. Irene was invit­ed to speak on Pig Chase there and I tagged along for moral sup­port. I’m always curi­ous what the response from the audi­ence is when we show this work. This being TEDx we’d pre­pared a small exclu­sive in the form of a tiny doc­u­men­tary film of a playtest we ran at a farm recent­ly with an actu­al work­ing pro­to­type. The game you see here is not as slick and shiny as the con­cept video, but this is the prod­uct of a small team of tech­nol­o­gists and design­ers nego­ti­at­ing a lot of tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ties and the unfa­mil­iar real­i­ty of installing tech in a pig pen. I’m pret­ty proud of what we’ve achieved.

Video by HKU Media Archive (Utrecht School of the Arts), orig­i­nal­ly on Vimeo; this copy from Hubbub’s own files.

Play­ing with Pigs: Pig Chase Playtest from Utrecht School of the Arts on Vimeo.

I also start­ed writ­ing my chap­ter for The Game­ful World. This is a book edit­ed by Stef­fen P Walz & Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing. The offi­cial announce­ment isn’t out yet but I can tell you they’ve gath­ered a great group of writ­ers and I am hon­ored to take part. My chap­ter is on the built envi­ron­ment. I’ve out­lined it, drew up a list of sources and have planned the writ­ing of my first draft which should be fin­ished by the end of this month. To make sure I stay on track I did a bit of game­ful design myself and set up a spread­sheet to keep track of how many words I have left to go.

More hap­py news: Alper has returned from Aus­tralia unscathed despite get­ting up close and per­son­al with var­i­ous mar­su­pi­als. His Mac­Book had faired less well though, so while a repair shop was mak­ing amends he joined me in the Utrecht stu­dio to work on a loan­er. In the age of the cloud it turns out it’s not much trou­ble to be up and run­ning on a for­eign machine.

Alper being back means we got project SAKE rolling again with a standup. We’re now shoot­ing for a first dig­i­tal pro­to­type to be avail­able for play­ing by the De Gids edi­tors by the end of this month.

The rest of the week was most­ly tak­en up with busi­ness development—meeting with a poten­tial client, talk­ing to a poten­tial future col­lab­o­ra­tor, and writ­ing a project pro­pos­al for the Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter Utrecht with my younger broth­er at Pony Design Club. That sort of thing.

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