Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Week 153

By Kars | Published: July 24, 2012

The not-much-gets-done-due to-sum­mer trend con­tin­ued last week.

I spent some time prepar­ing for my talk on PLAY Pilots in Helsin­ki. This includ­ed a trawl of the pro­jec­t’s blog archives. I was remind­ed of the won­der­ful work done by the stu­dios that par­tic­i­pat­ed as well as the Hub­bub team that worked on the web­site. The whole thing was a remark­able achieve­ment. Two years lat­er, it still com­pares favor­ably to the state of the art.

I don’t talk much about my work in edu­ca­tion. Last week, as near­ly every week over the past few months, I spoke with stu­dents who are pur­su­ing an MA at the Utrecht School of the Arts’ game design & inter­ac­tion design grad­u­ate school. I am coach­ing four young men who are doing very diverse and inter­est­ing work: A device aimed at mit­i­gat­ing the effects of for­get­ful­ness in elder­ly, an adven­ture game that explores the issues faced by cur­rent-day Bel­gium, a port­fo­lio sys­tem tai­lored to the needs of visu­al artists who work in the games indus­try and final­ly an explo­ration of poten­tial uses for 3D print­ers con­nect­ed to video games.

We are at the stage where most of the tough deci­sions have been made in each project. They are most­ly wrap­ping up pro­duc­tion, and writ­ing their research papers. Final exams are sched­uled for end of August.

On Fri­day, we ran anoth­er game of Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise. This one was part of anoth­er won­der­ful “local mul­ti­play­er games pic­nic” that Jan-Willem of Vlam­beer has been orga­niz­ing recent­ly. Tim and I made use of the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exper­i­ment with some slight adjust­ments to the vot­ing mechan­ic, as well as a change that would make the game suit­able for fes­ti­vals: In stead of hav­ing to bring their own par­ty ingre­di­ents, play­ers could pick them from a bas­ket we had filled to the brim with things our­selves.

The day after I got up ear­ly to fly to Helsin­ki. I arrived at the love­ly Paviljon­ki in time to attend the ses­sions on trans­me­dia sto­ry­telling. This includ­ed the amus­ing sto­ry of the Human Bird­wings hoax. After­wards there were drinks cour­tesy of the orga­niz­ers and we had a pleas­ant pan-Scan­di­na­vian din­ner at Salu­tor­get. On Sun­day I deliv­ered my talk as part of the social cities ses­sion, which also includ­ed talks from Michiel and Alper. There was some good dis­cus­sion after­wards. I round­ed out my stay in Helsin­ki — which was glo­ri­ous­ly laid back and wel­com­ing — with a small pub crawl in Kallio on Sun­day night, and a vis­it to Suomen­lin­na on Mon­day.

Actu­al­ly, is that not much? I’d say it’s pret­ty good, actu­al­ly.

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Kars speaking at several upcoming events

By Kars | Published: July 20, 2012

There’s a num­ber of upcom­ing events in the Nether­lands and abroad that I’ll be speak­ing at. Here’s a quick run­down.

  • The first one is short notice: this week­end I will be in Helsin­ki for Virtueel Plat­for­m’s Dutch E‑culture Days at the World Design Cap­i­tal Pavil­ion. I will be talk­ing about PLAY Pilots, and specif­i­cal­ly the strate­gies for audi­ence engage­ment each live game employes.
  • The next one is very close to home. I’ll do a so called Sum­mer Talk on per­va­sive games at the Dutch Game Gar­den. This is on Thurs­day, August 2.
  • The week fol­low­ing that I will head to Berlin to work with Alper at our local stu­dio and also attend Play­pub­lik. The orga­niz­ers were kind enough to invite me to talk about Pig Chase. This will prob­a­bly hap­pen some­time on Sat­ur­day, August 11.
  • And final­ly, on Fri­day, Sep­tem­ber 28, I will once again do a gen­er­al lec­ture on per­va­sive games, at /dev/haag on invi­ta­tion from Tijs Teul­ings.

Whew! That’s a lot of talk­ing. I promise we’ll con­tin­ue to make stuff in the mean­time. Some­where dur­ing sum­mer we should be able to share some new work with you. But in the mean­time, hope to catch you at one or more of these.

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Week 152

By Kars | Published: July 17, 2012

Let’s see what hap­pened last week shall we?

I know I’ve been say­ing that we’re close to fin­ish­ing Beesten­bende for a while now. But we’re close. Hon­est. Me and Alper did some dot­ting of Is and cross­ing of Ts. We now have an actu­al release client.

On Tues­day I had lunch with the Niels ‘t Hooft, the very mod­el of a plugged in games jour­nal­ist. We talked about how our plans for world dom­i­na­tion over­lapped and found sev­er­al new oppor­tu­ni­ties for work togeth­er. This might include project SAKE. We also talked about my new­found love for build­ing bicy­cles.1

Through­out the week I spent some time sketch­ing out the talk on PLAY Pilots for Virtueel Plat­for­m’s Dutch E‑culture Days. To this end I went over the copi­ous doc­u­men­ta­tion on the PLAY Pilots blog and was remind­ed of all the hard work done by those involved and the fun we had back then. Good times.

For BUTA, I spent a morn­ing with Irene mess­ing around with beam­ers and cam­eras to fig­ure out what would be a good match for a pig pen.

And to round things off I met up with Dirk Jr. in Ams­ter­dam to spend a rainy Fri­day after­noon work­ing on SAKE. There was lots of wav­ing hands and wild-eyed think­ing aloud. But we man­aged to write down some first prin­ci­ples that will guide us through the rest of the design. I head­ed back to Utrecht with a stack of old Gids edi­tions on loan from Dirk as I need to brush up on my Dutch lit­er­a­ture.2

  1. Niel­s’s side of the sto­ry can be read in these wee­knotes. [↩]
  2. For var­i­ous rea­sons, most of what I read is in Eng­lish. [↩]
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Week 151

By Kars | Published: July 9, 2012

I guess this was one of those weeks that is typ­i­cal of work dur­ing sum­mer. Which is to say: we made some attempts at tying up loose ends on run­ning projects and put some effort into start­ing up new ones but oth­er than that not much of any­thing got done.

I met up again with Dirk and Lies­beth again on Mon­day. This once again took place at the love­ly offices of De Groene Ams­ter­dammer, prob­a­bly my favorite Dutch print news pub­li­ca­tion in NL, and the new home of De Gids since April of this year. We were joined by Gids edi­tors Arjen Mul­der and Dirk van Weelden. Yes, anoth­er Dirk so to keep things sim­ple I will refer to them as Dirk Jr. and Dirk Sr. We talked about the rough plan­ning we had come up with on the Fri­day before, and also drew up a long list of writ­ers who might make good col­lab­o­ra­tors.

On Tues­day we played a game of Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise with Dutch Game Gar­den res­i­dents. As usu­al we had fun, even though it was kind of weird to run it in the mid­dle of the day. The game ends with every­thing set for a par­ty. To have to go back to work at that point takes some effort. This was also a try-out of sorts for run­ning the game at Indi­go so sev­er­al of the even­t’s orga­niz­ers were present.

Ceremony of Surprise aftermathAfter­math of a game of Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise

On Tues­day I went over all the copy in Saba and adjust­ed it as per the last review of the client. Speak­ing of copy, did I men­tion the game is called Beesten­bende? It rough­ly trans­lates “Ani­mal Mess” but could also mean “Bunch of Ani­mals”. I’ll talk about the con­nec­tion between the name and the game’s play some oth­er time. On Mon­day I head­ed over to the muse­um again, and most­ly went over details relat­ing to our deliv­ery, accep­tance test­ing and the sub­se­quent sub­mis­sion to the App Store.

In between some time went into a meet­ing with a poten­tial client for an orga­ni­za­tion­al change game. This took place on Thurs­day, and I pre­pared for it with an old-fash­ioned prop­er con­fer­ence call on Mon­day. The next step is to share some ideas and see if they’d be inter­est­ed in receiv­ing a prop­er offer.

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Week 150

By Kars | Published: July 2, 2012

Last week was a short week as I took a day off on Mon­day. I’m try­ing to see if I can do that every oth­er week, at least dur­ing the sum­mer months. The assump­tion is that a lit­tle less time spent in the stu­dio and in stead spent out­side improves both my work­ing and my play­ing life. Ear­ly results are promis­ing.

Most of my time was spent work­ing with Alper to fin­ish the release client for Saba. After a few furi­ous final cycles of test­ing and fix­ing, test­ing and fix­ing, we man­aged to get it done late on Fri­day evening. There’s a few final assets we’re wait­ing on but once those are in it’s time to send it off for accep­tance by the client and sub­se­quent­ly Apple. The feel­ing of fin­ish­ing some­thing was a great way to start the week­end.

Oth­er than that I had a meet­ing with Dirk and Lies­beth to talk about the plan­ning for Sake. This is a project I was asked to par­tic­i­pate in by Dirk, whom I first met at an Ignite at Media­mat­ic, where I talked about PLAY Pilots. Dirk, among many things, is one of the edi­tors of De Gids, the old­est lit­er­ary mag­a­zine of the Nether­lands. Togeth­er, we’ll be explor­ing how the world of games and play over­laps with that of lit­er­a­ture. As things devel­op I’ll share more details.

Final­ly, on Sat­ur­day, I had the plea­sure of vis­it­ing De Beschav­ing, a music fes­ti­val set apart by its elab­o­rate side pro­gram of sci­ence-relat­ed talks and activ­i­ties. The venue was lit­er­al­ly on my doorstep in Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty’s botan­i­cal gar­dens. (A music fes­ti­val in a botan­i­cal gar­den, I imag­ine that took some con­vinc­ing.) Any­way, Clemens was asked to talk about Pig Chase in a ses­sion on ani­mal wel­fare. His talk was pre­ced­ed by an intro­duc­tion to the top­ic by Frauke Ohl who empha­sized the fact that a lot of our ideas about ani­mal wel­fare are col­ored by what we as humans find plea­sur­able. This was fol­lowed up by Eimear Mur­phy, who has devel­oped a test to gauge the emo­tion­al state of pigs, using sound cues and M&M’s. Clemens talked about the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­nings of our project and showed the video sketch. Some inter­est­ing ques­tions came up after­wards, includ­ing why we’re mak­ing a game in the first place. Clemens point­ed out that play can be thought of as a kind of lan­guage that tran­scends species. It might allow us to have a dia­log with these ani­mals that is oth­er­wise impos­si­ble. I find that an idea worth pur­su­ing. Which is exact­ly what we’ll be doing these com­ing months.

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Week 149

By Kars | Published: June 26, 2012

I had the absolute lux­u­ry of doing a lot of sus­tained work on Saba this week. We’re near­ing the dead­line for deliv­ery of a release can­di­date and are more or less on sched­ule.

On mon­day I was joined by Alper who had come over from Berlin to do his part for anoth­er Hack the Gov­ern­ment hackathon. I hear that went rather well. We worked at the Utrecht stu­dio, took a few breaks for cof­fee and catchup con­ver­sa­tions and fin­ished off with a din­ner and some beers. Good times.

On tues­day and wednes­day work on Saba con­tin­ued and on thurs­day I was more or less at the end of our MoSCoWed issue list. So I allowed myself a few pomodor­os to fid­dle with some designs for a new side project we’re start­ing here, code­named Kohi. That should give you a hint as to what it is about.

I round­ed off the week with tying up a few more loose ends on Saba and some plan­ning for Sake — an upcom­ing project I’ll talk more about next time.

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Week 148

By Kars | Published: June 19, 2012

We got back into the sad­dle this week with work on Saba con­tin­u­ing, and Buta start­ing back up again. We also pub­lished Hamachi and I man­aged to squeeze in a lec­ture at my favorite games pro­gram. Read on below for the details.

On Tues­day I met with Irene, Hein and Peter in the stu­dio while Aduen and Alper joined us over Skype. We talked through the work that will need to be done for a very first playable pro­to­type of Pig Chase. We’ve decid­ed to set it up in the stu­dio before mak­ing the move to a pig pen, so that we can iron out the basic tech­ni­cal stuff first. There’s quite a num­ber of mov­ing parts on this thing as you might imag­ine from look­ing at the con­cept video. It took us a while to find all the exper­tise we’ll need but I think we are now well placed to get some­thing up and run­ning.

After the meet­ing each of the team mem­bers pro­duced an esti­mate of the work to be done. I strong­ly believe peo­ple should make esti­mates for their own work. it isn’t always the prac­tice in our field, with pro­duc­ers doing the esti­ma­tion for team mem­bers which I think is bad for peo­ple’s sense of com­mit­ment.

I was invit­ed to pro­vide a lec­ture on per­va­sive and urban games at the recent­ly rela­beled Inter­ac­tive Per­for­mance Design and Games pro­gram. This is prob­a­bly my favorite games pro­gram in NL at the moment since it encour­ages stu­dents to work across media and has a strong focus on per­for­mance. I talked for three hours on a hot Tues­day evening to the full first year (con­sist­ing of only fif­teen stu­dents). After a brief dis­cus­sion of how to define per­va­sive games – for which I made grate­ful use of “The Book” by Markus Mon­to­la, Jaakko Sten­ros and Anni­ka Waern – I dis­cussed a num­ber of games that I con­sid­er canon­i­cal. These includ­ed indis­putable clas­sics of the genre such as Pac Man­hat­tan and I Love Bees as well as per­son­al favorites such as Chro­maro­ma and Johann Sebas­t­ian Joust. I wrapped up with an overview of some of our own projects and used those to most­ly delve into design chal­lenges that are unique to mak­ing games like this.

On the Saba front I con­tin­ued to work with Alper on the improve­ments iden­ti­fied after the last play test. Things are steadi­ly pro­gress­ing. As is the case each week I also spoke to the client and went over some prac­ti­cal­i­ties relat­ing to pub­lish­ing the app once it is done. A notable step last week was the inte­gra­tion of the sounds pro­duced by Rik of Claynote. It’s a well known fact sound great­ly affects peo­ple’s expe­ri­ence of games but it nev­er seizes to amaze me quite how much this is the case.

On Fri­day I met up with Irene once again to col­late the esti­mates. She also dropped off a cam­era and a beam­er that we’ll be using in the first set­up.

Final­ly, and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, we pub­lished The Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise – an exper­i­men­tal par­ty game I’ve cre­at­ed togeth­er with Tim Bosje. It is com­plete­ly ana­log. The rules and asso­ci­at­ed bits you’ll need to print are avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. You’ll only need a few friends, some par­ty ingre­di­ents and a cake to play. Have a look and do share your expe­ri­ences with us.

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A ludic spin on the surprise party

By Kars | Published: June 15, 2012

Besides our work for clients we enjoy mak­ing small odd games as exper­i­ments. Today we’re pub­lish­ing one such exper­i­ment for your enjoy­ment. It’s a par­ty game, sim­i­lar to clas­sics such as Mafia, Were­wolf and The Resis­tance. But we’ve tried to explore the notion of per­for­ma­tive games too. As the game pro­gress­es, play­ers make actu­al prepa­ra­tions for a sur­prise par­ty. When the game ends, the par­ty is all set.

This game also marks the first col­lab­o­ra­tion between myself and Tim Bosje. Tim is an inde­pen­dent design­er of role­play­ing games, social games, per­va­sive games and so on. We share a lot of com­mon inter­ests so it seemed nat­ur­al to see what we might come up with togeth­er. Work­ing togeth­er was a lot of fun so I’m pret­ty sure we’ll give it anoth­er go some time.

Here’s Tim’s run­down of what the game is like:

‘The Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise’ is our ludic spin on the ‘sur­prise par­ty’. This game tasks you to organ­ise a sur­prise par­ty for one of your fel­low play­ers. The prob­lem is that at the start, no one knows who that play­er is. All you know is one name of a per­son who isn’t “it”.
But this game is also about build­ing a real par­ty. Through­out the game you have to decide which ingre­di­ents – real ones, brought to the game by the play­ers – are used in the par­ty. Propos­ing that per­fect acces­so­ry – that one per­fect par­ty song, your favorite drink or dec­o­ra­tion – and get­ting it into the par­ty, will reward you with new oppor­tu­ni­ties to retrieve infor­ma­tion from your fel­low play­ers.
No par­ty is com­plete with­out a deli­cious cake. In this game, you will have to earn your piece of cake by sur­pris­ing the cor­rect play­er. But don’t spoil the sur­prise, because if the play­er who is “it” guess­es right, the whole cake goes to him.

If that has wet your appetite, head over to the rules page for all the details. If you decide to run a game don’t hes­i­tate to share your expe­ri­ences with us. Enjoy!

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Week 144–147

By Kars | Published: June 10, 2012

Hav­ing returned from a few weeks hol­i­day­ing in Indone­sia it is time to get back into the rhythm of these week notes. So to begin, a quick recap of what hap­pened in the days lead­ing up to my depar­ture:

  • Sto­ry­board­ed a sce­nario illus­trat­ing the play­er expe­ri­ence of Kani and pre­sent­ed it to the client. Now it’s fin­gers crossed for a green light on pro­duc­tion.
  • Wrapped up some loose ends on the sec­ond phase of Saba so that phase three (deliv­ery) could start upon my return.

And after I got back:

  • Met with Hanne and Karel — and Skyped with Alper — to go over their improve­ments for Saba. Made a start with imple­ment­ing them.

With that, the record is com­plete once again. Onwards.

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Week 143

By Kars | Published: May 14, 2012

The pre­vi­ous week was the last full work week before I take a break, which starts this Thurs­day. So we’re wrap­ping up run­ning projects or at least get­ting them to stage where they can be safe­ly put on hold.

For Saba, this meant sit­ting down with Hanne, Karel and Alper remote­ly to MoSCoW the list of improve­ments that result­ed from the last play test. I shared the list with the muse­um and talked it through with them on Wednes­day. They had pre­pared their own list so we merged them, result­ing in a list we’re both sat­is­fied with. This has now been frozen and when I return from my break we will pick up from there.

On the Kani front, I did some esti­mates for a pro­duc­tion bud­get on Tues­day, dis­cussed some of the fin­er points of our con­cept with Hanne on Thurs­day and sketched out a rough con­cept sto­ry­board on Fri­day. This week – tomor­row in fact – we’ll present the whole thing to the hos­pi­tal. Hope­ful­ly by the time I return we’ll have a pos­i­tive response from them and can start build­ing a team for pro­duc­tion.

With Irene I had anoth­er chat about how to approach the pro­duc­tion of a playable pro­to­type for Buta. With some assis­tance of friends on the inter­net we now have a firm grasp of the tech­nolo­gies involved. So we are now in a good posi­tion to final­ly hire our team and then kick off the next phase once I get back.

Final­ly, I at last found the time to post my Lift12 talk. Alper pre­sent­ed his thoughts on gam­i­fi­ca­tion through the lens of love, dat­ing and rela­tion­ships at NEXT in Berlin. I’m sure he’ll get around to post­ing that here even­tu­al­ly too.

So, a few more days to go and I’m off to the oth­er side of the globe for a few weeks of R&R. You can expect to hear from us again once I return on Mon­day, June 4.

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