Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

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 I had inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions about a sub­ject that I hold dear.

There were good talks from oth­ers too. I was par­tic­u­lar­ly tak­en with the work being done by CEW-IT in Ugan­da to empow­er cit­i­zens, Emer Beam­er’s efforts to reimag­ine pri­ma­ry edu­ca­tion as design edu­ca­tion, and Lino Hellings’s pho­to walk method­ol­o­gy devel­oped at PAPA.

Mean­while, work on KUMA con­tin­ued apace. I went over to KLM to review sto­ry­boards, and hand­ed over feed­back to Tim for a first ver­sion of mock­ups. It’s been a plea­sure to see the first few of those roll by in Drop­box already.

Final­ly, I pre­pared two upcom­ing work­shops. One is togeth­er with Jeroen for Beren­schot, about using adven­ture games to increase aware­ness of integri­ty issues in the work­place. The chal­lenge here is to design gen­uine moral chal­lenges for play­ers, in stead of obvi­ous right/wrong choic­es.

The oth­er is for a group of exhi­bi­tion design stu­dents at Rein­wardt Acad­e­my, about play­ful design. The plan is to have them remix a famous Peg­gy Guggen­heim exhi­bi­tion and make a playable scale mod­el of their plan. Should be fun.

We also con­tin­ued to do mar­ket­ing on Bycatch. And as we sol­diered on this week, we were occa­sion­al­ly delight­ed by a mes­sages from play­ers shar­ing their expe­ri­ences with the game.

https://twitter.com/harm/status/561097274059939841

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Week 283

By Alper | Published: January 26, 2015

The biggest event this week was that we ful­filled the pre­orders for Bycatch and sent every­body a newslet­ter with updates. That took up a lot of our time and atten­tion as well as fix­ing some last minute hic­cups and mak­ing sure every­thing was right. At the time I’m writ­ing this I’m see­ing the first games arrive at peo­ple’s homes on Twit­ter which is a pret­ty amaz­ing feel­ing. We’re now mov­ing towards our offi­cial launch.

We played Bycatch in the stu­dio with Eel­co for the first time with the actu­al cards and even for us play­ing the game is still fun.

A play session with the actual cards of Bycatch. It turns out this is a really fun game!

What also got released is The Game­ful World book over at the MIT Press. It’s been a long time in the mak­ing but now the defin­i­tive book on gam­i­fi­ca­tion is out.

We’re work­ing on a con­sult­ing engage­ment for Beren­schot. Our work for KLM is pro­ceed­ing with the con­tent ham­mered out and Tim Hengeveld start­ing on the art.

I pub­lished our 2014 recap as a by prod­uct of our OKR sys­tem with a sol­id overview of the many things we did that year. Michelle Thorne pub­lished this amaz­ing treat­ment of the work­shop Ianus and I held at Thingscon Ams­ter­dam last year.

I made a big round of Ams­ter­dam vis­it­ing old friends and busi­ness prospects before I made my way back to Berlin on Thurs­day to attend the games.net new year’s par­ty (at the KING offices).

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A 2014 recap

By Alper | Published: January 21, 2015

Each year we review our Objec­tives and Key Results for that year and adjust them for the fol­low­ing one to pro­vide guid­ance for our stu­dio. The goals sum­ma­rized are to be the best known and respect­ed play­ful design stu­dio that works with the best peo­ple in the field to deliv­er val­ue for our con­sult­ing clients and pur­sue rel­e­vant projects of our own.

Projects

We start­ed and con­clud­ed many self-ini­ti­at­ed projects last year which was one of our key results for 2014. We can call the year a tremen­dous cre­ative suc­cess. The projects we have shipped are all in some way front-run­ners of the wider indus­try and a great show­case of what our stu­dio mod­el is capa­ble of.

What was new this year is that many of our own projects are becom­ing their own enti­ties with their own web­sites, brand­ing and rhythm. This makes it eas­i­er to talk about them as things in their own right.

Standing

standing-iphone-closeup-01-4x3

We com­plet­ed and launched Stand­ing to crit­i­cal acclaim and we then updat­ed the app with an attrac­tive visu­al design. Play­ful activism is a very impor­tant theme in our work and Stand­ing serves as an exam­ple of our think­ing and prac­tice on this top­ic. We think that Stand­ing will remain rel­e­vant for the fore­see­able future and we’ll refer back to it reg­u­lar­ly.

Camparc

We con­ceived and cre­at­ed Cam­parc for STRP on an open brief and we are extreme­ly hap­py with the result. Cam­parc is a very inter­est­ing and deep toy, that facil­i­tates play as a per­for­mance and includes live video, a recent inter­est of ours. We will devel­op Cam­parc fur­ther this year into a stand­alone trav­el­ing attrac­tion.

Bycatch

IMG_3688-v01-16x9

We start­ed con­cep­tion and design of Bycatch last year as our first col­lab­o­ra­tion with Sub­alekha Udayasankar. This quick­ly turned into an exam­ple of how we think games for seri­ous issues should be designed as well as a viable self-pub­lished card game. We will be sell­ing the game this year and talk­ing a lot about Bycatch.

Cuppings

This is an odd one out but we still run Cup­pings out of a per­son­al inter­est for cof­fee and because it is a great exam­ple of uncom­pro­mis­ing app design. Sales of Cup­pings have been stronger last quar­ter than they have been ever before so it looks like this lit­tle app has a bright future ahead of it.

Communication

One of the most impor­tant parts of our work is com­mu­ni­cat­ing the val­ue of our process and the­o­ry. We haven’t been bad at this last year but we need to be even bet­ter this year. The biggest prob­lem is that a lot of things about play­ful design which are obvi­ous to us aren’t even appar­ent to our peers, let alone the wider pub­lic.

Most impor­tant­ly this year we have changed our core propo­si­tion on the front page of the web­site to very clear­ly state the work we do for clients—“Strategy”, “Inven­tion” & “Prototyping”—and we split our­selves into a con­sul­tan­cy and a stu­dio. The con­sul­tan­cy helps organ­i­sa­tions do things with games and play, the stu­dio cre­ates play­ful prod­ucts.

We were fea­tured in Vrij Ned­er­land, De Cor­re­spon­dent, Bright, De Gids, Detektor.fm, Mare, Achter het Scherm, Kill Screen, Board Game Geek, Prod­uct Hunt.

We did things at LIFT, Behav­iour Design Ams­ter­dam, Studi­um Gen­erale Lei­den, Rezone, This Hap­pened Utrecht, Media­mat­ic, IT Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, De Vuurlin­ie, Hein­rich Böll Stiftung, JOIN, STRP Scene, Vecht­club XL, ASEM, IMPAKT, ThingsCon Ams­ter­dam, Tegen­licht, Lab for City, Talk and Play, Cre­ative Morn­ings Utrecht.

People

One way to term our approach would be an anti-agency with Kars resid­ing in Utrecht and me in Berlin. We have a list of reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tors for many projects and the con­nec­tions to be able to get the best peo­ple for any job.

We also have an asso­ciate pro­gram con­sist­ing of Ianus Keller, Joris Dor­mans and Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing which has proven very use­ful. Asso­ciates are peo­ple who we have worked togeth­er with in a part­ner­ship type agree­ment and with whom we want to keep doing this. We have deployed each of our asso­ciates on work this year and we look for­ward to doing more.

Logistics

The Utrecht studio—our de fac­to headquarters—moved to Vecht­club XL. We are immense­ly pleased with the local facil­i­ties and net­work we have there in an irre­sistible indus­tri­al-chique loca­tion just out­side of the city.

The Berlin stu­dio KANT closed down its loca­tion of the past years as sub­tenants of Panorama3000. We are wait­ing for our next stu­dio in the new­ly built addi­tion to the Auf­bauhaus Kreuzberg. The new loca­tion will have all of the ben­e­fits of Berlin with­out its tran­sience.

Looking Ahead

We think Hub­bub has an unique per­spec­tive on design­ing for the ludic cen­tu­ry in which we find our­selves. We think we have honed this per­spec­tive over the past years by think­ing-through-mak­ing and we look for­ward to shar­ing it with you in the com­ing year.

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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.

Look­ing ahead, we made good progress on a plan for Cam­parc Mark II, an improved ver­sion of our pub­lic space toy, which will debut at the STRP bien­nale. We expect to be ready to start pro­duc­tion on this baby with­in the next few weeks and will again be work­ing with the great Aldo Hoeben on it. Next to gen­er­al improve­ments we have a few cool new fea­tures lined up, so you might want to mark your cal­en­dars for the event and come over to Eind­hoven to play along.

On Thurs­day Alper and I head­ed to Fab­rique in Ams­ter­dam to talk to their team about our take on play­ful design, and hear about the impres­sive range of work they did for the Nation­al Mil­i­tary Muse­um. The sub­se­quent dis­cus­sions over drinks, about engage­ment, mod­el­ling game economies, and pro­to­typ­ing, were very enjoy­able.

We also received the first print run of Bycatch this week, and had a lot of fun unpack­ing the ship­ment and admir­ing the qual­i­ty. This means we’re now ready to start ful­fill­ing the pre­orders we’ve received so far, as well as send out pre­view copies to select pub­li­ca­tions. I’m very excited—and a lit­tle apprehensive—about see­ing what peo­ple will write about our strange lit­tle game.

Bycatch unboxed

By chance, our friends at Play­ful pub­lished Sube­lakha’s talk about the design of Bycatch this week also. So you can go and have a look at that and hear about the ori­gins of the project and some of our design con­sid­er­a­tions.

Oth­er than this, I con­tin­ued to work on the mock­ups for KLM, while Alper ran around and had lots of meet­ings with poten­tial new clients, friends and peers.

A sol­id week!

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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 the series of mock­ups we’ll be pro­duc­ing to illus­trate a game con­cept. We divid­ed some tasks (KLM will be very much involved hands-on in this) and set some mile­stones.

Lat­er that day I also briefed Tim Hengeveld on the project, who will like­ly con­tribute con­cept art to the project.

On Thurs­day, Alper and I went over to Rot­ter­dam to meet up with Simon to cel­e­brate wrap­ping up our work on Stand­ing. We’ve pushed out a few bug fix­es on the 2.0 ver­sion and con­sid­er the project “done” for the fore­see­able future.

Which isn’t to say we won’t con­tin­ue to think and talk about tools for play­ful activism though. For exam­ple, Stand­ing will be part of E‑motive Day 2015 and I will be there to share our ideas on play­ful activism.

We’ll also be part of this year’s Coun­ter­Play fes­ti­val and in all like­li­hood will also talk about Stand­ing and activism (along with oth­er areas of inter­est).

By the end of the week, a big box con­tain­ing pack­ag­ing for send­ing out Bycatch had arrived. We expect the games to be deliv­ered from the print­er on Jan­u­ary 16 and can’t wait to start send­ing them out.

On Fri­day, Alper and I reviewed 2014’s OKRs and start­ed mak­ing plans for this year’s objec­tives. Aldo dropped by to make plans for a sec­ond ver­sion of Cam­parc which we hope to be pro­duc­ing for this year’s STRP bien­ni­al. And we fin­ished things off in style at the very con­vivial Vecht­club XL new year’s drinks, but not before sam­pling the shōchū Alper had brought from Berlin’s Sake Kon­tor.

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Week 278–280

By Admin | Published: January 5, 2015

HNY! Well, we have three weeks worth of notes to catch up on. Week 278 got stuck in the mail because I was a bit too eager to dive into my Christ­mas hol­i­day. Week 279 and 280 were unevent­ful, as is to be expect­ed this time of year. Let’s get into it.

I wrapped up and deliv­ered our work for Social­Re­fer­ral in the form of a low fideli­ty click­able app pro­to­type. We’ll stay in touch to see of we may be of ser­vice at a lat­er stage again.

I also sent out a sum­ma­ry of the con­cept we devel­oped for our pitch for the Dutch Muse­um Asso­ci­a­tion. Next up: Sit­ting down with all the par­ties involved to rough out a pro­duc­tion plan.

I attend­ed an excel­lent edi­tion of Big Broth­er Awards, pro­duced by Dutch Dutch dig­i­tal rights organ­i­sa­tion Bits of Free­dom. See­ing Snow­den live on a big screen from Rus­sia was quite the expe­ri­ence, as was the rest of the evening. I blogged some quick impres­sions on the train ride back home that night.

Snowden at Big Brother Awards

We did some bug hunt­ing and fix­ing on Stand­ing 2.0. An update will be pushed out soon­ish.

I start­ed doing some plan­ning on our next project with KLM, which involves pro­duc­ing a series of mock­ups to visu­alise the con­cept we devel­oped for them ear­li­er.

Alper is start­ing to push hard­er on mar­ket­ing Bycatch. I am assist­ing by send­ing out the odd email to peo­ple in my net­work. Mean­while I have been on the hunt for the best pack­ag­ing mate­r­i­al for when we start ful­fill­ing our pre-orders.

Alper has also been dri­ving sales efforts for the con­sul­tan­cy, with an ample range of meet­ings with inter­est­ed par­ties.

Final­ly, Alper moved out of Oranien­straße 6 along with the rest of KANT. In Feb­ru­ary they will reopen doors on Moritz­platz, their new space.

Over Christ­mas and New Year, I took a break and sub­se­quent­ly got my ass kicked by a flu. Mean­while, Alper caught up on half a decade of PS3 games.

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Goat rodeo, issue games, and Bycatch

By Admin | Published: December 19, 2014

When Sub­alekha was pre­sent­ing Bycatch at Play­ful back in Octo­ber 2014, at some point Ian Wil­ley tweet­ed the fol­low­ing:

https://twitter.com/Ian_Willey/status/525643010714132480

I was intrigued by the expres­sion “goat rodeo” and imme­di­ate­ly looked it up. It turns out Ian was­n’t refer­ring to games about chas­ing goats with las­sos. In stead, he’s talk­ing about sit­u­a­tions that I tend to use the term “wicked prob­lem” for. Vinay Gup­ta – the @leashless referred to in Ian’s tweet – has some fun and inter­est­ing things to say about goat rodeo:

For all the fan­cy lan­guage used in the com­plex­i­ty con­sult­ing trade, we all know the feel­ing – 14 peo­ple around the table, with no clear idea of where they are going, going through the motions of map­ping a com­plex prob­lem with no belief that their respec­tive organ­i­sa­tion­al chains-of-com­mand will every approve any com­mon-sense solu­tion to the prob­lem at hand, and slow­ly the cof­fee pot drains, and peo­ple con­sid­er their pen­sions. For all the the­o­ry, for all the hope for ele­gant solu­tions, you know it when you see it and the polit­i­cal need is to be able to name and iden­ti­fy the goat rodeo when it aris­es, and begin to build an alter­na­tive rather than expect­ing it to be resolved in its cur­rent polit­i­cal form. The true goat rodeo is intractable. When you see it, run. If you can’t run, call me.

Real­ly, you should read the whole thing. The quad­rants and scale Vinay pro­pos­es are con­cep­tu­al tools I look for­ward to deploy­ing in the future.

I like the idea of Bycatch being a goat rodeo game. After all, con­tem­po­rary remote war­fare using drones – which is what Bycatch is about – is a goat rodeo. (Then again, maybe all of war can be con­ceived of as a goat rodeo.) I mean, in today’s drone wars we have dif­fer­ent “play­ers” with dif­fer­ent goals, and the tech­nolo­gies intro­duced into this mix wreak hav­oc with human cog­ni­tive bias­es. Bycatch invites play­ers to act out this goat rodeo. It per­suades them to try on the mind­set apt­ly described by Philip Alston in a New York­er arti­cle on Oba­ma’s drone war in Pak­istan:

“I think the great­est prob­lem is the men­tal­i­ty that accom­pa­nies drone strikes,” Philip Alston, an N.Y.U. law pro­fes­sor who inves­ti­gat­ed drone attacks for the U.N. between 2004 and 2010, told me. “The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of a list of tar­gets, and if we can suc­ceed in elim­i­nat­ing that list we will have achieved good things—that men­tal­i­ty is what dri­ves it all: if only we can get enough of these bas­tards, we’ll win the war.”

Not too long after Play­ful, I was hav­ing drinks with games researcher Jus­si Holopainen and we got to talk about Bycatch. He sug­gest­ed the term “issue game” to describe a cat­e­go­ry of games that Bycatch belongs to. Issue games, he told me, are defined by the fact that their mechan­ics mod­el the issue which the game is about. This in con­trast to many games for change, which often mod­el the solu­tion to an issue, and there­fore typ­i­cal­ly leave less to the play­er’s imag­i­na­tion when it comes to decid­ing their own per­spec­tive on the issue. It leaves less room for debate before, dur­ing, and after play.

I think issue games are an inter­est­ing approach. On the one hand it’s per­haps a less ambi­tious approach than some of the “save the world” type games we’ve seen in the recent past. But at the same time, I believe it is more pow­er­ful because it puts more trust in play­ers, and their pow­er to ulti­mate­ly decide what a game is about. When it comes to the goat rodeo, there are no easy answers, and with Bycatch, we do not pre­sume to have any.

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Week 277

By Alper | Published: December 16, 2014

We gave and won the pitch I men­tioned last week for the Dutch Muse­ums Asso­ci­a­tion so that is very good news and makes it very like­ly that we’ll be able to real­ize that idea in the new year.

Stand­ing made it out to the App Store and is look­ing amaz­ing.

Hanging out with Lekha's dog Panther

Bycatch now has a BoardGameGeek page which we’ll fill out as we progress. This is great though because now you can already put it on your wish­list and talk about it there. Week­ly hang­outs about pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing are con­tin­u­ing and we’re on sched­ule for a Jan­u­ary release of the pre­orders.

Kars is work­ing on the user engage­ment of Dutch recruit­ing plat­form Social­Re­fer­ral. We enjoy work­ing with star­tups because the scale of their ambi­tion com­bines well with our prac­ti­cal design approach.

We shipped the pro­duc­tion plan on our engage­ment with KLM and wrapped that up. We will con­tin­ue to work with them in the new year to fur­ther con­cretize the con­cept.

Cup­pings our lit­tle cof­fee app got fea­tured on Prod­uct Hunt and saw a fair uptick in sales because of it.

We did a bunch of social calls around town to pre­pare plans for the new year. Kars gave a talk at Cre­ative Morn­ings Utrecht notes for which you can find on his Tum­blr (a video of that talk should also be forth­com­ing).

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Week 276

By Alper | Published: December 9, 2014

Last week we fin­ished a lot of stuff which is real­ly nice.

Talk and Play

Bycatch is now ready to print thanks to the efforts of Kars and Ties. I pre­sent­ed about the con­cept at Talk and Play and did an impromp­tu playtest both of which were very well received. We’re now plan­ning how to tell peo­ple about our game in the fol­low­ing months when it becomes avail­able. If you’re read­ing this you should go pre­order your copy and help spread the word.

Stand­ing’s visu­al­ly updat­ed app is now in the app store review process and will hope­ful­ly make it through before the Christ­mas break. We fixed some last minute things and went over it once more and found that it was ready.

It turns out that the diver­si­fi­ca­tion of iPhone sizes com­pli­cates things a lot. That is the rea­son why Cup­pings still isn’t opti­mized for the newest iPhones yet, but we are get­ting there. We are hap­py to report though that sales on Cup­pings are brisker than ever.

The Game­ful World book is now on the MIT Press web­site and it looks like it’ll be released this year yet.

I ran around Berlin to talk to lots of peo­ple and look for an inter­im office solu­tion.

Kars pre­pared a pitch for the Dutch Muse­ums Asso­ci­a­tion for a game to let chil­dren expe­ri­ence free­dom and the lack there­of. This should be pret­ty awe­some if it gets made.

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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 meet­ings, and focused on pro­duc­tion of Bycatch, which cul­mi­nat­ed in deliv­ery of the final art­work from Agnes, of which see a sneak pre­view below.

Bycatch artwork teaser

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