Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

PRACTICE 2014 recap

By Alper | Published: November 27, 2014

This year’s PRACTICE, the game design con­fer­ence at NYU Game­cen­ter, was as great as expect­ed. It’s real­ly nice to be sur­round­ed by game design­ers for a cou­ple of days and to be able to dis­cuss game design in detail. As Frank Lantz put it in the intro­duc­tion: “Game design is a sick­ness and the only cure is more game design.”

The over­all lev­el was great but here is a list of ses­sions that espe­cial­ly stood out for me. I would rec­om­mend check­ing out the record­ings of these talks when they are up.

Holly Gramazio

Hol­ly Gra­mazio did an excel­lent overview of per­va­sive games, cov­er­ing both its his­to­ry and the myr­i­ad of games that she has cre­at­ed and facil­i­tat­ed. She divid­ed per­va­sive games into three main cat­e­gories: ‘the scav­enger hunt’, ‘the blind­fold game’ and ‘tak­ing cer­tain kind of pic­tures’ and high­light­ed prob­lems with all of these, many of which were pret­ty famil­iar.

David Kana­ga pled for a for­mal­ism that push­es things for­ward in a pre­sen­ta­tion that used the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy as a mind bomb. David’s writ­ing has been a great inspi­ra­tion for us and it was nice to see his meta-phi­los­o­phy being pre­sent­ed in real life.

Saman­tha Kalman ran us through years of pro­to­types that final­ly led to Sen­tris. To see this devel­op­ment was illu­mi­nat­ing from per­spec­tives of game design, inter­face design and music the­o­ry. I don’t think there are pro­fes­sion­al or casu­al music apps that have a sim­i­lar approach to acces­si­bil­i­ty and iter­a­tive devel­op­ment.

Netrunner teaching

Lukas Litzsinger went over the reboot of Netrun­ner and the numer­ous design deci­sions that went into that. Netrun­ner is a stu­dio favourite that is more or less com­pul­so­ry for game design­ers to play. Hear­ing this talk when you’re in the process of pro­duc­ing a card game your­self was pret­ty intim­i­dat­ing.

Zach Gage gave a high-den­si­ty talk using sci­ence about how to design games for prob­lem solvers and how to turn peo­ple into bet­ter prob­lem solvers. It boiled down to cre­at­ing sand­box­es for peo­ple to play in and be able to form their own mod­els before being faced with prob­lems. The slides are online already and I rec­om­mend work­ing through them your­self.

These talks should prove a good taste of what PRACTICE was about. I’m already look­ing for­ward to next year’s event.

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Week 274

By Kars | Published: November 24, 2014

At the start of this week Alper was still in NYC after enjoy­ing anoth­er excel­lent edi­tion of PRACTICE. He did some work on Bycatch with Sub­alekha and oth­er­wise enjoyed the city before head­ing back to Europe on Tues­day.

While he was mak­ing the cross­ing, I par­tic­i­pat­ed in the first Tegen­licht meet­up in Utrecht. We watched the episode on the mak­er move­ment and sub­se­quent­ly had a nice lit­tle debate with the episode’s direc­tor. I also briefly pre­sent­ed on how “mak­ing” fig­ures in Hub­bub’s prac­tice and why we appre­ci­ate work­ing from “mak­er space” Vecht­club XL, using Cam­parc as my main exam­ple.

Most of my time this week was tak­en up by work on Bycatch. I sketched out the explana­to­ry illus­tra­tions that will be part of the rules. Our bril­liant edi­tor Natalye got the rules’s text in good shape for pub­li­ca­tion. Agnes sent us a cross-sec­tion of all the art­work. On Thurs­day I went over to Pony Design Club to do rough lay­outs of the game’s rules, box and cards with my broth­er Ties.

Laying out Bycatch rules at Pony Design Club

I also did a lit­tle work on Stand­ing togeth­er with Simon. We were so close to ship­ping the visu­al update when we all of a sud­den had to deal with those new iPhones. As a result we’ve been mas­sag­ing the app’s autore­siz­ing set­tings in Xcode to get to com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Near­ly there.

We wrapped up the week with two events. I par­tic­i­pat­ed in an event organ­ised by Rezone on games for urban devel­op­ment. Alper, mean­while, mod­er­at­ed a pan­el on smart cities at #lab4city. By all accounts he did a great job.

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Week 273

By Alper | Published: November 18, 2014

Last week Kars and I crossed con­ti­nents. He came back from hol­i­day in Seoul (check out his visu­al food report) on the day I flew out to New York to attend PRACTICE.

I spent the week doing some admin­is­tra­tion, review­ing cur­rent projects among which Stand­ing and pack­ing. I’m also orga­niz­ing the fourth edi­tion of Game Design­ers Anony­mous at our stu­dio in Berlin.

After work­ing on Bycatch in Lon­don with the three of us, it was con­ve­nient for me to be in New York and be able to work on it with Sub­alekha. We had a marathon hang­out ses­sion with Kars from the Impact HUB to go over the copy for the rules before Natalye Chil­dress does the final edit.

PRACTICE was just as great as last year with lots of amaz­ing peo­ple present and a slew of insight­ful talks. The talk about Netrun­ner by Lukas Litzsinger espe­cial­ly hit home both because the game is a stu­dio favorite and because we are in the process of design­ing a card game our­selves and see­ing his process was rather hum­bling.

PRACTICE

I met too many game design prac­ti­tion­ers at PRACTICE to count. Dur­ing the week I hung out most­ly with old Ams­ter­dam friend Peter Robi­nett of Bub­ble Foundry and Paper + Equa­tor (Sub­alekha’s design firm).

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Week 272

By Alper | Published: November 12, 2014

Last week was a fair­ly qui­et week over at the stu­dio. Kars did the deliv­ery for our engage­ment over at KLM and then got ready to go on hol­i­day to Seoul where he is right now.

Bycatch was fea­tured over at Killscreen with a very nice arti­cle.

I was sick for most of the week but I did make it over to Ams­ter­dam to hold a work­shop at ThingsCon there on Fri­day togeth­er with Ianus. We did a ses­sion called “Play­ful Devices Improv” and every­body had a lot of fun think­ing of new approach­es to con­nect­ed prod­ucts. We asked par­tic­i­pants to take kitchen devices and come up with a char­ac­ter for them. With these char­ac­ters they would then have to devise sto­ries and final­ly these sto­ries were act­ed out over the kitchen counter.

DSC09750

DSC09755

The groups did real­ly well, each one had sev­er­al inter­est­ing finds and as a whole the work­shop real­ly showed that adding fric­tion to sit­u­a­tions can be more pro­duc­tive than start­ing from a func­tion­al per­spec­tive. And even though we ran the work­shop fair­ly freeform, the ideation that came out of it was as good or maybe even bet­ter than what you would get in a more for­mal set­ting.

DSC09753

On Sat­ur­day I vis­it­ed the Inter­face Cri­tique event at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts in Berlin which was an inter­est­ing con­trast from the applied think­ing at ThingsCon the day before.

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Week 271

By Alper | Published: November 6, 2014

These wee­knotes are late because of some irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the stu­dio. Kars is cur­rent­ly enjoy­ing a hol­i­day in Seoul while I have been sick for most of the week. Last week was event­ful so there are the wee­knotes any­way.

Last Mon­day we final­ly got around to doing our Q3 OKR review with opti­mistic results. In the evening we caught up with Jus­si Holopainen of GEE­lab who was in Utrecht for the Games for Health event.

Dur­ing this entire week we kept on test­ing and tun­ing Bycatch. After hav­ing opened pre­orders last week at Play­ful we need to get it into shape to ship quick­ly. Thank­ful­ly we did crack some of the big­ger game design nuts and we now have a game on our hands that is fun and does what it needs to do.

We are inch­ing towards releas­ing the new ver­sion of Stand­ing. Those new iPhone mod­els were a bit of a set­back but progress is steady. The team would love to have this out there so we can take a breather.

We con­sult­ed with Sebas­t­ian on KLM and did a bunch of work to fin­ish that engage­ment for final deliv­ery. It has been a plea­sure work­ing with them and find­ing a solu­tion fit­ting for their prob­lem space. We may be writ­ing some more stuff about what we pro­duced lat­er.

I met up with Berlin based Affec­tive Sys­tems to tie up that engage­ment as well. This one was dif­fer­ent in almost all respects but because it is an ear­ly stage start­up we think that this is the ide­al moment to start think­ing about how play can add val­ue to the prod­uct.

We brain­stormed with Ianus for our upcom­ing work­shop at Thingscon Ams­ter­dam. What we thought would be the most fun and the most inter­est­ing was to mashup the works of Kei­th John­stone and Bill Bux­ton and see whether we can impro­vise a bunch of play­ful devices that talk to each oth­er.

Kars ran a work­shop at the uRule sym­po­sium about smash­ing the bor­der between online and offline and met with Rosie Poe­bright of Splash and Rip­ple (pic­tured below).

Splash and Ripple's Rosie Poebright talking about the wonderful Ghosts in the Garden

On Fri­day we had a call to dis­cuss fur­ther details of Bycatch with Sub­alekha. Kars met up with Jamin War­ren to talk through the Kill Screen pan­el on video games and affect at Impakt Fes­ti­val.

Setting up for Kill Screen panel on games and affect at IMPAKT festival

On the week­end Kars appeared on that pan­el. I attend­ed the first Berlin Pro­duc­thunt meet­up and I worked a bit on remain­dered projects: a new release of Cup­pings should be out soon.

Producthunt Meetup

And in ran­dom facts we were pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to hear King Willem-Alexan­der of the Nether­lands men­tion the Pig Chase project in a speech.

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Week 270

By Kars | Published: October 27, 2014

My week start­ed with the sec­ond day of the Asia-Europe Cul­ture Min­is­ters Meet­ing (ASEM)‘s work­shop on play­ful cities. It was a huge plea­sure spend­ing two days with tal­ent­ed peers from Europe, many of whom’s work I admire great­ly. It was equal­ly great to meet Asian prac­ti­tion­ers and hear about the big dif­fer­ences in their local con­texts. By the end of the day we had gone very, very deep into the chal­lenges of lever­ag­ing a play doc­trine to for­mu­late a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to the pre­vail­ing smart cities rhetoric. One com­ment I post­ed about this got a very pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sion between some big thinkers in the field over at Face­book.

ASEM Playful Cities workshop LEGO creations

In the mean­time Alper trav­eled by train to the Nether­lands and got a decent amount of work in, pro­cess­ing the out­comes from his work with Affec­tive Sys­tems and resub­mit­ting All-See­ing Eye pro­pos­al.

The whole of Tues­day was tak­en up by our third and for the moment final work­shop with KLM. Now all that is left for us to do is doc­u­ment all the out­comes and deliv­er them, after which we’ll start explor­ing next steps.

On Wednes­day, a fun inter­view with us about our way of work­ing togeth­er remote­ly was pub­lished in Dutch on Achter het Scherm.

I spent most of that day and the next fin­ish­ing up the web­site for Bycatch and then trav­eled to Lon­don on Thurs­day, as did Alper.

That Fri­day, we attend­ed Play­ful, where Sub­alekha talked about our work on Bycatch so far, and we flipped the switch on pre­orders. If you want to be one of the first to own a copy of this card game about drone sur­veil­lance and remote war­fare, go on and click that “add to cart”-button.

Play­ful was a plea­sure as always, with stand­out ses­sions (as far as I’m con­cerned) from Aard­man’s Dan Efer­gan and George Rowe on east­er eggs in videogames, Bone­loaf’s James Brown on the mak­ing of Gang Beasts and Ida Marie Toft’s love­ly and weird hybrid per­for­mance-game Love­birds.

Team Bycatch united at last

The day after Play­ful, while watch­ing the first orders trick­le in via our Slack-Stripe inte­gra­tion, we made good use of the oppor­tu­ni­ty of being all three phys­i­cal­ly co-present and furi­ous­ly tweaked and tuned Bycatch’s rules.

I trav­eled back that same evening. Alper stuck around for a Cup­pings cof­fee tast­ing expe­di­tion in Fitzrovia and head­ed back on Sun­day.

While recov­er­ing from a pret­ty intense week, our friends at ThingsCon Ams­ter­dam announced the work­shop Alper and Ianus will run on play­ful prod­uct design.

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Presenting Bycatch, a card game about drone surveillance and remote warfare

By Alper | Published: October 24, 2014

We’re proud today to present Bycatch, a card game that we have been devel­op­ing and that’s avail­able for pre-order right now.

As the site says, Bycatch is a game about ‘flawed sur­veil­lance, impos­si­ble deci­sions and the peo­ple caught in between.’ Play­ers can shel­ter civil­ians, gath­er intel­li­gence about those of oth­ers and based on this intel­li­gence they can per­form drone strikes to elim­i­nate sus­pect­ed ene­mies.

Intel­li­gence to inform your actions is gath­ered by using your cam­er­a­phone on anoth­er play­er’s hand of cards. By its very nature this mechan­ic yields incon­clu­sive infor­ma­tion. This mir­rors the infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing and infer­ence process on which gov­ern­ments base their mil­i­tary actions.

We think this is a very impor­tant issue and it deserves a treat­ment that makes it playable and fun with­out triv­i­al­is­ing it. Vio­lence is a com­mon theme in games but it is usu­al­ly not treat­ed crit­i­cal­ly. We hope play­ing Bycatch makes peo­ple think dif­fer­ent­ly and more deeply about cur­rent secu­ri­ty prac­tice.

We’ve been work­ing on this game for the past half year with Sub­alekha Udayasankar across Utrecht, Berlin and Brook­lyn. The game design has evolved over count­less video calls and we have each playtest­ed local­ly. We now feel that we are at the point where we can share the pro­duc­t’s fur­ther devel­op­ment with the world.

For the illus­tra­tions on the cards we are work­ing togeth­er with Agnes Loon­stra who has an amaz­ing draw­ing style. Ties Alfrink of Pony Design Club is help­ing us design the cards and the pack­ag­ing of the final prod­uct.

Bycatch is turn­ing into a beau­ti­ful card game, it is fun to play and it will give you a lot to think and talk about. You can pre-order the game on the Bycatch web­site and you will receive your copy at the start of the new year.

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Week 269

By Alper | Published: October 21, 2014

We’re mak­ing good progress on Bycatch for which we got a wel­come refo­cus­ing after a sit-down with Joris. Joris him­self was at SPIEL demo­ing Super Duo a card game of his own so he’s def­i­nite­ly an expert when it comes to this kind of thing. We’ll also have a web­site online this week through which you can pre­order your copy.

We did a sprint review for Stand­ing to see what we need to do to get the ver­sion out the door. We have a bit more test­ing to do thanks to Apple releas­ing a bunch of new iPhones but stil we should be in good shape this month.

We had a week of stu­dio work for KLM for which we worked through the stuff we pro­duced dur­ing the last work­shop and brought in Sebas­t­ian for a design crit. We have devel­oped some con­cepts but dis­cussing these we inevitably are led into strate­gic con­sid­er­a­tions which will be the focus of our final ses­sion tomor­row.

I did an after­noon of work­shop­ping with Affec­tive Sig­nals in Berlin to see how their prod­uct in the field of com­put­er aid­ed psy­chi­a­try can be improved by apply­ing the right game mechan­ics. The rest of the week I spent doing behind the scenes work, call­ing peo­ple to make sure we are still aligned and send­ing out pro­pos­als. One of those calls was a review of the cur­rent projects for Open Cul­tu­ur Data part of the Open State Foun­da­tion of which I’m still a board mem­ber. I am also still look­ing for a new loca­tion for our Berlin office which is prov­ing to be a chal­lenge.

Kars went over to Philips to dis­cuss a new game for them and had a meet­ing with STRP about the future of Cam­parc.

We are gear­ing up to head to Play­ful at the end of this week. A bit lat­er I’ll be doing a work­shop on Play­ful Prod­uct Design at Thingscon Ams­ter­dam togeth­er with Ianus and in Novem­ber while Kars is on hol­i­day, I will be attend­ing PRACTICE in New York.

Work con­tin­ued dur­ing the week­end with Kars attend­ing the ASEM Play­ful Cities work­shop among many oth­er things.

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Week 268

By Kars | Published: October 13, 2014

After a false start on Mon­day due to a lin­ger­ing head cold I was back in action on Tues­day. We made good progress this week on KUMA (our project with KLM on game-based learn­ing) and on Bycatch (our card game about drones sur­veil­lance and remote war­fare).

Let’s start with KUMA. We processed the out­comes of the first work­shop and deliv­ered them in the form of a brief. We then moved on to prepar­ing for the sec­ond work­shop, which focused on cre­at­ing a port­fo­lio of con­cepts. To this end, Alper flew in on Wednes­day to work with me in the stu­dio for the remain­der of the week.

We called in the help from Agnes to do live illus­tra­tions. This turned out to add real val­ue. They pro­vide an imme­di­ate visu­al anchor point for each idea and add an addi­tion­al dimen­sion to descrip­tions, mak­ing it eas­i­er to empathise.

Sebas­t­ian is also con­tribut­ing to the project with his con­sid­er­able knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence in the sub­ject. We had a very use­ful con­fer­ence call on Wednes­day and he sent us some use­ful last-minute input before the work­shop, despite it being a hol­i­day in Tel Aviv, his tem­po­rary place of res­i­dence.

So after ample prepa­ra­tion we ran a sec­ond pleas­ant and pro­duc­tive ses­sion from one of the neat work­shop spaces in Vecht­club XL with cater­ing from De Klub, which is hard to beat. After­wards we imme­di­ate­ly sent out the raw out­put to the client (a ben­e­fit of work­ing com­plete­ly ana­log and record­ing every­thing that is decid­ed on paper).

Reference images for a game design workshop

On to the Bycatch front. I also talked to Agnes about a first round of illus­tra­tions for the cards which we can show at Play­ful. I also talked to Ties about get­ting some offers from print­ers and get­ting his help on graph­ic design. Oth­er than this, we dis­cussed the state of the project in anoth­er call with Sub­alekha and we start­ed set­ting up a web­site for the game with Stripe Check­out built in to take pre-orders.

As if all of this was­n’t enough, Alper also fin­ished up our appli­ca­tion for a grant from Cre­ative Indus­tries Fund to do a first round of design work on All-See­ing Eye (a game about cam­era sur­veil­lance we’re work­ing on with Bits of Free­dom). Alper also start­ed prepar­ing a few design work­shops he’ll be run­ning with a Berlin-based start­up and he made plans for a work­shop we’ll be run­ning at ThingsCon Ams­ter­dam. Phew!

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Week 267

By Alper | Published: October 9, 2014

Let’s hope late wee­knotes does not become a trend but we’re rather busy these few weeks both with client work and prepar­ing the future. I flew back to Berlin last week but now I’m sat in Utrecht again writ­ing this.

Last Mon­day we had our KUMA work­shop with KLM which was excel­lent. We look for­ward to work­ing fur­ther with this client to map out the prob­lem and solu­tion spaces.

Kars round­ed up Cam­parc for which we just pub­lished a video here:

Bycatch (web­site forth­com­ing) is mov­ing along nice­ly. We now have a card game that does what we want it to do and also is fun to (re)play. The next step is to pre­pare a ful­ly func­tion­al demo that we can present and take into pro­duc­tion. We’ll be show­ing a pre­view of the final prod­uct at Play­ful.

To announce: we will be in Lon­don around Octo­ber 17th with a sig­nif­i­cant com­ple­ment of Hub­bub peo­ple head­quar­tered in Dal­ston. Kars, myself and Sebas­t­ian will be present at Play­ful to see Sub­alekha present. All of us look for­ward to meet­ing you.

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