Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Tag Archives: games

Shifting from Gamification to Playful Design

By Kars | Published: November 12, 2015

This is a light­ly edit­ed tran­script of a short lec­ture I deliv­ered some time ago at an off-site gath­er­ing orga­nized by one of NL’s largest con­struc­­tion-ser­vices busi­ness­es. The event explored the poten­tial of games, game design and gam­i­fi­ca­tion for prop­er­ty devel­op­ment and con­struc­tion. This talk cre­ates a com­mon frame of under­stand­ing about gam­i­fi­ca­tion and why […]

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New Planning Methods

By Kars | Published: October 9, 2015

This is a write­up of my talk at the event ‘Nieuwe Plan­ningsmeth­o­d­en’ (‘New Plan­ning Meth­ods’) in Pakhuis de Zwi­jger, Ams­ter­dam on Octo­ber 8, 2015. Hel­lo. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am a design­er and part­ner at Hub­bub, a small play­ful design agency, based in Utrecht and Berlin. Hub­bub helps organ­i­sa­tions do things with games, […]

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A new direction for the studio

By Kars | Published: July 2, 2014

Today we’ve updat­ed our front page and about page to reflect a new direc­tion for the stu­dio: dig­i­tal prod­uct design for a play­ful world. The way we see it, play­ful­ness has become an impor­tant qual­i­ty for a wide range of prod­ucts. It invites peo­ple into an expe­ri­ence, enables them to con­nect to oth­ers and express […]

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‘The Social Contract Put at Play’ at Lift12

By Kars | Published: May 8, 2012

This is a long over­due blog post for my talk at Lift12. It’s about what games can do for soci­ety. As such it builds on what I talked about in 2011 at FutureEv­ery­thing and at dCon­struct. What I tried to do here is to be more artic­u­late about why I think the pub­lic sphere is […]

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Hack days as ludic practice

By Kars | Published: December 8, 2011

It was at DiGRA that I first heard Eric Zim­mer­man talk about the idea of this being a ludic age. We’re in the peri­od that fol­lows the infor­ma­tion age, which we’ve more or less left behind. In the ludic age, says Zim­mer­man, “infor­ma­tion itself is put at play”.1 What does that mean? It can’t just […]

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Occupy the future at Playful 2011

By Kars | Published: October 24, 2011

After mak­ing the many dif­fer­ent cre­ative indus­tries out there take games seri­ous­ly (and sub­se­quent­ly sort of regret­ting the con­se­quences) Play­ful was back this year and decid­ed to look towards the future. Ever since I pre­sent­ed there in 2008 this has prob­a­bly been my favorite event of the year. So I returned after a much-regret­t­ed hia­tus […]

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The Transformers at dConstruct 2011

By Kars | Published: September 20, 2011

Over two weeks have passed since dCon­struct 2011 so it’s high time I post my talk. I felt a bit appre­hen­sive about this one: dCon­struct tends to have a pret­ty het­ero­ge­neous audi­ence, so it’s hard to know what kind of talk to shoot for. In addi­tion, I was slight­ly wor­ried about how peo­ple would react […]

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Six games about architecture

By Kars | Published: August 9, 2011

I went look­ing for a few recent exam­ples of games that deal with archi­tec­tur­al themes in some way. I pulled these most­ly from a few of the major street games fes­ti­vals that are out there, such as Come Out & Play, Hide & Seek, Igfest and You Are GO! Just from this small sam­ple size […]

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New Games for New Cities at FutureEverything

By Kars | Published: May 19, 2011

Last week I was in Man­ches­ter for FutureEv­ery­thing. I pre­sent­ed on games and how they can be used to improve city life. Below are my notes and a selec­tion of slides. It’s longish, but hope­ful­ly infor­ma­tive. I’ve tried to con­nect crit­i­cism of gam­i­fi­ca­tion with the virtues of open-end­ed play, and show how the lat­ter can […]

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Looking back on playful Tweetakt 2011

By Kars | Published: May 6, 2011

I’ve just uploaded a set of pho­tos tak­en at the open­ing of the play­ful Twee­t­akt 2011 exhi­bi­tion. As you may recall, I was asked to curate an inter­ac­tive addi­tion to this youth the­atre fes­ti­val. The works I select­ed are in my opin­ion all won­der­ful exam­ples of the way play can lead to per­for­mance. Each was […]

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