I cam across two things this week that made me think thoughts. Not that I’ve come to any conclusions, but I’m posting this in case the process makes me come to any.
a real garden that feeds on social interaction. The more you talk to me, the more I grow!
Essentially it’s a plant that is hooked up to a system that will detect physical interactions and social media activity. Stroke it and it’ll get watered. Become a fan of the Facebook page and send it messages and it’ll receive nutrients.
What interests me about this is the way that the means of communication is filtered (the plant can ask for quiet time and protest about too much watering) and the idea that simply by communication becoming a two-way stream an object can be imbued with a personality to which one might form an attachment.
There’s something about dependency to figure in here too.
The idea is that you control a pixel and have to arrange yourself, along with all the other people controlling their own single pixels, into various formations. If you manage to be part of a formation when the clock runs down you receive points. There’s no effective means of communication (and therefore coordination) between you and the other players.
Groups formed in order to make formations, became successful and then unwieldy before splitting. Formations came together well before the deadline, leaving stray pixels zooming around the screen looking for somewhere to settle (or a crowd to be ‘in’ with).
Decisions had to be made about when to flee a sinking ship and seek fortune (and points) elsewhere. Unlike with Meet Eater, a clump of pixels had no physical form to be attached to so connections were ephemeral, loose and only maintained as long as everyone’s self-interest was served.
More Hide and Seek-related stuff. They’re being terribly interesting at the moment.
I went down to their Weekender thing at the National Theatre on Sunday. It was part of LIFT, itself interesting because Mark Ball (who founded Fierce and was there when I worked for them a couple of years back), seems to have given the festival a kick up the arse in the best way.
One of the things we saw was a huge game of pass the parcel. Huge to the extent that in the early stages the players had to circle the parcel, rather than it being passed around.
The two people who facilitated the game were fascinating to watch – keeping the game ticking along at a decent but unrushed pace, getting people involved and leaving them to their own devices. Carefully cultivated chaos broke out as the layers came off and the area became strewn with balloons, feathers, wrapping paper, bubble wrap and all sorts of other bits and bobs.
It was fascinating to see side-games springing up all over the place too. Some provoked directly by the facilitators, some not (although in most cases they’d still provided the platform/materials for them to take place).
Try to be a theatre director of any scene of people in play and you discover many games tumbling out at once – games of status, of desire, of curiosity, of connection, and of greed, of all the sins and of all the virtues – plus hope – and as an actor here you can’t stop still, moment by moment a different game crackles into life. And in reality, these games are all being played all at once: by different people at different times in different places, interrupting and overlapping
The other week, I was invited along to a pervasive games lab at the MAC. Fierce organised it and Hide & Seek hosted it. The other invitees were artists (of various stripes), filmmakers, webby types and developers of serious games.
Pervasive games might involve roleplaying, running about, technological doodads, funny hats, location-based tomfoolery and all sorts of other things. Often the games take place in the ‘real world’ (the very fact that it’s necessary to point this out is instructive). Games might last ten minutes or run for days at a time. It’s a broad church. Street games and alternate reality games are similar/related.
I’m consciously avoiding any proper sort of definition because no-one seems able to agree on one, leading to all manner of tedious hairsplitting.
Labs, just to clear this up, are workshops but… um… edgier. Maybe?
After some general orienting in the morning, we spent the afternoon devising games for Nikki Pugh’s whale hat which she explains here along with videos like this one:
All in all, it was nice to mess about with something a bit different for a day and to make some new friends. What’s more, Nikki’s gone on to develop the whale hat into a game called The Bloop which became something of a media magnet in the run-up to this weekend’s Hide and Seek weekender at the National Theatre.
Going all big picture for a bit, there seem to have been two motivators for the day; to give some WMers a kick up the backside and to get some cross-sector collaboration going in a growing market.
Reticent West Midlanders
Fierce had an event happening at Warwick Arts Centre on 26 June. They’d put out a call for proposals – offering cash for artists to come and do stuff . There was apparently loads of interest from around the rest of the country, but not much here.
This ‘lab’ was partly an attempt to coax out a few more applications and develop some games that could be tried out at that Sandpit event on 26 June. We didn’t quite get that far – half the group had to leave after lunch and many had brought projects they were already working on and couldn’t really give up to this process. That stunted things a little so hooray for the whale hat.
I hear this sort of thing from time to time. To pick two off the top of my head, the West Mids has/had the lowest number of bidders for upcoming Olympics contracts and a (Birmingham-based) BBC chap I met was saying that he gets pitched digital stuff all the time, but from agencies outside the region. It’s rather frustrating.
Getting all collaborative
There are a whole bunch of initiatives going on that are/have been trying to draw links between different sectors and disciplines. Hats off to Screen WM for being active in a lot of that, Producers Forum are working with others a bit, 4iP has been a beacon for that kind of thing, the TSB are trying (in their own mildly incomprehensible way) and there’s a new thing called Switchboard which is a next step in bringing together various creative industries strands.
As well as the general benefits that collaboration brings, pervasive games, transmedia projects and multiplatform approaches are all the rave at the moment. I imagine there’s a sense that the region could do quite well in this emerging area if people got their heads together. Where the best transmedia producers come from is a tricky one, but these sorts of sessions will help.
Not wanting to gloat, more to record for posterity. Andy Hartwell and I are having quite a long-running pool competition in the office. We’re running fairly even at the moment but at lunchtime today, and thanks to two incredibly jammy shots, I managed to do this:
Andy, ever the gent, did as tradition demands in such an eventuality.
The CiB shop is probably to blame for this, although I’ve not spent much in there (yet – although you’d think the place has cost me enough money as it is).
However, I bought one of TTVPete‘s prints the other week. Pete’s a friend, but his stuff is lovely and he’s got a knack for catching casual moments and scenes. The one that he caught in the print I now own is from when Jo and I were working a mulled wine stall at the Kings Heath Big Party at the end of last year.
Last weekend I was down in London and, on a walk through Spitalfields Market, I passed a section of prints that caught my eye. The style was quite instantly recognisable as that of Tom Lewis. I’d nicked a picture of one of his little hip-hop characters to use as an avatar a few years back and also given him a mention on CiB.
Long story short, we had a nice chat (he’s a top chap) and I bought a couple of prints – Megan and the shimmer tree and The Legend of Hoo-oo Lagoon.
There’s a few other things I’ve got my eye on – a couple of bits and pieces in the CiB shop and also a canvas from the Mitchy Bwoy exhibition at the Sauce Gallery.
Last night I got to enjoy Stan’s Cafe‘s new production, Tuning Out with Radio Z, from a fairly unique perspective. I say fairly unique because there were four others who were tucked up in beds arranged around the stage at the mac.
It was a strange experience.
We took our positions 10 minutes before the doors to the theatre opened and only got up after the audience left, so I’ve no idea how many people were there watching.
I didn’t get to see any of the action on stage from where I was lying and, when I was told I could get up, I was surprised there was that much paraphernalia lying around.
Without the visual part of the show it was like listening to 4 hours of Blue Jam.
Although the focus is on two radio show presenters, reality and perspective slides sideways and backwards quite regularly. It was smoothly conveyed through speech and, the more I think about how they achieved the effect, the more impressive it seems.
The music was really good – I particularly enjoyed a bit of Spiritualized and will be digging out Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space soonish. They played my fave Girls Aloud tune too.
We weren’t given much direction or told what to expect, or at least no-one told me anything other than to lie down and look asleep. When Craig dashed over to me and started shouting questions in my ear – “Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes? Blink if you can hear me” – I was a tad surprised and not sure how to react. I figured the safest thing would be to not react. Good choice, I reckon.
There was a part where. I gather, we sleeping forms were non-responsive patients in a hospital. There was an extended period of no action on stage and I shifted slightly, making Craig run over, all hopeful that I could be roused. I wonder if they were waiting for one of us to move or if he just improvised around that.
As for what the show was about, I’m not sure. It was an improvised performance that took the theme (that night) of ‘shooting’. Things or people being missing provided a major thread – opportunities not taken, the shock of people being taken and events happening in other places. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice was told with small alterations.
Gemma Thomas, who was in the audience, said that the last hour was she was moved more than expected by the last hour.
UPDATE
Ah, I’ve just found the tracklisting online via the joy of the Stan’s Cafe Last.fm account. I was there from Donna Summer onwards.
No, Talk Talk, you utter sods. I’ve been frustratingly disconnected from your service (which I continue to pay for) for over three months now. Repeated phonecalls trying to sort the issue have only wasted my time further.
So don’t email me to claim you’re bringing me “the brightest and best of the web”. Clownshoes.
Games Thanks to a few tweets by Daniel Nye-Griffiths I’ll be playing Machinarium, Samorost 2, The Path, Fatale and The Graveyard, all of which are on offer at the moment (handy tweet 1 and handy tweet 2).
Of course, I’ve not a hope of making it through much of that little lot, but it should be worth a spirited attempt.
I’m sure we’d all like to convince ourselves it’s the former. However, the idea that ‘the good will out’ puts me in mind of the routinely rubbished concept that ‘if you build it they will come’. As far as I’m concerned (and I base this on nothing much more than personal experience) the chances are slim.
At least I have an article on Edge Online (found via Tom Armitage) to back up my witterings. Essentially, a recent study of computer game sales revealed that a game’s quality (judged by reviews) had hardly any effect on sales as compared to marketing spend:
Using a simple correlation scale comparing marketing spend and sales against Metacritic rating and sales, Divnich found that marketing influenced game revenue “three times more than game scores”
Too many good people hide behind false modesty, a lack of confidence or Bill Hicks quotes, allowing themselves to be eclipsed. It’s hardly a new problem but it’s always dead irritating to see.
