TLDR: We’ve got an SXSW panel in the running. Vote for us!

I was with some friends today, and had one of those curious moments where the zeitgeist seems to manifest before you, and remind you that it’s no longer the 90s. There was substantial indecision amidst a conversation, and to provoke some sort of choice, someone chimed in and said, “Click yes or no.” We’ve known that computers are no longer the strict domain of nerds for a while now, but it’s still a cool splash in the face when an average joe makes references to modal dialog boxes in everyday conversation.

It goes well beyond computers, of course, which is really why I bring this up. Technology is, naturally, just a medium; kids today don’t even refer to it as the internet, they just refer to specific applications like Facebooking and Google Mapping it. And without even looking at the market research data, you’re going to accept it when I say that games are one of the more applications going. Along with Google, Photoshop, and lolcats, the underpinnings of gaming have seeped into the vernacular and the popular unconscious.

While some worry about how games might subsume everyday life, others prefer to flip the premise: could games augment everyday life? Looking at youth, who are presumably amongst the more malleable minds, researchers have found that doomsday predictions of obese pork chops spending 25 hours a day glued to the screen haven’t really panned out. It turns out that people are pretty good at extracting the value from mediated systems, and applying it IRL, without getting hopelessly lost in the shiny. The implication is that as our culture becomes more enraptured by gaming, the possibility is large that game-like systems will increasingly inform our way of living, rather than replace it.

Some thinkers were calling for games as a mechanism for enriching culture 50 years ago. Constant Nieuwenhuys called for “unforeseen games” that make “inventive use of material conditions” as a means to humanize urban spaces. In the developed world, our problems are more mental than material, and we’ve banked a lot on our capacity to advance intellectually and spiritually. Games present systems that seek to solve complex, abstract problems — and they do so in a way that uplifts us emotionally. If that’s going to inform our way of living, it could be a big deal.

And that’s why we’ve got an SXSW panel in the running, on this very topic: Our Game Could Be Your Life. We’ve teamed up with some other fantastic pervasive game designers to put this thing together, so it’s going to be pretty wild if it gets accepted.

Spacing Radio has a podcast all about Gentrification: The Game!

For this SUMMER SHORT, reporter Andrew Walsh brings us the sounds of the game, while producer Mieke Anderson catches up with one of the game’s creators, David Fono, to talk about the importance of public play-time and tackling the subject of gentrification.

Listen to it and be rad.

This year’s Hide and Seek’s Weekender was a delicious magical sandwich filled with, fun, inspiration and silliness.

Since we were there to run Gentrification: The Game! (thanks for having us guys!) I didn’t get much time to play, but of the few I got to experience I had two favourites: Taunt and The Agency.

I loved these two games for a bunch of reasons, but I loved how they were at two ends of the complexity spectrum. One was really, short and simple to pick up and play, while the the other really intricate, layered and time intensive (both for players and the designers) . Both totally rocked their respective styles.

Holly Gramazio’s Taunt is basically team based, simplified mad libs with more yelling with the aim of teaching some of the history behind the English language. It was really easy to pick up and play, with a very high pay off of fun. And I learnt about the two origins of the many of the words in the English language (Anglo-Saxon and Norman). Neat!

Invisible Flock‘s The Agency is a whole other beast. I got addicted to eurogames (board games with short, simple but clever rules; an emphasis of strategy and tactics over luck; constructive not destructive and have a high level of social interaction) while living in Western Australia (thanks Stew!) So, imagine a eurogame on crack, complete with costumes, actors, a flat screen tv with a readout of game stats, a phone and intercom system to interact with NPCs and and even a small audience to watch the whole thing play out. It was immersive and engaging. The one thing I would’ve liked more was more audience interaction. There is something really compelling about being part of a game performance, so really bringing in the audience would take the game to the next level.

We can’t wait to see what happens next year!

Over and out.

Ande the Art Critic and Adrian the Local Billionaire

About a month ago, we here at the Atmosphere Industries Top Secret Underground Lair received a very exciting email: an invitation to do Gentrification: The Game! ! in London as part of the Hide and Seek Weekender on the Southbank, home of many iconic London landmarks – the London Eye, and right across the river, the Parliament buildings and Big Ben.

Would it work? Could we do a game designed for Brooklyn’s streets full of small shops in the fancy-pants streets of the Southbank? After a few frantic days of virtual touring via Google Maps and recon on foot by one of the organizers on the other side of the pond, we found two streets that fit the bill. So we booked our flights.

We ran the game on the Cut and Lower Marsh. It didn’t rain one bit (even though it was London). We think everyone had a blast – London players are even more hardcore than the New Yorkers!

We left feeling inspired and excited. London is a hotbed of street games and interactive art, theatre and dance. Even the festival itself was hosted by the National Theatre and was part of a larger festival – LIFT – which included a giant living room set covered in astroturf for spectators to take in outdoor skits and plays. My favourite of which was a dance set atop a glass table, where the audience sat underneath and watched from below. It reaffirmed out conviction to get the same sort of movement happening in our hometown of Toronto.

Congrats to the winning team: 'When I were a lad, all this were fields'

So, a big congrats to the winning team: ‘When I were a lad, all this were fields’!

And, an equally big thank you to our Local Billionaire, Adrian Hon (Six To Start) and our Art Critic, Ande Gregson (media140). And our dear, dear friends Margaret Maitland and Simone Van Hattem (who came all the way from Australia!) for being our photographers, videographers and general sanity maintainers.

And last but not least, a big thanks to to Holly Tracky and everyone else from Hide and Seek for bringing us over and helping us run an awesome game. Hope to see you again next year!

I’m pretty notorious for not doing post-mortems of our games, while being fully aware that I really ought to. Gentrification: The Game! will be no exception, mainly because it’s still around and kicking. So this is a pre-mortem, if you will. This seems timely, since G:TG! just won a couple of awards at Come Out and Play. It seems we’ve blindly stumbled, in our wildly thrashing sort of way, into some kind of good design principles, so now’s the time to try and sound smart if there ever was one.

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