We’re recruiting 8 children aged 8-10, living within the Greater Toronto Area, to help make this game. Starting in October, they’ll participate in 9 sessions lasting 4 hours each, on weekend afternoons over the course of 4 months. These sessions will be classroom-style interactive workshops, where the children will:

• Learn about how to make games from professional game designers, through game-based lessons and exercises.
• Work together to help make a game, by contributing ideas and creative material (writing, drawing, etc.)
• Discuss their feelings and opinions regarding online privacy.

Participating children will have the unique opportunity to learn about game development, and to contribute to a professionally produced game. The material created by children during these sessions will be used to create a game that will be distributed online, for free.

We are also recruiting children aged 6-7, who will participate in a single 4-hour group discussion, where they will talk about their feelings and opinions regarding online privacy.

Sessions will take place at Ryerson University and/or the Bell Lightbox. Children will be supervised by experienced project staff.

This is a research project being conducted by Ryerson University’s EDGE Lab and Atmosphere Industries Community Games, with financial support from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Ryerson Digital Media Zone.

For more information, or to inquire about participation in the project, email hello@gamingprivacy.org.

The project also contains a significant research component which examines conceptions of privacy among young children, which is why we’ve partnered with Ryerson’s EDGE Lab (where Atmosphere Industries Co-Founder David Fono and I are both Research Associates) and will be drawing on the lab’s collective expertise in early childhood education, privacy, autonomy and research-based activism. We also have the generous support of the Ryerson DMZ, who are providing a hub for the game development process.

We’ll be working with the support and guidance of EDGE Lab founders Jason Nolan (who is co-principal investigator with me) and Alexandra Bal and the research support of Noah Kenneally and Claire Buré who both have strong backgrounds in technology and engaging diverse communities, especially children and youth.

We also have an amazing advisory team comprised of some the top minds in Toronto (and beyond)’s indie game making and research communities:

Sara Grimes, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto; gender, gaming and education researcher
Adrian Hon, Founder, Six to Start (creators of Smokescreen)
Melanie McBride, Research Associate, EDGE Lab; educator and gaming researcher
Nick Pagee, Consultant on Gaming and New Media, TIFF Bell Lightbox; Programmer, Sprockets Toronto International Film Festival for Children
Jaime Woo, Co-Founder, Gamercamp and Gamercamp Jr.

Our first step is creating a game design curriculum with the help of our advisory board, a process being lead by Noah. Like the entire project, our lesson materials and outcomes will be publicly available and shared on our (soon to launch) blog under Creative Commons licensing. Until then, you can follow the project on Twitter: @gamingprivacy

Links
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Official Press Release
Full List of Funded Contribution Projects
Follow us on Twitter

We’re honoured that Gentrification: The Game! was selected to be part of this inaugural Future Games program, which aims to showcase a selection of the ‘most challenging and innovative’ games created by Canadian postsecondary students. Kate Raynes-Goldie, co-creator of Gentrification, who is also a visiting PhD student at Ryerson University’s Experiential Design and Gaming Environments (EDGE) Lab (who was the technology sponsor for Gentrification) will be talking to high school students about the development of the game as well as her work at the EDGE Lab. She’ll be joined by game co-designer David Fono, who is also a Research Associate at the EDGE Lab.

Atmosphere Industries is thrilled to have this opportunity to talk to the next generation of pervasive game designers. One of our overall goals is to encourage a thriving pervasive and urban gaming community in Toronto, and we believe this starts with students. To this end, we’d also like to announce the official launch of our monthly sandbox event – recess.to – which is open to anyone to come and run a game test, get feedback, or just along to play some fun innovative games. Whether you’re a pro, a hobbyest, a student or have never made a game before, we want you! Our first sandbox is March 26, 2011. See you there!

Moreso than last year, I definitely got a feeling of attendance from local residents who were just looking for something interesting to do. It’s worth noting that last year the festival was largely based in Times Square, because being in Brooklyn this time presented a real contrast. As a local I spoke to noted, no one actually ever goes to midtown Manhattan; there’s too many people there. The location last year was electrifying, and I was initially disappointed by the movie this year. On the surface, running or playing a street game in Times Square seems grandiose and thrilling. Yet Brooklyn seemed to have a more receptive atmosphere.

Clicking this hyperlink will navigate your browser to the complete article!

After a busy summer season, Atmosphere Industries is back! This time, we’re pulling out one of our classics from Come Out and Play 2009, Paparazzi, and playing it in the most fitting city possible–LA–on Saturday, October 9!

The game was invited to be a part of the 2010 IndieCade Festival, a massive weekend-long event featuring independent games of all genres, on all platforms, including a great set of Big Games–games played outside in real time and real space. We’re absolutely tickled to have the chance to take part!

So what is Paparazzi?

In Paparazzi, players (in teams of 3-4) act out the age old battle between the camera-wielding paparazzi and the celebrities they stalk. As celebrities, players must be quick and clever in order to steer clear of shutterbugs. As paparazzi, they must be sneaky and organized. Will there be scandals? You bet. Will there be awkward photos of stunned-looking people, faces contorted, arms flailing wildly? Most certainly!

Visit EventBrite for more information or to register.

Locals banding together to host a parade!

After successful runs in Brooklyn’s Come Out & Play and London’s Hide & Seek Weekender (WOW!), we brought everything back to where it all began… Toronto’s Kensington Market! Back in the spring, we did our first ever run of Gentrification: The Game on Augusta Ave, through the shops, restaurants, bars, parks and abandoned lots the market, so we knew it would be a whole lot of fun to bring it back–this time as part of Kensington’s Pedestrian Sundays.

Three teams of locals and three teams of developers faced off in a neighborhood that has so far proven far more resistant to gentrification than either of the other areas we’ve run the game in. Would this somehow effect the results? Perhaps, but despite a bias toward locals in the market, some very enthusiastic developers managed to take home the big prize. Congrats to the School of McHard Knocks!

Our winning team, the School of McHard Knocks

A big thanks to the folks at Pedestrian Sundays, both for giving pedestrians a chance to take over the market one Sunday a month and for letting us be part of this great festival. Double-bonus thanks to EDGE Lab at Ryerson for loaning us iPads, which made us look as hip as we think we are. An equally big thanks to our local billionaire (Jason Nolan) and art critic (Evan Munday). And of course thanks to everyone who made it out for such a fun day!

If you missed the fun, you can check out the pictures here (from all our editions of Gentrification: The Game, all summer long), and you can avoid missing out next time by singing up for our Magic Funtime Mailing List on the right side of this page. Do it!

Now for the promised fall preview: We’re going to be pulling one of last year’s games out of the closet this fall. David Fono will be hosting a game of Paparazzi in LA–how fitting! Check back for more details in the coming weeks.

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.

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.

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!