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!

Gentrification was borne of a desire to not do everything we’ve done before, kind of. I actually pitched another game for our next project, which has now been relegated to the backburner. This game involved GPS and chases, which in addition to being terribly unoriginal, disavows one of our secret half-truths: sometimes we get into arguments with technology, and don’t return its phone calls. More on that in a moment. Instead, we thought, let’s try and make something simple, festive, and deeply atmospheric. Let’s make something that uses chalk instead of cell phones, and which is full of tightly crafted bits of flavour.

Deep, lasting flavour.

Flavour is an interesting term. As a game designer, it’s my tendency (and job) to get hung up on the intricacies of gameplay. I think deeply in terms of mechanics and dynamics, and look at aesthetics as a sort of wrapper to the systems I create. This sort of thinking doesn’t necessarily devalue aesthetics, but it does sort of put it off on its own pillar. I find the distinction becomes more pronounced with games that are supposed to “do” something. What many of my games are supposed to “do” is to create a new experience of space and place, to recontextualize everyday environments, and turn them into something new and exciting. It seems very natural to believe that if it’s going to be a game that’s doing this, then the effect should largely be realized through the experience of performing gameplay. Themes, words and pictures further this intent, but there’s a reason a lot of game designers call it flavour.

Situated games, big games, pervasive games — whatever you want to call them, working with them complicates matters. First of all, the very existence of complex gameplay becomes problematic. Anything involving any amount of “reality” is inherently much harder to execute and much harder to understand. The effect is combinatorial. If you’re trying to run a game on a busy street, you’re kinda screwed: not only will the simplest tasks become difficult for designers to plan and manage due to outside factors, but players will be expected to digest unconventional information in an unconventional context without about a million other things going on. If there’s one problem that I keep seeing at CO&P games, it’s that after a game is explained, most of the players generally have no clue what they’re supposed to do. Designing around this is a whole other topic worthy of a separate post, but the thing I want to say now is that this limitation imposes dramatic limits on the possible depth of gameplay.

But the other thing about these games is that they inhabit a domain with a rich history of loosely structured, highly theatrical experiments and strategies. We all know about pillow fights, zombie walks, and alternate reality games. Public space hacking or reality hacking is traditionally contained within art circles; and art, as inevitably distinguished from games, thrives on unpredictability and chaos. Theater, architecture, and other artistic disciplines contain rich discourse on appropriating facets of reality because each of them speak directly to inextricable components of everyday living. If you’re going to design a pervasive game, you’re going to be thinking about architecture and theater and whatever else, whether you know it or not.

These guys know what I'm talking about.

Coming back to Gentrification, one of the big “a ha” moments for me was realizing the essential theatrical components that have always been a part of our games. With my obsession over gameplay, theatricality was something that never really concerned me. But that was my loss, because theater has a lot to teach gaming about how to use spaces, people and media. Gameplay is difficult to parse and often takes time to resonate; theater, when done right, has immediate impact. Theater can be a fantastic way to contextualize gameplay, or transform it. Gentrification itself has solid strategic gameplay at its core, but things like the parades and the protests add a level of engagement and excitement to what would otherwise be an interesting, but dry game. Perhaps more significantly, they entail an involvement in the street and the community that you don’t get from pure gameplay. That’s important when your goal as a designer is to affect relationships with the space, as it is for us.

On an entirely separate note, the technology issue: we’re not really on poor terms with technology (we would, for instance, say hello to it at a party), but its relationship with our games has changed over time. In Gentrification’s case, the technology acts as a facilitator, of sorts. Although Gentrification is a street-game, it’s driven by a computer. That’s because it’s a fairly sophisticated game, and the computer does all the hard stuff and keeps everything fast and simple for the players. The players tell us what to do, and then we tell the computer, and then the computer tells us what’s changed, and then those changes are reflected in a couple of ways. First, we track everything on a big sidewalk chalk map, because sidewalk chalk is awesome. Second, players can access a mobile web-app to get updates and the current game status directly from the computer. Using the web-app isn’t strictly necessary to play the game, but it makes it a lot easier and more fun. It allows players to keep track of everything that’s going on and strategize effectively, which can be tricky when you’re playing a fast-paced, nuanced game amongst the hustle and bustle of a crowd.

The computer and the web-app allow Gentrification to scale, both in terms of our ability to manage the game, and the players’ ability to understand/interact with it. The technology here serves as a kind of glue that holds things together, rather than as the centrepiece. It’s very easy to make technology the centrepiece, and let it drive design; it excites people, and makes you seem really innovative. We’ve done the Bluetooth, the GPS, the large-screen display, and found that they all tend to introduce a degree of instability that is perhaps more than they’re worth. With Gentrification, we said, “Okay, how we integrate technology in a meaningful way, but where if it fails it doesn’t break the whole thing? How can it support the experience, rather than define it?”

Mobile phones: so 2007.

Moving forward, our plans for iterating on Gentrification map directly to the issues I’ve discussed here. We want to find ways to bump up the theatricality and the spectacle — to make the game as much of an experience as an activity. One of the interesting challenges here is navigating the invisible border between good plain fun and LARPing; LARPing gets a bad rap in North America, despite being pretty close to what a lot of people already do. We could, for instance, encourage teams to roleplay either as developers or locals, but how far can we push that before players get uncomfortable? Our other immediate goal is to round out the web-app a little, and make it more than the tech demo it is now — while at the same time, of course, preventing the game from becoming dependent on it. We have some good opportunities to try out our new ideas, since Gentrification will be running at Hide and Seek on July 11, and PS Kensington on July 25 (full details on the game page). Hope to see you at one of them!

Hide & Seek, purveyor of fine unconventional games in London, England, has invited us to run Gentrification: The Game! at their annual festival. Rumour has it that Hide & Seek puts on a pretty good show, attracting a couple thousand people or so. We’ll be there on Sunday, July 11, and there’s lots of other fantastic looking games running from Friday.

British people like to run.

It’s all happening by the National Theater in South Bank, which is apparently the unofficial home of London skateboarding, so I may take this opportunity to shred some sick primos, dude.

Did I mention that the winning team for our game was the illustrious Chicken Livers? Hell yeah!

That is some serious jumping.

We owe a big thanks to our volunteers, Mark Abrams and Tahiat Mahboob.

We owe an equally big thanks to our celebrity judges for the game:

*Kate Rothschild (artistsAwake Productions)
*Emily Kornblut (The Really Useful Media Company — the name is accurate)
*Dan Winckler (ditto)

Also thanks to the COaP organizers and judges. I said it last year, and it seemed to work, so: See you next year, New York!

Wanna play? The next game is happening July 25 at PS Kensington (Toronto)!

]]> http://www.atmosphereindustries.com/gentrification-wins-big-at-coap/feed/ 1 http://www.atmosphereindustries.com/gentrification-the-game-brooklyn-vs-toronto-grudge-match/ http://www.atmosphereindustries.com/gentrification-the-game-brooklyn-vs-toronto-grudge-match/#comments Sun, 23 May 2010 17:29:12 +0000 David Fono http://www.atmosphereindustries.com/?p=254

Our latest effort, Gentrification: The Game!, is coming to Brooklyn as part of Come Out and Play 2010 on June 5. Then it’s coming back to Toronto as part of PS Sundays Kensington, on July 25.

Gentrification: The Game! is pretty good about traveling and doesn’t cry too much on the plane, so everything should be fine.

Want to play? Sign up for our mailing list to get regular updates on our games as we move into our fantastic summer season.

Turn the neighbourhood upside down in a strategic street game game that pits developers against locals! We’ve got art, lawsuits, sidewalk chalk, and an iPhone web app. Winner of Best in Fest and Best Use of Tech at Come Out & Play 2010!

Read more about the game »

In this awesome new street game, small teams compete to collect Kensington properties and develop them into expensive lofts and swanky coffee shops. But watch out for the team of angry locals, bent on thwarting your efforts in an attempt to save the market from certain doom.

What: With your teammates, you’ll run around Kensington market, scouting properties, strategizing, and negotiating with other teams. Your objective? Build fancy stores, raise property values, make $$$! Or, if you are super lucky, you will be the secret team of locals, charged with protecting the market from these evil developments. Along the way there will be art, vicious debates, and possibly an Apple Store.

When: 2pm, Saturday March 6, 2010

Where: Bellevue Square (that little park in Kensington market), around a sidewalk chalk map of the surrounding neighbourhood.

How long: The game will proceed in 5 rounds, lasting about an hour.

What to bring: A digital camera (camera phones are cool too, as long as they aren’t super low res)

Questions? kate (at) k4t3 (dot) org

[RSVP here] (Facebook) or email kate (at) k4t3 (dot) org

Stick around afterward to discuss the game, and help improve it!

(We’re preparing this game for Come Out & Play 2010 (http://comeoutandplay.org/), the awesome street game festival in NYC!)