• How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost
• Lady of Mazes, Karl Schroeder
• The Well-Played Game, Bernie DeKoven¹
• The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
• Critical Play, Mary Flanagan
• The Scar, China Mieville
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• American Gods, Neil Gaiman
• Rework, David Heinemeier Hansson, Jason Fried
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy²
• The transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick
• The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
• Vermilion Sands, J. G. Ballard³
• The Broom Of The System, David Foster Wallace
• Number9Dream, David Mitchell
• Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold
• Last Call, Tim Powers
• Thoughts on Interaction Design, Jon Kolko
• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
• The great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald
• Unit Operations, Ian Bogost⁴
• I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison
• The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
• Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard
• The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick⁵
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley

1. For its heartwarming humanism and great marriage of form and message. Most fun book about fun.
2. Beautiful, lyrical portrayal of the end of the world that hits you like a sledgehammer.
3. Unparalleled in the originality and believability of its envisioned future. No-one has a feel for near-future fashion and leisure like Ballard.
4. Tough but rewarding read that provides a solid framework for thinking about the aesthetics of all things procedural.
5. Essential PKD, deep meditation on what it means to be human wrapped in a scifi detective plot.

Rainer Kohlberger is an independent visual artist based in Berlin. The concept and installation design for the THESEUS Innovation Center Internet of Things was done in collaboration with Thomas Schrott and is the basis for the visual identity of the technology platform. The installation connects and visually creates hierarchy between knowledge, products and services with a combination of physical polygon objects and virtually projected information layers. This atmospheric piece transfer knowledge and guidance to the visitor but also leaves room for interpretation.

Helma van Rijn is an Industrial Design Engineering PhD candidate at the TU Delft ID-StudioLab, specialized in 'difficult to reach' user groups. De Klessebessers is an activity for people with dementia to actively recall memories together. The design won the first prize in design competition Vergeethenniet and was on show during the Dutch Design Week 2007. De Klessebessers is currently in use at De Landrijt in Eindhoven.

FourceLabs talk about Wip 'n' Kip, a playful installation for Stekker Fest, an annual electronic music festival based in Utrecht. Players of Wip 'n' Kip use adult-sized spring riders to control a chicken on a large screen. They race each other to the finish while at the same time trying to stay ahead of a horde of pursuing monsters. Wip 'n' Kip is a strange but effective mashup of video game, carnival ride and performance. It is part of the PLAY Pilots project, commissioned by the city and province of Utrecht, which explore the applications of play in the cultural industry.

Lotte Meijer talks about Smarthistory, an online art history resource. It aims to be an addition to, or even replacement of, traditional text books through the use of different media to discuss hundreds of Western art pieces from antiquity to the current day. Different browsing styles are supported by a number of navigation systems. Art works are contextualized using maps and timelines. The site's community is engaged using a number of social media. Smarthistory won a Webby Award in 2009 in the education category. Lotte has gone on to work as an independent designer on many interesting and innovative projects in the art world.

I’m happy to say we have our fourth speaker confirmed for next Monday’s This happened. Here’s the blurb:

Landscape architect Ronald Rietveld talks about Vacant NL. The installation challenges the Dutch government to use the enormous potential of inspiring, unused buildings from the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century for creative entrepreneurship and innovation. The Dutch government wants to be in the top 5 of world knowledge economies by the end of 2020. Vacant NL takes this political ambition seriously and leverages vacancy to stimulate innovation within the creative knowledge economy. Vacant NL is the Dutch submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010. It is made by Rietveld Landscape, which Ronald Rietveld founded after winning the Prix de Rome in Architecture 2006. In 2003 he graduated with honors from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture.

At first sight this might be an odd one out, and architectural exhibition at an interaction design event. But both the subject of the installation and the design of the experience deal with interaction in many ways. So I am sure it will provide attendees with valuable insights.

Anne Nigten is director of The Patchingzone, a transdisciplinary laboratory for innovation where Master, doctor, post-doc students and professionals from different backgrounds create meaningful content. Earlier, Anne Nigten was manager of V2_lab and completed a PhD on a method for creative research and development. Go-for-IT! is a city game created together with citizens of South Rotterdam and launched in December 2009. On four playgrounds in the area street tiles were equipped with LEDs. Locals could play games with their feet, similar to console game dance mats.

Richard Boeser is an independent designer based in Rotterdam. His studio Sparpweed is currently working on the game Ibb and Obb, scheduled to launch for Playstation Network and PC in August 2011. Ibb and Obb is a cooperative game for two players who together must find a way through a world where gravity is flipped across the horizon. Players move between both sides of the world through portals. They can surf on gravity, soulhop enemies and collect diamonds. The game is partly financed by the Game Fund, an arrangement that seeks to stimulate the development of artistic games in the Netherlands.

Edwin van der Heide studied sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He now works as an artist in the field of sound, space and interaction. Radioscape transforms urban space into an acoustic labyrinth. Based on the fundamental principles of radio each participant is equipped with a receiver, headphones and an antenna. Fifteen transmitters each broadcast their own composition. Inspired by short wave sounds, they overlap to form a metacomposition. By changing position, the interpretation of sound is changed as well.

A big thank you to our sponsors, Microsoft and Fier for making this one happen.

My upcoming holiday, which will be the first break in over a year. I am planning to completely unplug, which I am both dreading and looking forward to. It seems the longer I am self-employed, the harder it gets to just leave work behind for an extended period of time. It seems crazy to be worried about the continuity of my business when I’m only away for a week on a freaking Wadden island.

Today marks the last day of final exams at the HKU and I am lead to wonder about the future of design education as it happens there and at other similar institutes around the world. It often seems too closed off from the outside world, too insular. I am looking forward to tangling with this subject matter more in an upcoming project with River Institute.

Choosing has never come easy to me. In the past I have found it painful to choose between disciplines, skills to develop, projects to work on. And at some point I sort of decided to stop forcing choices and find ways to have them all mesh. I think that finally I am getting to a spot where I am comfortable in not choosing. So now I wonder why that is, what the value of refusing to choose is and what that means for creative disciplines.

I am essentially pessimistic about the future of this world. I have a very hard time conceiving of any future, in fact. Recently I found myself in a workshop aimed at making plans for an event in 2015 and I was totally lost. Having learnt this about myself the next question is how to act – I don’t wan’t to “play dead” as Bruce Sterling would say – so what’s the alternative?

Since it is at the core of my business I am thinking a lot about domains where games could go next. I am thinking a lot about citizen engagement, particularly when it comes to public policy, but I am mostly stumped about making inroads into that area locally.

There you have it.

Keez Duyves is one of the cofounders of PIPS:lab, based in Amsterdam, NL. Archie and the Bees, their newest theatrical concept, links the primary colors red, green and blue to the primary elements of rhythm: kick, snare and hi-hat. In this hybrid of multimedia performance and installation, PIPS:lab demonstrate their revolutionary Radarfunk machine – allowing them to generate sound from color. A light painting or the colors in the audience serve as musical basis over which PIPS:lab improvise and amaze with their other self-developed instruments: the Bashblender, the Grinder and the LCDC video guitar.

Matt Cottam is the founder of Tellart. Wooden Logic represents the first phase in a hands-on sketching process aimed at exploring how natural materials and craft traditions can be brought to the center of interactive digital design to give modern products greater longevity and meaning. It is only in the past decade or so that the community and tools have evolved to the point that designers can sketch with hardware and software; which before that was the sole domain of engineers and computer scientists. This project seeks to combine seemingly dissonant elements, natural, material and virtual, and explore how they can be crafted to feel as if they were born together as parts of a unified object anatomy that is both singular and precious.

Sanneke Prins and Berend Weij are co-founders of Mijn naam is Haas, a company that produces a range of educational products aimed at primary education. These products are all situated in the world of the main character Haas. The range consists of illustrated children’s books, CD-ROMs and an online learning environment, in which the vocabulary of toddlers is increased through game principles. Children create the world of haas by drawing. All drawing actions directly influence the unfolding story, so each play session is unique which makes the game continuously engaging. In this creative process language elements are presented in a playful manner. The first version of the game was created by the founders during their attendance of the EMMA program at the HKU.

Sebastiaan de With is an interface and icon designer working under the name Cocoia. He designs, teaches and runs a popular blog on interfaces and icons. Sebastiaan is easily recognized in Drachten wearing his Exploded Settings Icon or Bricky shirt and toting an iPad. Classics is one of the first popular e-readers on the iPhone, offering public domain books in a well-designed experience. The project was initiated by the Phill Ryu, (in)famous for MacHeist and his support of the Delicious Generation. Clearly the Classics app is a feat of design driven development, complete with an inspired wooden bookshelf, curling page turns (both now also available on the iPad), marvelous icons and a collection of lovingly designed book covers.

We wouldn’t be able to pull off this edition with the support of the Utrecht School of the Arts and Microsoft Design Toolbox. Thank you!

Knikkerbaan

Made by a few principals at the Medialab Utrecht. Push a button and a marble starts rolling down a futuristic looking track. Halfway through it enters a scanner of sorts, and is converted into a virtual counterpart visible on a screen, only to emerge physically after some time again. At the end of the track, you get to keep the marble.

It’s hardly interactive, but does look kind of impressive and of course, marbles are always fun.

Kleurkamer

A new version what is becoming a classic by the troublemakers at Monobanda. A beamer, a white decor and wiimotes enable you to paint with light. It’s a simple premise, the execution is serviceable but the result is quite magical. The addition of white jackets for people that want to become part of the canvas is a real nice touch.

Blockblazers

Made by my friends at Fourcelabs, this is the one that hasn’t the benefit of a spectacular physical shape but is the most fun to play. It’s a competitive platform game playable with eight people at the same time with some clever social and physical touches. Scoring points is rewarded with a big photo of yourself that is shown for a few seconds, and the game wraps around two big screens that are back to back, forcing you to move around and compete with the other players for physical floor space.

It’s nice to see this kind of stuff at a theatre festival. I hope the pieces will do well – despite the fact that not all of them have been placed and presented to the public in the best way – so that we’ll get more of this stuff in the years to come.

“Why should pocket calculators be put on a pedestal, and not Peggle?”

He writes about the need for games to be appreciated and critiqued as design objects. He points out that the creation of any successful game is “at least as complex and coordinated as that of a Jonathan Ive laptop”. He also speculates that reasons for games to be ignored is that they might be seen primarily as media, and that mainstream design critics lack literacy in games, which makes them blind to their design qualities.

Reading this, I recalled a discussion I had with Dave Malouf on Twitter a while back. It was sparked by a tweet from Matt, which reads:

“it’s the 3rd year in a row they’ve ignored my submission of a game… hmmph (L4D, fwiw) – should games be seen as design objects? or media?”

I promptly replied:

“@moleitau design objects, for sure. I’m with mr Lantz on the games aren’t media thing.”

For an idea of what I mean by “being with Mr. Lantz”, you could do worse that to read this interview with him at the Tale of Tales blog.

At this point, Dave Malouf joined the fray, posting:

“@kaeru can a game be used to convey a message? We know the answer is yes, so doesn’t that make it a form of media? @moleitau”

I could not resist answering that one, so I posted a series of four tweets:

“@daveixd let me clarify: 1. some games are bits of content that I consume, but not all are

“@daveixd 2. ultimately it is the player who creates meaning, game designers create contexts within which meaning emerges.

“@daveixd 3. thinking of games as media creates a blind spot for all forms of pre-videogames era play”

“@daveixd that’s about it really, 3 reasons why I think of games more as tools than media. Some more thoughts: http://is.gd/5m5xa @moleitau”

To which Dave replied:

“@kaeru re: #2 all meaning regardless of medium or media are derived at the human level.”

“@kaeru maybe this is semantics, but any channel that has an element of communicating a message, IMHO is media. Tag & tic-tac-toe also.”

“@kaeru wait, are you equating games to play to fun? But I’m limiting myself to games. I.e. role playing is play, but not always a game.”

At this point, I got frustrated by Twitter’s lack of support for a discussion of this kind. So I wrote:

“@daveixd Twitter is not the best place for this kind of discussion. I’ll try to get back to your points via my blog as soon as I can.”

And here we are. I’ll wrap up by addressing each of Dave’s points.

1. Although I guess Dave’s right about all meaning being derived at the human level, what I think makes games different from, say, a book or a film is that the thing itself is a context within which this meaning making takes place. It is, in a sense, a tool for making meaning.
2. Games can carry a message, and sometimes are consciously employed to do so. One interesting thing about this is on what level the message is carried – is it told through bits of linear media embedded in the game, or does it emerge from a player’s interaction with the game’s rules? However, I don’t think all games are made to convey a message, nor are they all played to receive one. Tic-Tac-Toe may be a very rough simulation of territorial warfare, and you could argue that it tells us something about the futility of such pursuits, but I don’t think it was created for this reason, nor is it commonly played to explore these themes.
3. I wasn’t equating games to play (those two concepts have a tricky relationship, one can contain the other, and vice-versa) but I do feel that thinking of games as media is a product of the recent video game era. By thinking of games as media, we risk forgetting about what came before video games, and what we can learn from these toys and games, which are sometimes nothing more than a set of socially negotiated rules and improvised attributes (Kick the can, anyone?)

I think I’ll leave it at that.

• Faith in Fakes, Umberto Eco
• Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
• Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
• Black Dogs, Ian McEwan
• Out of Control, Kevin Kelly
• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
• Game Design Workshop (2nd edition), Tracy Fullerton
• The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
• Fight Club, Chuck Paluhniuk
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch
• Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
• Underworld, Don DeLillo
• Rum Punch, Elmore Leonard
• Digital Ground, Malcolm McCullough
• The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

Common themes: cities, complexity, society & the individual, inner & outer space, design.

I’ve been quite picky with what I read last year and will probably continue to do so this year. Many of these have heaps of dog ears and margin notes and its a wonderful feeling to have them sitting in my studio bookshelf, ready to be picked up and used when required.

• Vancouver
• Saint Augustine
• Kuala Lumpur
• London

One or more nights were spent in each place. All of these were lovely in their own way, but KL’s my favorite of the bunch. Best city for food anywhere on the planet. In case you’re interested, I keep track of these on Dopplr.

1. As per Kottke and many others.