Leidsche Rijn – Leapfroglog

Week 153

I totally forgot to post this last week; I’ll blame it on a combination of excellent weather and too much work on my hands. We’re already well into week 154, but to give you a brief overview of what number 153 looked like, let me just say it was more or less divided between:

preparing for and subsequently running a hand full of urban games at the NU Grounds festival in Leidsche Rijn (we had gorgeous weather and a lot of fun, can’t wait to run more)
sitting on a mid-term exam committee at the HKU (exhausting, but when a student nails it, as happened several times, it’s a real treat)

I also attended Kunstgras where a book profiling several creative entrepreneurs in Utrecht (for which I was interviewed) was presented.

That all left me quite spent so I took Monday off. Which, I think, is a first in over 6 months. And now we’re in the second week after my return from Copenhagen. It already seems ages ago since I stepped off that airplane.

Week 151

So, some notes for the past week. They will be very short because there is not much to tell really. It was one of those weeks with a lull in between projects, and also virtually devoid of meetings, today being the exception.

I went over to LikeMind to catch up with my fellow Dutchman Mark, who seems to be doing great, living and working between Copenhagen and London. Not the shabbiest pair of cities.

I also had another chat with the guys running the U-Turm project who seem to be making nice progress with the image tracking side of things and are now really getting into the game design. Which means, as I told them, they need to start iterating on the rules like crazy, doing paper prototype after paper prototype.

Aside from this I’ve been doing some preparations for PLAY, reaching out to creative teams and individuals who I’d like to see be part of the productions we’re going to be running. Getting lots of positive responses so that is great. I also posted some background on the work we’ve been doing so far for this at the Hubbub blog.

Julius and Karel ran a successful second urban games workshop in Leidsche Rijn for Cultuur19 last saturday. We are now gearing up to assist with NU Grounds, a games festival in the same neighborhood where there will be several urban games on offer. That’s going to take place two weeks form now and should be good fun.

The relative quiet this week has allowed me some time to tinker with Processing, particularly the Box2D library that Mr. Shiffman has put together. I’m just making a little silly software toy with that to kind of flex my flimsy programming skills. Nothing special but I might post some screenshots and maybe a screencast later anyway.

And also, I bit the bullet, installed XCode, and had a go at OpenFrameworks, mostly to have a look at some of the Box2D stuff out there that is controlled with OpenCV (a computer vision library). That seems to be a really nice basis for gaming in public space using urban projections and such. I don’t see myself working in OpenFrameworks though, it really is an increase in complexity as opposed to Processing. Still, by messing with it, I can now appreciate it better.

Next week is going to be my last one here in Copenhagen and looks like it’ll be slightly more busy, with another trip to Malmö and a lecture at CIID. After that it’s back to NL. Time really flies.

Week 150

That’s a nice number, 150. One-hundred-and-fifty. I like the sound of that. So what’s been going on this week?

I hopped on a plane last Sunday to the Netherlands for This happened – Utrecht #6. Wouldn’t miss out on my own party, of course. And I’m so glad I didn’t, because we had awesome talks by Berend & Sanneke, Matt, Sebastiaan and Keez, plus a surprise appearance over Skype by Mr. Buxton. The room was packed, interaction designers of all stripes were chatting away beforehand, during the break and afterwards over drinks. I had a blast and judging by the reports that have been coming in, so have many others.

Before heading back to the Netherlands the next day I managed to squeeze in a few meetings. One of those was for PLAY which, now that I’ve wrapped up project Tako,¹ is ready to move into its next phase. We’re planning to produce several playful ‘things’ for a number of cultural events and tie them all together with a meta-game. It’s a matter of getting all the right people on board now and getting going as fast as possible. So I’ve a list of folks to contact in the coming days.

I think I broke a personal record for the number of Skype sessions in one day on Wednesday, with back to back talks with my HKU students as well as a planning session with Karel and Julius for an urban games workshop they’ll be running tomorrow in Leidsche Rijn.²

And today, after spending Ascension day on a couch, plugging away at email and to-dos, I’ll be making the trip across the Øresund to Malmö in a bus full of makers and interaction designers to attend ThoughtMade, which I’m really excited about; an exhibition and talks including a candy machine controlled by Twitter. What more can one ask for?

I need to write a report on that one at the Hubbub blog soon. [↩]
A new development area of Utrecht I’d say is the closest thing to a real-world Sim City project that I ever saw. [↩]

Week 146

Crazy, crazy week I am glad to have survived. But wait, it’s not done yet. Tomorrow (saturday) I’ll be running a workshop in Leidsche Rijn with local young folk, for Cultuur19. The aim is to design a little social game that’ll function as a viral marketing tactic for our upcoming urban games design workshop in the same district. This is a Hubbub mission, and I am glad to have the support of Karel who – besides cooking up crazy plans at FourceLabs – is an occasional agent of Hubbub.

This was my last week working on site with Layar because I’m heading to Copenhagen on sunday. I’ll be staying there for a few weeks, working there – for Layar still, possibly for Social Square – lecturing at CIID and apart from that just taking it a little slower. My apartment is around the corner from the Laundromat Café in Nørrebro so that should be no problem.

I was at Waag Society‘s beautiful Theatrum Anatomicum last wednesday to cohost a workshop on games and architecture as part of the Best Scene in Town project initiated by 7scenes. I presented three bold predictions for the future of games in the city. Look for a write-up of that one at the Hubbub blog soon. The teams came up with interesting concepts for games in Amsterdam and I enjoyed working with all of them.

Going back to the start of this week, I turned 30 on monday. A watershed moment of some sort I guess. Somewhat appropriately, we announced This happened – Utrecht #6 that day too. Check out the program, I am real pleased with our speakers.

Now let’s just hope that volcano doesn’t mess with my flight in sunday and the next note will be coming to you from lovely CPH.

Week 141

It’s been a while since I spent time at my own desk in the Dutch Game Garden. It was nice to do this again yesterday, having the city right outside my door and kindred spirits such as FourceLabs upstairs. I wasn’t inside the whole time though, in the morning I had another chat at EKKO about Tako. And in the afternoon I headed to Leidsche Rijn accompanied by Julius to attend a workshop concerning Utrecht’s bid to become European capital of culture.

I kicked off the week with two days of work at Layar (now on my way to Amsterdam in a diverted train for my third and last day of the week there). I’ve been collaborating closely with some of the engineers to shape some upcoming new… stuff. Things are developing at such a high pace that it’s a real challenge to keep up. It feels like being on top of a rodeo bull sometimes, but in a good way. This means I need to be pragmatic and fast with developing and documenting designs.

In between, I’ve posted a long overdue project description to the Hubbub site for Mega Monster Battle Arena. It’s this quirky project – a cross between a game and an opera – that I was involved with last year. It feels good to finally have it out there for me and others to point to.

Other in-between stuff includes a final review of several graduation project proposals. I need to provide feedback by the start of next week, and then I’ll switch to coaching a handful of students.

The week will be topped off with what is sure to be a fun friday at the BUROPONY studio. I’ll do some work on their site, and in return have them do some additional work on the Hubbub brand. Scratching each other’s backs, that’s how small creative enterprises flourish.