Monobanda – Leapfroglog

Week 177

I was just checking out a secret development version of the Bandjesland page on PLAY Pilots. It is shaping up nicely, all the basic tech is in place, now it’s just a matter of kneading it to look nice and connecting it to the installation Monobanda are building for Le Guess Who? When all goes according to plan we’ll have a lovely online record of what went down in that very special place in Tivoli Oudegracht. Getting the scaffolding up for this took up a large chunk of the week, with Alper and Simon back in the studio for engineering and design.

Next wednesday I’ll be speaking at an event for teachers in middle education at Pakhuis de Zwijger organized by Noordhoff Publishers. I’ve been asked to share my most remarkable idea for engaging students in a novel way. I have a rough outline of the thing on paper (it popped up almost fully formed when I woke up this morning, love it when that happens). Now it’s just a matter of building the slides. Shouldn’t take too long.

Another major thing this week was coaching the development of a paper prototype of the game we’re designing for the Learning Lab. Wieger and Sylvan, my two awesome interns at Hubbub, have come up with a lovely concept for something that runs on top of the course’s internal blog system and supports students with reflecting on their self-development. We played through it this morning with the client, filled a big whiteboard with comments and are now in good shape to work towards a version that we can playtest with students. Lovely.

Week 176

As I was starting to write this a discussion broke out on dramaturgy and game design. So I got sidetracked debating similarities and differences between disciplines and most importantly what they have to offer to each other. The room was filled with interaction designers, game designers and folk with a theatre background.¹ So that was interesting.

More mixing of disciplines: on tuesday I spent a day working on Buta with Irene van Peer, a product designer with a tremendous amount of experience in the healthcare domain. We sat down and managed to push the work forward through lots of sketching and making. Next up is more work with pigs and farmers on site.

The rest of this week was taken up by work for PLAY Pilots (Monobanda’s Bandjesland for Le Guess Who? is turning out great), the Pampus project at the HKU, and a few meetings for new projects on the horizon.

I have been paying attention to my calory intake the past few weeks. It turned out this was far too low. Now that I am eating much more I find myself being able to cope with less sleep, more stress and just generally feeling much better. Which also makes for more pleasure taken from my work. Who’d have thought food could be such an upper?

Wieger and Sylvan, interns at Hubbub, study Design for Virtual Theatre and Games at the HKU. [↩]

Week 174

This week on Wednesday I found myself in the lovely KNAW building to talk about the far future of applied game design. I was invited to do so by STT, together with David Shaffer, Jeroen van Mastrigt and Jeroen Elfferich. I talked about the incapacity of design as well as science fiction to effectively imagine a future, how to deal with that as a designer, and two areas that I see as truly virgin territory for applied game design: the new type of city we’ve seen emerge in the East, and synthetic biology. I got some nice responses and some challenging questions from the crowd, so I guess things went OK. The annotated slides will find their way to the Hubbub blog soon.

Aside from this, I spent the week working on PLAY Pilots – continuing work on the next pilot for Le Guess Who? together with Monobanda. And at the HKU, working with my students on the Pampus project. Finally, my interns have kicked off their third game at the Learning Lab, this one running on their internal blog platform. It involves monkeys and a blind dragon. Looking forward to the writeup for that one.

Quite a few bits of content found their way online too, by the way. In case you missed them the first time around, here they are:

Plus a video of the Bocce Drift session Hubbub ran a while back:

Week 170

Time is short (as seems mostly the case these days) so a quick rundown of what happened this week:

Opened registration for This happened – Utrecht #7 and ‘sold out’ in 8 minutes.
Joined my group of students on a field research trip to the island of Pampus.
Worked with the PLAY Pilots website team and Zesbaans to make the online/offline coupling with De Stereoscoop a reality.
Kicked off the third PLAY pilot with Monobanda and the people behind Le Guess Who?
Attended Virtueel Platform‘s HOT100 at PICNIC ’10 as an ‘expert’ on games.
Paper prototyped a new version of the project Maguro game with Niki and Mathijs of Monobanda.
In a few hours, we’ll be celebrating the launch of De Stereoscoop at the entrance of the Netherlands Film Festival pavilion (which I can actually see from the studio window).

A promise a bit more reflection on next week’s events.

A quick look at Tweetakt’s playful installations

Tweetakt is happening in Utrecht at the moment. It’s a youth theatre festival, really pushing the limits of what we think that means. As an example, they’ve provided space for several installations at the festival centre on the Neude. I went over for a quick look today – even though I know most of the creators personally and am familiar with several of the pieces. They’re all free and open to the public, so if you’re in the area, you should go too.

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.