pervasive gaming

what’s better than a pickup game? a semi-planned, semi-improvisational pickup game with a group of strangers in a public space, following strange rules and using the environment around you and/or mobile technology to coordinate and fulfill objectives, that’s what! in the last few years, pervasive gaming has been on the rise. inspired and influenced by flashmobs, live-action role playing (LARPing), street theatre, and the increasing popularity of cellphones/PDAs and other personal mobile electronic communication devices, people have been finding ways to connect on the streets, for silly, bizarre, fun, interactive experiences.

we’ve long been fans of Improv Everywhere, the New York City based improvisational theatre group the coordinates large-scale, orchestrated happenings, like the now-annual Pants Off Day on the subway, where lots of people, er, take their pants off on the subway and ride in their skivvies.

a great example of a pervasive game is Pac-Manhattan, where a group of people dressed as Pac-Man characters played out a game of PacMan on the streets in NYC, using the street grid as the game’s layout. the player’s movements were dictated by other players who were tracking them at a control base via GPS and communicating directions via cellphone.

when we were in london in March, we went to Sandpit, a festival of pervasive games, run monthly in varying locations all over the city. there were running-around style games, there were games built off of texted suggestions, games to play with a pack of cards or a pad of paper, games where you needed to interact in character in order to collect pieces of information, etc. there were all sorts of ages, professions, and nationalities, playing together. it was a lot of fun, and gave us a lot of ideas.

for even more ideas, ludocity is a wiki-style collection of tried & tested and in-progress pervasive games. perhaps SCREWY will soon concoct such a game and implement it!

 

Undead Event… kind of dead.

Zombie Flashmob: Thriller-Dancin’ Undead to Invade London Bridge Tube Station on Friday the 13th!

Sounds cool, no? Well… The event was publicized (as an ‘organized’ flashmob to ‘promote’ the London Bridge Festival) on Facebook, and the Met police, afraid of an actual, successful flashmob, like the awesome one last week, asked the organizers to take down the event. So they did, and the hundreds of people planning to go figured it was canceled…

We thought we’d head down anyway (after all, you know we can’t resist an opportunity to dress as zombies), but when we got there anyone with fake blood had been banished outside, though the photographers outnumbered the zombies. Lame. Still fun, as long as you were listening to Thriller on your iPod!

For a more detailed play-by-play, this twittering blogger was there and totally had things sussed:

“7:20pm -random fat guy comes along in a “London Bridge festival” T-shirt and Michael Jackson hat and starts bossing everyone around! He orders everyone to attack him and then asks us to dance. Twat. We attack him and I bite his head cos he’s a twat.”

On the upside, now there are more pictures on the Interwebs of us dressed as zombies:

molly wants to eat your brainz

molly and tara are on the far left of the zombie lineup

and a few more, of our own:

this poster just happened to be there. coincidence?

surprise! the flash mob is actually the photographers...

 

why tube advertisement space should be like public bathroom stalls

this project by the space hijackers has a wonderful yes-men feel about it, with their tongue-in-cheek impersonation of Transport For London (TFL) and what they should be doing. amazing!

advertisements on public transport have always grated on me – corporate sponsorship fees may be subsidizing my train fare, but it’s not like there are many alternatives for getting around. (how is public transport funded, anyhow? isn’t iit also partially federal money? tabitha would know!)

anyhow, it’s nice  to see groups of people out there engaging with their surroundings. i’ve had many conversations where people say that they like both graffitti and advertisements as long as they’re of a certain ‘quality.’  i like even scribbled tags, proof that some kid had the guts to claim a bit of visual, physical sapce as her own, to leave her mark (of however little artistic merit), whereas advertisements, however clever or beautiful, always leave me with a vague gross feeling of being manipulated.

a lot of banksy’s writings are about how graffitti and other ‘illegal’ use of public space is illegal only because it is not being paid for, as advertising is. if public space is public, why can it be bought? 

subways aren’t a public space, obviously – you have to pay to get in – but the advertising is so intrusive and so built into the atmosphere that it’s nearly impossible not to look at it. i especially hate the long rows of repetitive posters up the sides of the escalators here in london. there’s something about their proximity and the motion as you pass them that makes it nearly impossible not to look at them – trying frustrates me nearly every time.

as suggested by people the space hijackers spoke to, it would be nice to replace the advertisements with art or poems, but even just blank space would be welcome. better yet, what if commuters could trade being passive receptors of massages on public transport for becoming active creators of content, marking walls, drawing pictures, and having drawn-out, scrawled conversations with each other?

other good stuff i found on their website:                                                             urban letterboxing                                                                                                        the starbucks game

the laboratory of insurectionary imagination

 

Quick! Catch that cupcake!

This afternoon I went to THE GREAT CAKE ESCAPE. I was clued in to it by a little article about the guerilla cake-droppers in the free commuter paper The London Paper a couple of days ago. For about a year, two lovely twenty-something women have been letting loose batches of cupcakes in the streets of London, with little tags encouraging passers-by to take them! This afternoon they hosted a scavenger hunt and street tea party in Hoxton Square, which is a block from The Circus Space. Arrived just as they were packing up – it was FREEZING here today – but got to have a quick chat & a cupcake before they skedaddled, leaving a fountain adorned in free sweet goodies…

http://www.myspace.com/thegreatcakeescape  

I’d love to emulate them… Molly, shall we create some Mysterious Muffin Mayhem in Amherst?

-Tara

 

reality hacking in london

Yesterday I went to an incredible Mobile Clubbing event at the Royal Exchange. The plan was simple: show up with your iPod, CD player, walkman, or other portable-music-device with headphones, and at 6.20pm, turn it on and start dancing. I got there 20 minutes late, and there was a crowd of people bopping around, mouthing lyrics, and giggling… it was a pretty odd sight, and if you weren’t clued into what was going on it took a minute to realize that the group wasn’t just a group of people waiting around, not talking to each other. 

There were babies, and men in suits, and cyclists, and students, and hipsters, and hippies… they were swaying, and rocking out, and popping, and skanking. I really wanted to see a couple slow dancing, but no dice. An idea for next time, I guess! Every once in a while a spontaneous cheer would erupt, people would throw their arms up and whoop and dance harder for a minute. So much fun to be among city strangers, staying warm in the chilly November night, all boogying down!

I took two really short clips (no pics of me, sorry, but the camera ran out of memory). I’ll put them up just as soon as I figure out where to house them online… Mol, how do I make use of my Stout student space?

-Tara

(more about Mobile Clubbing)

 

world domino record!

this is insane! i love when a lot of people from different countries can come together and work for a common, absolutely ridiculous goal.

-tara

 

We Are One

I am SO GOING to the next one of these!

weareoneparty.org

The weareOne parties are free, and feature live music, short films, performances, shared food, dressing up and general foolery and fun. From their website: “Every party is an immersive experiment in harnessing the vibracy of and playfulness of living in the moment. People leave feeling in love with life, other people, and most importantly themselves.” My people!

-Tara