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Holly Gramazio

Gamechangers: Football

In October 2015, Matheson Marcault tried out ten new ways to play football – each one designed for GameCity by a different designer.

Nottingham was declared the City of Football for 2015, so GameCity decided to fill the Market Square with reimagined versions of the game for ten days, and they invited us along to curate it.

It was a brilliant experience – playing games right in the middle of Market Square made it really easy to get people involved, and we had commentators, referees and demonstration players from around Nottingham to help passers-by understand what was going on. Check out this Guardian article for more context around the project, or read about the individual games below…

Essays, Events, Games, Words

Now Play This: #128CharGames

Leave a ball on a quiet pavement. Players take bets on whether each passer-by will kick it.

Take a glass of orange juice. Add a tsp. of salt each turn. Sip. First to spit out drink loses.

Back in 2013, an awful lot of people on Twitter made up games designed to fit in a single tweet. They shared them using the hashtag #128CharGames, in a project initiated by game designer and conceptual artist Zach Gage. Gage wrote up the results of his experiment here – dozens and dozens of minimal games and ideas, all folded down into just a sentence or two.

The project itself was pretty great, and so were a lot of the games that people designed. So as part of Now Play This, our September event at Somerset House, we got permission from Gage and the designers of our favourite contributions to print up their games on index cards and show as part of an exhibit of instructional games and artworks. And then we left a little pile of index cards on a table, thinking that a few people might want to add their own.

Events, Games, Physical, Site-specific

Now Play This

Click through the gallery above to see photos from the event.

On 4-6 September, we ran Now Play This, a weekend of games at Somerset House in London with George Buckenham and Jo Summers.

Over the course of three days we involved more than 70 speakers, game designers, writers and performers, and drew an audience of over a thousand players.