Browsing Category

Digital

Our Projects

Since forming in June 2015, we’ve worked on the following projects:

Art Deck (ongoing). A drawing game that focuses on both creating a fun experience, and helping players to make drawings they’re genuinely pleased with.

Now Play This (ongoing). A three-day festival of play at Somerset House, running annually as part of the London Games Festival.

An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments (2018). A collection of short games about awkwardness and intimacy for Science Gallery, Dublin.

As I Was Saying… (2018). A card game to play while exploring Goodrich Castle, created as part of the site’s interpretation offer for families.

Inverted Operas (2018). A collaboration for Playsonic Festival, combining sculpture and performance with play.

Pop-Up City (2017). A city-building game that ran on the Ellipse, a 48-metre LED screen at the Museum of London.

The Skegness Selfie Hunt / One Night in Skegness (2017). A treasure hunt and a digital game, both exploring Skegness through time as part of SO Festival.

Playable Patterns (ongoing). Digitally created patterns, projected onto walls and floors for physical play. Made as part of a residency at QUAD.

The Scientific Village Fete (2016-2017). A set of fairground-style games originally designed for New Scientist Live, designed to explore ideas around science including games exploring space and the future of technology.

Games We Found at the V&A (2016). A set of boardgames designed to be played on patterns taken from the walls and floor of the V&A.

Drawing Games (2016). Pencil-and-paper games designed to help players create a work of art, created for NYU’s No Quarter exhibition.

The Scientific Village Fete (2016). A set of fairground-style challenges for New Scientist Live, designed to explore ideas around astronomy.

One Easy Step (2016). An ongoing project at King’s College, researching public play and creating an installation for the Quad.

The Wind and the Weather (2016). An online game about Amy Johnson’s pioneering flight from England to Australia.

Gamechangers: Football! (2015). Ten football variants running in the centre of Nottingham. With GameCity and Nottingham City of Football.

Prediction (2015). A half-article half-game challenging players to find ways to predict their futures. For Hack Circus.

Tweet Like It’s 2099 (2015). A game about writing tweets in a series of distant futures. For New Scientist.

Manifesto! (2015-16). A live manifesto-building game played by passers-by. Made for Frequency Festival, also shown at Beta Public and Game On!

The Light Machine (2015-16). A game that invites players to make pictures with light. Made for the Barbican’s Serious Play weekend, also shown for Discover Story Centre.

Now Play This (2015). A pilot version of Now Play This, our festival of games and play at Somerset House.

Wellcome Play Spectacular (2015). An evening of games for 1500 people at Wellcome Collection.

The Racing Line (2015). A live drawing game for two players, made for Here London.

54 Cities (2015). A set of cards that’s also a puzzle, leading players on a series of walks around Kensington and Chelsea. Made for InTransit festival.

Digital, Events, Games, Physical

Now Play This 2016

*click through gallery above*

Now Play This returned to the New Wing of Somerset House for a second year on 1st – 3rd April 2016, running as part of the London Games Festival. The three-day event included nearly a hundred games to play, including some created especially for the weekend.

The festival is designed to showcase the wider possibilities of games. The peculiar, the beautiful, the deeply experimental. It’s a place for games that get us playing in new and wonderful ways – whether that’s in groups, on our own, outside, inside, on or underneath tables. Games that send us running across courtyards, games situated on nearby screens, games that take place entirely in our heads.

Some highlights included

  •  Qubit from Simon Johnson: a new sport played in the Somerset House courtyard with a real live quantum computer
  • New commissions made especially for the festival including Get Lost! from S Woodson; Castles Made Of Castles from Nico Disseldorp; and Sett from Gary Campbell and Jeannine Inglis Hall
  • Inks from State of Play in a custom-designed pinball cabinet
  • Gorgeous installations including Orthogonal / Diagonal from Nova Jiang, Escalado Reshod from Josh Wilde, and Shiki-On from Miyu Hayashi
  • Books, board games, walks, special showcase events, a mini-conference of microtalks

…and about 90 more games over the course of the three days. See the Now Play This website for details.

 

Now Play This was funded by the Arts Council and Games London, and was part of UTOPIAS: A Year of Imagination and Possibility at Somerset House. 

Digital, Events, Games, Site-specific, Words

Hotel Room

Click through the gallery above to see pictures of the game in action.

Hotel Room was a twenty-minute experience in a hotel room in Krakow, running at Playpublik in Summer 2014. It explored the strange ways we behave in hotel rooms, and the idea of the hotel room as a temporary space: something assembled anew for each visitor and then torn apart as soon as they leave.