June | 2016 |

Browsing Date

June 2016

Talks, Workshops and Consultancy

We speak at events, run workshops, and consult on playful projects.

Our workshops can introduce the essentials of game design, get people experimenting with physical game design, help participants understand how to evaluate game ideas and commission games, or address the processes of developing games through iterative playtesting. We also develop and run custom workshops, including a workshop for Historic Royal Palaces on understanding the potential for narrative physical games, a workshop for Discover Story Centre around the role game design can play in encouraging play and storytelling, and workshops for young people at NFTS and Wellcome Collection.

We consult on other people’s projects, whether that means helping to formulate a brief, working on game design and writing across a project’s lifespan, providing feedback and advice on an active project or helping to provide a wider context for a games project. This has recently included working with Chromatrope on a prototype for a digital game for the BBC, and for Sesame Workshop on design for physical games with learning outcomes.

We often speak at events, dealing in particular with physical play and site-specific game design. We’ve spoken at the V&A, Digital Week Bordeaux, Nordic Game, Videobrains, Digital Shoreditch, Nicer Tuesdays, GDC, Playful, Boring and many other events.

Games for Your Event

We’re always interested in running games for events – whether that’s a new commission to fit a particular brief, or one of our existing games that suits your event.

Some of our existing games that are particularly suited to running at events, and which can be easily tailored to a particular environment, include:

Manifesto! (2015-16). A live manifesto-building game for 2 to 8 players at a time. Teams (often drawn from passers-by) take part in frantic three-minute rounds, trying to agree on a manifesto that they can all stand behind. They arrange and rearrange a set of predefined words and sentences, before presenting it to an audience for voting. Suitable for adults and older children. 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. Players draw a card from a deck which gives them a prompt for a picture, then they create an image using cutouts, shapes, household objects and more. When they’re finished, they take this image to an overhead projector, and project it onto a wall and – if they choose – themselves. Suitable for all ages. Made for the Barbican’s Serious Play weekend, also shown for Discover Story Centre.

The Racing Line (2015). A live drawing game for two players. Players place their marker pens on one end of a two-metre drawing track – then frantically race towards the other end without taking their marker off the page. Different obstacles in the way challenge them to answer questions and draw images on the way. Suitable for adults. Made for Here London.

Interesting Things for June 2016

A new thing: for the next few months, at least, we’re going to post monthly about some of the neat things going on in physical games and embodied play. Upcoming events, current exhibitions, interesting recent essays, open calls – you know the sort of thing. And there’s a lot of all of those sorts of things this month, so I guess we’d better get started…

(Image: Awkward Arcade by James Medd, launching 2 June.)

OPEN CALLS

The European Innovative Games Showcase at GDC, curated by Lea Schönfelder and Jonatan Van Hove, has submissions open till 6 June: Each selected game is going to showcase what’s unique and special about their in-development or already released game in a series of fascinating mini-talks.

And Come Out And Play New York – the longest-running street games festival! – has submissions open for live games until 24 June (though the sooner the better, from the look of things): Have a great social, physical real-world game you want to share with the world?