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Browsing Date

2016

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?

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.

Raise Haiku Ratio

At Now Play This last year, we ran a game called Woodlouse (created by Jake Simpson and Pete Morrish). To play Woodlouse, you think of words (like “woodlouse”) that have more vowels than consonants. That’s it. If a word qualifies, it’s “a woodlouse”.

When we ran the game, we had a big piece of paper with some marker pens nearby. We put instructions out, and I wrote up a few sample words (in different coloured pens, with an unconvincing attempt at faking different handwriting styles). Then we invited people to write up any woodlouses they could think of.