This week, we’re off at the Science Centre Singapore as part of the Maker Extravaganza for Maker Fair’s 40th Anniversary. GEEK Play has curated a hall full of play and interaction, and we’re really excited to be there alongside John Sear, Genetic Moo and TROPE.

We’re taking a couple of the games we showed at the Scientific Village Fete last year – our gravity-well planet-rolling The Two-Body Problem (see picture above), and Saffron Parker‘s Space on Earth (below). They’re both quick, robust physical games that help people understand outer space a little better – and when we ran them last year, we had an actual real-life astronaut play.

 

We’re also taking one new game: Fatal Floor, a game of dodging dangerous surfaces and sticking to safe ones. Groups play as a team on a four-metre game board projected onto the floor. Their aim is to get at least one team member to safety through ten levels. In each level, players choose where to stand on a series of differently obscured surfaces; they only have a little time before some of the surfaces are revealed as safe (some nice paving stones, say; a green carpet; a glass floor), and some as dangerous (nettles, perhaps; thin ice; Mars). Players on safe surfaces stay in for the next round; players on dangerous surfaces are relegated to advise from the sidelines. But you all win as long as at least one of you makes it through to the end.

It’s a game that came out of our residency at QUAD in Derby, where we worked on the idea of playable patterns – projected game spaces that are created digitally, but where the computer doesn’t bother to pay attention to what players are doing. The gameplay is socially mediated, a little like hopscotch if the squares moved around. We’ll write a little more about Fatal Floor after we’ve played it at the Maker Faire!