On 1-2 July we were in Skegness as part of the wonderful SO Festival, with not one but two different games.
With these games – one physical, and one digital – we explored two different aspects of Skegness: the physicality of the town itself, with all its fascinating corners; and its history, full of museums built in shipwrecks and experimental amusement arcades and daredevils and all sorts of peculiar entertainments.
We recently spent a week at QUAD in Derby as part of our digital participatory artist residency. We’ll be going back in February; this post discusses what we’ve been making so far, and the games we’ve been testing out with different groups of players at QUAD.
When we play a digital game, we expect the game to pay attention to us. To know what we’re doing. To respond. Which is reasonable, right?
But the board of a board game doesn’t know what piece you’ve put down (well, with some exceptions). A hopscotch grid chalked on the ground doesn’t light up to let you know where your stone fell.
During our time at QUAD, we’ve been thinking about what happens if you try to make digital games where the play is socially, rather than technologically, mediated. What possibilities exist in this design space that are different from both traditional digital games, and from purely analogue installations?
Playable Patterns is an ongoing experiment in playable digital work where the interaction and play happens purely between people; where the computer doesn’t look at what you’re doing. Specifically, it’s a series of patterns that move and change in particular ways, designed to be projected onto walls or floors in order to enable people to play.
Our new game, The Wind and the Weather, is an interactive story about Amy Johnson. Johnson was an aviator from Hull, and the first woman to fly from England to Australia.
Our game was commissioned by the Amy Johnson Festival, as part of their series of twelve new writing commissions exploring different aspects of Amy’s life. It takes ten or fifteen minutes to play, and focuses on the last few hours of Johnson’s journey.