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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.

Manifesto!

Manifesto! is a sugar-coloured game designed to frustrate. We made it while the political fallout of the 2015 election was playing out all over the media. It grew out of some conversations with Furtherfield, about what a street game inspired by the Magna Carta might look like, for a strand they were curating at Frequency Festival in Lincoln.

Gamechangers: Football

Events, Games, Physical

In October 2015, Matheson Marcault tried out ten new ways to play football – each one designed for GameCity by a different designer.

Nottingham was declared the City of Football for 2015, so GameCity decided to fill the Market Square with reimagined versions of the game for ten days, and they invited us along to curate it.

It was a brilliant experience – playing games right in the middle of Market Square made it really easy to get people involved, and we had commentators, referees and demonstration players from around Nottingham to help passers-by understand what was going on. Check out this Guardian article for more context around the project, or read about the individual games below…