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Events, Games

Now Play This 2017

Now Play This 2017 is over! It ran from 7-9 April, and we’ve collected a few pictures (taken by Ben Peter Catchpole) above – click through the gallery to see them, or pop over to our Facebook gallery to see a larger selection.

You can also read about how other visitors found the experience, and catch up on their pictures, with:

Emilie Reed’s overview “Now Play This 2017“
Zuraida Buter’s collection of tiny videos
“13 games that will change the way you think about gaming“, by Jordan Erica Webber at the Guardian
“Now Play This is a showcase of surprising gaming delights“, by Kate Gray at Kotaku
Blog posts describing the event from Matthew Tyler-Jones, Verity Virtue and Jackson Tegu

And don’t forget that until 7 May, you can still visit Game Changers: Another Way to Play, an exhibition looking at billiards, chess, mazes and their evolution over time. (We’ll write a little more about Game Changers next week…)

Playable Patterns

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.

Games We Found at the V&A

used with permission from The Victoria and Albert Museum: Photographer – Gabriel Bertogg

The V&A is in an extraordinary place. Every surface of the Victorian building is embellished, and once you start looking at the building between the exhibits it’s hard to stop. Every section of floor seems to have a different pattern of tiles. Each stairwell has its own visual schema.