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One Easy Step: installation and talk

Events, Physical, Research

Over the past couple of months, for our project One Easy Step, we’ve been doing a lot of research into public play – interviews, observation, reading, experiments. You can see a lot of the interviews we’ve conducted here on the website – and we’ve got a few more coming up soon.

This has all been part of the King’s College London Arts and Humanities Festival, which this year is themed around play – and there are some amazing events going on, talks and workshops and installations and chances to play.

One Easy Step will culminate with an installation running from 10-21 October, and we’ll be delivering a talk on 11 October to share the research we’ve been doing over the last couple of months – so if you’re interested in the research we’ve been doing, do come along! Tickets for the talk are free, but registration is required.

The Scientific Village Fete

Have you ever been at a village fete, and found it just a little too… unscientific? Or wandered around a science festival and wished for some real festivities?

Well, we’re coming to New Scientist Live – a four-day festival of ideas and discovery, taking place at ExCeL London – with a solution to exactly those problems. You can challenge your friends and beat the clock in four cosmos-themed events at this space age fair:

  • Knock the planets from their perches in our Planet Shy – but be careful, the planets are made to scale, so your aim is going to have to be pretty good if you want to get Mercury.
  • Overcome the fallibility of your delicate human mind in So Wrong It’s Right, a head-to-head gameshow that pits you against your friends and against the Stroop Effect
  • Become master of the solar system in The Two Body Problem, a gravitational simulation that challenges you to choose an orbit that isn’t immediately disastrous
  • Prove your worth as an astronaut in Saffron Parker’s Space on Earth, a co-operative game that asks you to work with a friend while you both wear spacesuit gloves

The Scientific Village Fete will be running at New Scientist Live from 22 to 25 September.

 

Interview with Greg Trefry

As part of our research project for the King’s College London Arts and Humanities Festival, we’ve been interviewing different curators, designers, artists and architects about playful work for public space. This interview is with Greg Trefry, a game designer who co-founded the games festival Come Out & Play (and is director of the New York branch); also co-founded Gigantic Mechanic, which makes games with real-world physical elements; and teaches at NYU.

This is an extract from a longer interview, which will be included in full in a report at the end of our research project. The picture above is from Come Out & Play 2015, taken by Josh Lee.

US: We’ve talked before about people being able to drop in and out of games in public spaces – and not having to install anything, and the difference that makes to persuading people to actually play.

GREG: It’s a weird design problem. Most games – as opposed to playful things – are delimited by time and space. People can push the boundaries on some of those (“oh you can run around anywhere”) but a game still usually starts at a specific time and ends at a specific time, or you’re moving towards a winner and you have to be there at the end of the game to see that.  

So how do you make an experience that isn’t ruined if players can drop in and out at any time?

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