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Games for Your Event

We’re always interested in running games for events – whether that’s a new commission to fit a particular brief, or one of our existing games that suits your event.

Some of our existing games that are particularly suited to running at events, and which can be easily tailored to a particular environment, include:

Manifesto! (2015-16). A live manifesto-building game for 2 to 8 players at a time. Teams (often drawn from passers-by) take part in frantic three-minute rounds, trying to agree on a manifesto that they can all stand behind. They arrange and rearrange a set of predefined words and sentences, before presenting it to an audience for voting. Suitable for adults and older children. Made for Frequency Festival, also shown at Beta Public and Game On!

The Light Machine (2015-16). A game that invites players to make pictures with light. Players draw a card from a deck which gives them a prompt for a picture, then they create an image using cutouts, shapes, household objects and more. When they’re finished, they take this image to an overhead projector, and project it onto a wall and – if they choose – themselves. Suitable for all ages. Made for the Barbican’s Serious Play weekend, also shown for Discover Story Centre.

The Racing Line (2015). A live drawing game for two players. Players place their marker pens on one end of a two-metre drawing track – then frantically race towards the other end without taking their marker off the page. Different obstacles in the way challenge them to answer questions and draw images on the way. Suitable for adults. Made for Here London.

Digital, Events, Games, Physical

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.

The History of Text Generation

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a lot of people write interestingly about computer-generated text – partly as a result of National Novel Generation Month, which ran through November and prompted some really lovely generated texts.

And as I read, I started wondering about the history of text generation. Not the twentieth century stuff, the Dadaists and William Burroughs and all the later work that happened once computers came into the picture. The old stuff, from the nineteenth century and before. “This won’t take long,” I thought. “There can’t have been much going on.”

So hey, I was up till 3 last night reading and guess what: it turns out I was really really wrong. There’s been a ton of text generation going on over the past thousand years, and it’s fascinating stuff. Most of it comes from writers who really feel like they’d be making deeply confusing experimental games if only they hadn’t died back in the 1680s.