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An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments

An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments is a booklet of short games about awkwardness and intimacy, designed for the Science Gallery in Dublin.

Each game takes a different moment of a potential failed connection and turns it into something playable – whether that’s eye contact with people on the street, conversations with familiar strangers, a phone conversation with a lot of lag, people-watching through windows, scrolling through old text messages, or desperately signalling from the top of a tower in a terrible post-apocalypse.

Some of them can be played within the gallery itself, responding to the space and the other works in the show; some can be played in the space around it; some aren’t currently playable but might be in the future (few of us currently have an astronaut wife on Mars, for example).

An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments is part of Intimacy, running at Science Gallery Dublin until 24 February 2019.

As I Was Saying…

Goodrich Castle (photo above by Robert Moranelli) is an amazing place – a set of walls and towers and castle fragments that Wordsworth considered the “noblest ruin in Herefordshire”, now cared for by English Heritage.

And this summer, we made a game for it, to run as part of the castle’s on-site family interpretation. If you visit, you can check it out for free from the visitor centre – something to play while you walk around and explore.

It’s a card game for families and groups to play as they explore the castle, called As I Was Saying. It draws on the real history of the castle, and the people who were there around 1296 and 1297 – from countesses to clerks and coachmen.

Seaside Games at SO Festival in Skegness

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.