{"id":846,"date":"2016-12-09T12:06:14","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T12:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/?p=846"},"modified":"2016-12-09T12:08:12","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T12:08:12","slug":"playable-patterns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/2016\/12\/09\/playable-patterns\/","title":{"rendered":"Playable Patterns"},"content":{"rendered":"

We recently spent a week at QUAD in Derby<\/a>\u00a0as 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

But the board of a board game doesn’t know\u00a0what piece you’ve put down\u00a0(well, with some exceptions<\/a>). A hopscotch grid chalked\u00a0on the ground doesn’t light up to let you know where your stone fell.<\/p>\n

During our time at QUAD, we’ve been thinking about\u00a0what happens if you try to make digital games where the play is socially, rather than technologically, mediated.\u00a0What possibilities exist in this design space that are different from both traditional digital games, and from purely analogue installations?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"maze-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The game mechanics that this supports need to be really simple – ideas that people can get their head around in a few seconds. So for example, a gradually changing maze (above) that players have to navigate through with the shadow of their finger, holding their hand in front of the projector. Or (see top) a grid of shapes shot over with unpredictable trails of paint, where different players pick a colour and can only step on that colour,\u00a0moving precariously to keep safe\u00a0on the board as it changes. Or (below) a collection of photos that are revealed by a slowly disappearing board, while passers-by race to guess what they show.<\/p>\n

There’s obviously some relationship between this and, say, Hide&Seek’s old Tiny Games app<\/a> (which I worked on): quick-to-explain games distributed digitally where the rules are then enacted and enforced\u00a0by players. But the ability to create our own playing space means that very different types of games are possible.<\/p>\n

We started off by making a range of different patterns that we could\u00a0adjust live – making them move or stay still, switching shapes, switching colour palettes, replacing colours\u00a0with photos, adding changing numbers or letters or paint blobs, getting faster or slower while people played. This direction seems like it’s going to be fun for facilitated play, or for people who like inventing their own games – there are an awful lot of different combinations to explore. But it’s not something we’d expect to be able to set up somewhere in public and have many people genuinely invent their own games. One of the things we learnt from our research at King’s on the One Easy Step project<\/a> is that most people don’t really want to come up with their own rules, and a sentence or two suggesting ways to play can make a lot of difference.<\/p>\n

\"guessing1\"<\/p>\n

We’re currently working on getting 15\u00a0or so different playable patterns working well\u00a0and able to stand alone as coherent games without a facilitator. We’re also thinking a lot about what the affordances of this particular medium are. So: what makes this different from just sticking down vinyls or painting on the ground<\/strong>? What can we do here that we couldn’t with tape and chalk? The answers are something like:<\/p>\n