^ Doug Church on “play”

I’ve been working on the subject of “play”, in its sense of a human universal drive, for the last few months at Nokia.

As part of this, during October, with the assistance of Ludicorp, we were able to gather a diverse, interesting group of ‘players’ together for a discussion on the subject – during which Justin Hall interviewed a number of them, resulting in this short film.

More play this week – I’m heading to the Other Players conference in Copenhagen, where the programme features Richard Bartle and TerraNova’s Nathan Combs amongst others.

If you’re there, I’ll be the guy with the iBook covered in Pete Fowler stickers…

Gene points out that the first spacetime coordinate of the whole ‘ilovebees.com’ alternate-reality thing is today, in Silicon Valley…

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Update at ARGN:

“While many were expecting Halo 2 demo disks, what they got instead was one of the largest, most complicated distributed interactions in ARG [Alternate Reality Gaming] history. Hundreds of people around the country descended upon over 200 locales, working as a team to answer phone calls correctly, in order to unlock a series of audio clues.”

In a feature puffing this week’s e3 and bemoaning lack of plot or gameplay in current videogame offerings, USAToday gets this bizarre quote:

”Consumers expect to have another experience based on a (game) franchise. The same is true, on a psychological basis, in the music business,” [Sony Computer Entertainment America president Kaz] Hirai says. ”You don’t call Born in the USA ‘Bruce Springsteen 7.’ But if you want to go back and experience the world of Bruce Springsteen again, you buy his new album. It is catering to consumer wants and needs to re-experience that artist, that franchise or that motion picture.” The key, he says, is that developers must also continue to ”keep pushing the envelope with new franchises so they will be next year’s sequels.”

Perhaps it’s just me, that seems like a mind-bendingly odd (and faintly depressing) way to look at the work of an musician; and it doesn’t do that much for gaming either.

Bruce Springsteen is not a world.

I think.

As part of the Collaborative Mapping Workshop activities at Etech, a few of us took some maps, GPS units, cameras (digital and LOMO!) and a coin around the streets of San Diego for an hour or so.

The coin was part of the psychogeographical plan. Following point (8) of Derivé [” 8. A derivé seldom occurs in its pure form.”] we created some rules of our mapping game.

We flipped the coin on each junction to decide whether to carry on in our established direction, and then again to decide a change in direction if necessary.

This was working pretty well until we caught a glimpse of the beach…

Once the coin started to lead us away from the glinting sunshine-on-surf, we rebelled pretty much as a group and abandoned the coin-based games in order to head beachwards.

As Matt Webb remarked, if the rules of a game are good for one thing, it’s for finding out what you really want once you start ignoring them…

My Newtonmass present to myself was an Xbox.

I’ve not been immersed in Xbox culture up till now, so any must-have game recommendations are welcome (I have Halo…)

Reading an Xbox mag, Links 2004 got my attention, not because I’m a big golf fan (my dad always loved Leaderboard on my Atari 520STfm, though) – but because of the Xbox-Live enabled side of the game.

I haven’t seen it or played it; but I imagine, like most golf games on computers or consoles, that you are ‘teleported’ between the holes. That is, you don’t have to wander between the last hole and the next tee-shot.

I wonder if Links does away with this to bring the Xbox-Live social connection to life. Would the golf game just be the activity that the social exchange is centred around, like real-life golf. The walk between the holes together would be the really pleasant bit of the game.

Most online gaming concentrates on clan or p2p chat, not proximity interactions. I’d hope that having a private p2p chat on a golfcourse might have to be enacted through a complicated series of rituals to carve the privacy out of the group situation:

“Excuse me, chaps, my broker is on the phone… Sorry, I really have to take this… you know how it is…” *thumbs joypad, scampers away down the fairway a little* “hello aSTRObabe88. a/s/l??”

If not, get rid of p2p chat (or at least chat-at-a-distance) all together. Distractions such as birdwatching, admiring each others plus-fours and humming tunes, or telling jokes might come into play.

Ambling around as a group admiring all that wonderfully-modelled landscape that is boasted about in the marketing. Lovely – the game of golf itself would wind-up being just the bothersome bit with the clubs that spoils a good walk?

John Thackara:

“The French – who, with their grands projets, have so long been focused on trophy buildings – have noted that ‘sociability’ and ‘liveability’ are now the key criteria for urban design and have gone off in a new direction: towards the development of live, participatory events as ways of adding value to a place. Formal cultural festivals have been booming in France for years, but the new craze is for ‘les arts de la rue’.”

» Icon magazine: November

Jump London on Channel 4 tonight was full of spectacular moments, but not the spectacular moments the filmmakers had hoped, I thought.

The format was – introduce “Le Parkour” or freerunning, with a brief history, then buildup to a set of freerunning pieces across major London monuments.

The potted history of Le Parkour was good – best I’ve seen in a mainstream programme, starting from the schooldays of one of the originators of the sport, Sebastien Foucan. The buildup was pretty drawn-out with mock tension over whether or not stuffy old London building managers would let maniac Frenchmen run all over their Grade-One listed heaps.

Then the runs were shown. The more classical ‘monuments’ like The Royal Albert Hall, County Hall and The Mall were actually pretty dull. Not to knock les superheroics francais, but freerunning just doesn’t work on buildings of classical scale it seems – not enough nooks and crannies, ramps, and articulation of form to waltz with it seems.

The trio of parkouristes were at their best in the close quarters, dense backalleys of Bankside and fractal flatroofs of Wardour St, Soho. And at their most spectacular on the gun turrets and gunwales of HMS Belfast and the brutalist concrete crevices of The National Theatre.

A number of pundits were put up to speculate briefly on the potential phenomenon, including Wills Alsop and Hutton, Skateboarding & The City academic Iain Borden and, weirdly, The Pet Shop Boys.

The best bit for me was a little 2 minute sequence in the buildup to the run, where you saw the guys fresh from France, having to familiarise themselves with the feel of a new city.

They had to handle it, touch and examine it. Jack Hawksmoor for real. You saw them adjusting to the slightly different rhythms and gaits of London – brick courses just a little different, past layers of Imperial measure intersposed with more modern metric, bollards at slightly different spacings and heights.

The careful, deliberate and delicate sizing up of a new lover. Fantastic.

Here’s a link to the UK’s own UrbanFreeflow – a good place to start if you want to get into Le Parkour/Freerunning

More screengrabs below in the extended entry…
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Well, I know that’s a stupid thing to say, because of course these things are orchestrated – but it seems that the inaugural London flashmob was a bit more stage-managed than most.

“Anyway. We’re here, the shop’s shut. Which would seem to have f***ed the flash mob, which is supposed to be about the appearance of spontaneity, right? Well, then, the shop opens. In fact, it seems to open specifically to let the flash mob in.

Media hordes. Shop opening specially for a spontaneous mob. Right.”

It had crossed my mind that for some undefinable reason of psychogeographic importance that London would be a bit crap for flashmobbing. Critical Mass or Poll-tax riots she can do, but digitally-assisted Dadaism I’m not sure is her thing.

Anyway.

Warren Ellis has the story. Any other eyewitness reports?

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Update: Cockup, not conspiracy, seems to be the consensus of comments below. Also – a correction on my captioning a photo of rollerbladers as being part of Critical Mass. It’s a picture of a more frequent gathering of skaters known as “The Friday Skate” – thanks to Gerard for correcting me.

Grant Morrison on the future of narrative:

“…I think people will tire of movies altogether very soon as the immersive interactive experience offered by video gaming becomes more sophisticated and involving. I’ve been doing more and more work in the games field and I’m very excited by the possibilities for radical narrative experiences.

…I don’t know if I’d be writing comics today. I’d write games. I probably would write comics but only as a hobby…”

» CBR: CATCHING UP WITH PROFESSOR M: TALKING WITH GRANT MORRISON
[via barbelith]

From this month’s Edge:

“…the central strength of the Pokémon world is that there is no us and them. Unusually for an RPG, there are no enemies. Every battle you have is against creatures who could just as well be on your side… The rule of RPG thumb is that you play as an alien, wandering a strange and hostile world where each monster is more venomous and bizarre than the last. In Pokémon you belong. Fought in anger only rarely, battles are as much about maintaining the natural balance there would be in the wild, as about slapping down a cocky Geodude.”