Well, last week we had our first “serious” look at play, as we went to interview Quentin Stevens a professor at University College London who has recently pubblished The Ludic City, discussing the development of play in urban environments. He talked about how play helps us to transgress boundaries in order to escape the realities and seriousness of everyday life. The weird looks that most pervasive gamers receive from non-players who view their behaviour as crazy was not so crazy to Quentin, who told us that because our gaming behaviour has a purpose and a goal it is therefore acceptable to those people involved.
We also visited Thomas and Jack who have organized one of the largest Capture the Flag game in London. They both said they wanted to create something in the city that didn’t involve spending money in order to consume a service or a product created by someone else. Quentin, Thomas and Jack all talked about how play allows us to express different aspects of our personalities introducing new ways of behaving in the city, switching between one’s serious everyday attitude and to one’s games’ face. Thomas said “I don’t know why people embrace it, maybe it’s escapist, it’s another way of being in the city, maybe it takes people by surprise how easy it is.” The public and exhibitionist nature of pervasive games was seen as important to Quentin who said that “it’s important to us to present and perform who we are… doing things where other people see them is more fun and interesting because we don’t know what other people will do, but it’s also in a sense more important because we feel the need to have other people confirm that we are alive that we have skills, interests and identities and makes us recognize who we are. Play is a low risk, low impact way of doing this.”
The next Capture the Flag game is set to take place in Shoreditch on June 5th, come out and see what all the fuss is about!
