Slightly belated reporting from the front line of collaborative game design – sorry all, I blinked and 2 days went by…

A bleary-eyed Playmakers team set up shop at The Hub on Sunday morning. One thing I’ll tell you – community collaborative design processes are TIRING, especially when there a Sandpits to run… Also I sustained a nasty French cricket injury in the park on Saturday.

Half an hour in and everything was rosy again! A crack team of old friends and new faces arrived to contribute ideas, develop fresh concepts, and help us think about the parts of the game that remained unsettled. We split into two groups – my group wanted to focus on two things – storylines and what could we do with the Humongous Filming Device to make it more interesting / more team-friendly / create better video.

Working with James Wallis, Gwyn Morfey, Kevan Davis, Ben Henley, and a very nice lady who dropped in but didn’t leave her name (thank goodness she did though or it would have been bloke-a-rama) we pushed on through some early thoughts about surveillance, 60s Russia to get to… 1984. Chatting about 1984, we decided there were several things about it that we liked.

1. In terms of surveillance culture, the one that Orwell wrote about and the one we’re living in now are very different. We think. And those differences are interesting.

2. Lots of interesting things happened in 1984, like Torvill & Dean, Tommy Cooper dying live on national TV and the recording of Do They Know It’s Christmas?

3. Shoulder pads, 80s hair, gigantic cellphones, fax machines and VHS camcorders are both amusing and interesting from a game design perspective.

All the chat about surveillance reminded me of another piece of feedback we’d had from theatre director John E McGrath. John wrote a bugely interesting and important book about surveillance culture called Loving Big Brother, which he lent to me near the start of the project. John’s feedback about the Playmakers game was this:

Thoughts from a ’surveillance’ point of view.  One of the most interesting things about surveillance is how it transforms space.  Your description of the city game you played in New York reminded me of the kind of ‘performative space’ experience I talk about in the book.  In your surveillance game, however, the experience feels to take the ’shooting’ metaphor as the central experience and perhaps loses engagement with space as a result.  Stepping into a space and thinking you may or may not be under surveillance is rather different to hiding from and trying to catch other teams.  There’s something about the immobilisation of surveillance that’s perhaps lost here too – the fixed cameras that never quite have the range to show the interesting stuff outside the frame, the disempowered security guard stuck in his station looking at screens – very different to competition of catching the other team.

So in the morning, we talked a lot about how surveillance culture might relate to our game, and what a ruleset that made the most of different versions of 1984 might be. Here’s my draft of that ruleset: http://ludocity.org/wiki/1984.

Something I think we should add in to this version is Ben Henley’s idea about a second camera:

While discussing how to play up the “dystopian surveillance” theme a bit more, I wondered if it might be interesting to have a second camera pointing backwards and recording what the players were doing (maybe even hidden so they aren’t aware of it?). The footage wouldn’t be for scoring, but just to improve the coverage of their reactions, making the edited footage of the game more interesting (and informative to game designers).

More later from other folk present at the Yes, And day!