It was iglab 8 last night and it was good.
Mr Speakman tried out a new game of his called Double negative that involved running through the streets trailing lengths of barrier tape. The sight was seen by some bystanders and described to a blind friend as “mad people running with police tape” and then as “people making rectangles and triangles from the tape as they ran”. This we liked.
The game was a kind of running puzzle game. Two teams were divided into blockers and runners. They then proceeded to try and block the passage of each others runners between an agreed start and end point. Red runners couldn’t pass the red tape, yellow runners couldn’t pass the red tape. You could unblock a blocked route by blocking it with the same number of opposite colour tapes.
Result - Sprint race with furling ribbons. A beautiful sight even for those who cant see it.
The rest of the eve was spent in the Cells at bridewell by kind permission of Art Space Life Space. There we played two more games, Midnight Tennis(we renamed this Monsters Ball) and Monochrome.
Monochrome was first up. The game saw red and green teams pitted against each other in a perceptually limited sneak in the dark. Red Teams wore red visors and carried dim red lights invisible to the green team who wore green visors and carried equally dim green lights. This enabled players to sneak through the blackness with a light that was invisible to their opponents. A neat trick but the aim was simple enough. each player had a word taped to their chest and back like “ice “, “fire”, “cave”, “hole”. points would be scored for every opponents word you could find in the blackness within a 180 sec round.
Tom Melamed Brought the balls and set up his game Monsters ball in which the Monster Moth Men listening to Morresy were loosed into the Darkness (total blackout) of the cells. Players then had to navigate the darkness and find the three pieces of a riddle that had been chalked out somewhere in the gloom. To aid them on their way they could bash their monster ball and it would flash with awkward red lights for a few seconds. in this time you could see alittle but the moth men would also see the light and start closing in on you. If they could tap you before the light went out you went out.
Pretty creepy, as I walked through the blackness i bumped in to another player who was clearly hiding in a cell “your not a moth man are you??”. Luckily not, for him…
Thanks to everyone who came along last night more great games will be on soon. In fact REALLY soon. Like next week…
Watch this space for log in details for another Citywide Escape Effort as CARGO gets its second test outing.
../simon J
Hosted by the Watershed, June’s iglab will bring you some of the best street games and pervasive games to have been developed around the the theme of sports. Heading the Line up will be a mini tournament of Korean Lazer Ball. Like some kind of sport from a sci fi future, Korean Lazer Ball pits two teams of lazer gladiators against each other leaving them to shine bounce and dodge their way to the top of the league. We will invite the current world champion teams to defend their title against all-comers.
