Comfort in Union Square from Simon Evans on Vimeo.

concept

You walk through the busy square, headphones hidden beneath your hood. A voice whispers in your ear, “there’s a Lover nearby…;” you steal a look around trying not to be too obvious and you hear the voice again: “…your life is now at level 6…” If that’s higher than before then you must be a lover too and you should find that other person in the crowd, team up. You set off, weaving through the crowd, trying to blend in. “There’s a Dancer nearby…” you stop to read a sign and look around “…your life is now at 5…” So you are definitely a Lover not a Dancer. You need to find other Lovers and stay away from the Dancers; If they find you before you find another Lover you could be in trouble. If your life drops to zero, the voice goes silent and you are out of the game. But how do you discover the other players hidden in the crowd and, when you do, how to you know who they are? You could ask them “are you a Lover or a Dancer?…” The Comfort of Strangers is a street game that uses ipaq PDAs and Bluetooth to create a series of social encounters driven by risk and common interest. Players use anonymity and group formation to live and survive urban experience. They find comfort in strangers.
Rule Set
Players are given an ipaq PDA and a pair of headphones. Each device runs a simple programme that monitors the other bluetooth devices the ipaq can detect. Each ipaq will be allocated to one of two teams; the Lovers or the Dancers. Every time a player encounters a member of your team, the player is informed by a voice whispering in their ear and their life goes up. Every time a player encounters a member of the other team the same voice informs them and they lose a life point. If life drops to zero the programme stops running and the player is out of the game. When only one team remains alive, the game ends with the surviving team members winning.
Ideas
The game immerses players in the crowd, exposing them to the ambivalent feelings aroused by city life; the freedom of anonymity and its loneliness. Out of the drive to stay in the game, the swarm dynamics underlying the game engine generate opportunities for ad hoc social groups. Players engage and negotiate with other players, using cooperation as a game strategy, but also, we hope, coming to an understanding of social action that is based in enlightened self-interest, but also intuition.

players: >10

duration: about 30 mins for a short game, but can be played over longer durations.

designers: Swarm Toolkit (simonJ, simonE).

set up: each player needs a device capable of running the mscape platform(this means windows mobile 5 or 6), the game and their own headphones.

This is one of the games we’ve been playing as a part of our swarm toolkit research

there are two variations we like best

Polerise

ruleset: pick two people in a group, move as close as possible to one and as far as possible from the other

players: >8

duration: 2 mins

outcome: this causes a frenetic boiling frenzy usually, but sometimes it might just cause distinct small groups to form… its weird when that happens.

Magnetise

ruleset: pick two people in a group, move to a position where you are equidistant from them both.

players: >8

duration: 2 mins

outcome: after a fair bit of shuffling around the group usually stabilises or locks together. This is when it gets interesting. At this point a set of power relations is formed, if anyone has chosen you to be in their triangle you can control the whole group. because if you step anywhere those in your triangle will adjust to reform the group and those in their triangle will do the same as they move etc until the whole group has adjusted. if no one chose you then you are powerless to affect the position of the group tis way.

Dan Effergen has built a processing sketch of these games

have a look here

Ruleset: something like a jigsaw puzzle or one of those sliding tile games. This is an SMS enabled game best played on a large screen. Players each receive a card with an image on one side and a letter on the other. If combined with all the other players images, the cards fit together to make a picture. The players are challenged to collectively create the picture. Each player must txt the letter associated with their image along with the grid location they wish it to appear in.

Set up: the swarm toolkit SMS engine, 1 mobile phone per player

Players: 7-8

Duration: <5 mins

Makers/url: Swarm Toolkit