Comfort in Union Square from Simon Evans on Vimeo.

Our pictures from the festival are now up on Flickr. Enjoy.

Upstairs in the Delancy lounge we had the COaP after party. There is canvas roof they pull back on hot nights to let the night air cool peoples heads. The nights out here have all been hot and the heads have all been pretty hot too. Some of the games designers here have encyclopedic knowledge of games titles/companies/consoles/producers over the last 10+ years and everyone’s got an opinion. This crowd seems to be whats different about the street games scene in NY. The street games designers are making these games as an aside from their regular games design jobs. Games Lab where most of the COaP producers work produce downloadable pc games and flash games. Their offices are decked out with an extensive games library and manga(book) collection, all the current consoles, and a couple of retro arcade games for good measure. These are hardcore gamers. There were lots of other games producers and designers volunteering at the festival too. Lots of people hungry to break into the street games scene. This is not the same in the uk. Almost everyone i’ve met at iglab and the sandpit are coming to street games from an art or theatre scene or from no scene at all. Just people who like to be playful. Quite often people don’t have a auxiliary interest in console games. This means that the languages and references people are bringing to these games are quite different. as is our ambition for the sector. The mix of games at the festival shows the scene is still young. The games are often just vessels for the players to behave in an extroverted way, or to gather together and cheer each other on. But the potential for well crafted experiences within this field is clear.

So the question remains the same how is this sector going to develop, who is going to pay for it. Jane McGonigal seems to be looking to BIG corporate sponsors. Her latest game ‘the lost sport of Olympia’ is apparently part of a big ARG shes making thats sponsored by McDonalds. Disney put some money into the festival and there were some minor sponsorships from a soft drinks company too. This seems to indicate that there is the beginning of real interest in the sector from the business world. A few companies dipping thier toe in to the area to see if its going thier way. Whereever it is going, everyone here wants to have a lot of fun en route. The enthusiasm of the crowd is palpable. I rebuilt a version of hipSync for the party and we played a few rounds. I could hardly stand for laughing so much. The party was just for games designers and they were from all over, SF, Amsterdam, DC, Denver UK and of course NYC. Some ive met before and some were new to me. But everyone at the festival has been super friendly and i look forward to seeing them all again, next time we all come out to play together.

Sitting in the Clinton Street Bakery eating their excellent blueberry pancakes and catching up on the blog. We ran the second performance, if that’s the right word, on Saturday afternoon, the hottest day of the year here so far. Two over dressed British gentlemen cabbed across town with 40 ipaqs and headphones to Parsons college of Art & Design where they issued the ipaqs (getting pretty slick at that now with the help of some excellent volunteers) before sending about 30 players out into the cacophony of Manhattan to begin the game.

At the strike of 14.50 on the huge digital clock that hangs above Union Square the players hit go and began nervously weaving through the bustling crowd listening to the toll of points removed or added as lovers and dancers came close. But what a crowd, everything you’d expect from Manhattan: people picnicking and sun bathing; a Hare Krishna unit drumming away, some sort of Korean church running an outdoor service; a circle of African Americans taking turns to rap along to a beat box; a farmers market; and, finally, our players, sneaking and strolling, running or hiding. An incredible game space and one we always hoped we could find.

I always enjoy the moment when people first start to talk to each other and start playing together. This is the core of the game; in Union Square it took 15-20 mins of game play for two large groups to form, one of Lovers and one of Dancers, carefully avoiding encountering each other and trying to mop up the last individuals. Well we assumed the groups were homogeneous but we get the impression that some people had joined the wrong group. We gave out 30 devices, 15 of Lovers & 15 of Dancers, but at game end we had two groups of unequal size. If you encounter a group of the opposing team you’d get a flurry of points knocked off, but once done, if you stayed close to these supposed friends, you’d loose no more points. We reckon this leads people to joining groups of people from the opposing team, with the urge to join a group overcoming the players individual logic. This didn’t go down so well during post game feedback when one or two players questioned the unequal group sizes; kind of cuts against American’s sense of rugged individualism.

And that was that for Comfort of Strangers in New York. The game really had a buzz around it, although there was some bemusement about what is was about, with one rumour claiming it was some experiment in psychological control. Overall feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with people really enjoying the initial period of disorientation and quick learning curve, followed by the exciting feeling of jeopardy. The technology held up (despite a really, really annoying bug in the mscape experimental release) and our tweaks to the game design really paid off in that people could play through to the end of the game without the rapid polarisation we saw in London.

So we played the first game of Comfort of Strangers last night at Arleens. Winner. The thronging crowds around the lower east side bar were a perfect camouflage for player so get lost in. We had 40 players + and some great and enthusiastic feedback. Clearly we were coding up to the wire to get a build of the game that jumped through our latest set of hoops. But all those hours felt like a worthy price once the game was up and running.

There were two other games last night mu only one of them worked. One had WiFi headphones and it fell over. The other game was on at the same time as comfort so i didn’t get to play, but it sounds interesting. it was a projection mapping game (joanie’s ears pick up). There was apparently a set of lights which people had to block out with their shadow sounds cool but i didn’t play.

On a fri night this part of the LES is thronged so it was great for comfort, people really got lost in the night. It was a great game to open the festival with people loved it even those who were confused loved the experience. The only downside was i forgot to take my ID so the bouncer derw two big black X’s on my hands and i wasn’t allowed to drink…. Boo