Thanks to everyone who came along to iglab#2, thanks to the PM Studio for hosting us again and thanks to SW Screen for their continued beer sponsorship…

another great night with lots of interesting and excited people.

here’s a quick run down of the games we played + talked about + tinkered with

the potato game was presented to us by mouse over studio (the game will be online towards the end of the month)

we finally got to play our sms game scramble though really i think it would benefit from 30> players at a time

werewolf made its first appearance at the lab this month… i’m sure this popular game will be back

two other games making thier first outing this month were HollaLuLu and HipSync

everyone who turned up early (or on time ) were roped in to helping out so thanks for all those skills guys but an extra special beyond the call of duty big up to Dan Efergan for building a flash app (a shuffle mode mp3 player for HipSync) and then loading it onto a set of ipaq’s all in < an hour.

Hope to see you all next month at the lab but just as a teaser i’d like to let you know that there are some special events coming up. May will see iglab take a theatrical turn and towards the end of the summer there will be an *extended iglab event* more about both of these in due course

/simonJ

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

here are a couple of vids of the first playtest ofholla lu lu at iglab#2

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

Rule set: based on the classic board game Scrabble, Scramble is an SMS enabled big screen game. The challenge is to make words with other players by texting your letter to one of the positions on the board. Players each receive only one letter but they can move it as many times as they like. They need to negotiate with other players to form words on the 15 x 15 board.

Players: > 10 & < 100

Set up: Swarm Toolkit SMS engine, big screen/projector, 1 mobile phone per player.

Duration: can be played in 3-5 min rounds or over much longer periods

Makers/url: Swarm Toolkit