thanks to all those who came along to iglab#3

And as usual thanks to our supporters, the PM Studio and SW Screen.

This months theme was feedback which meant i at least got to collect up game feedback cards from everyone who played.

There were a number of other games on the night bit the big hit was undoubtedly Holla Lu Lu #2. It has the same rules as Holla Lu Lu but with an extra stage added at the end. heres a diagram to explain all…

clearer ? No? well ok the second stage was somewhat manic and confusing. On finding all thier members of thier team, each player gets to open their envelope. inside is a set of instructions or relationships. for example, if you were a tarzan then you mght have to find cuckoo’s and join up with them. you might also have to hunt car horns.(a tap on the shoulder counts as a catch) and you would also have to stay away from the police sirens as they are hunting you. this of course all gets muddied when you do join up with another team of get caught or catch another player. but the in short the game gives you licence to run and shout and play in the streets. what could be better.

next month iglab will be taking a theatrical turn. in collaboration with mayfest we will be presenting a series of games across the city. there will be games as performance and performance as games. This means there will be a slighlty expanded time slot too.

iglab#4 will take place on the 21st and 22nd of may.

if you would like to submit a game for iglab please contact simon.iglab@urbanantics.net

/simonJ

here’s a vid

holler lu lu from iglab 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.

The next iglab event will be on tue the 15th of april at 7pm in the PM Studio

Heres a link to a map http://tinyurl.com/3m89mw

This month well be looking at our games through the lens of feedback

What kind of feedback do the games use ?

How does feedback affect the game play ?

What role does feedback have in a players experience ?

etc…

Also we’ll be starting a new feedback/commenting process on the night so we can start building up the research side of the lab.

More on this in the night

This months games line up is still to be finalised but heres a sneak preview

comfort of strangers: a swarm toolkit game about finding forming
groups in public spaces using bluetooth as a sensor

Holla LuLu #2: well like Holla LuLu but with an additional game phase…

More play test games to follow
but there will also be werewolf, wii, xbox360(plenty of feedback with
guitar hero no doubt) hanging around for the odd quiet moment

don’t forget to register so i know how much beer to buy

http://iglab.eventwax.com/iglab3/register

/simon