Skyberries and Voidmelons or Voidberries and Skymelons

NaNoWriMo starts soon, and as I've been reading Twisty Little Passages, I'm vaguely contemplating writing some kind of interactive fiction/text adventure type thing for it.

[Poll #1474777]

A talk at the ICA on the 29th of February: Fun and Games: The Gallery as Adult Play Centre

I've hung upside down on a climbing frame in an art gallery in Amsterdam and I know that many people played on the slides at the Tate Modern in London, so when I heard that the ICA's founding president, Hubert Read, described the ICA at its inception as an "adult play centre", I was inclined to agree that art galleries can be thought of that.

The talk at the ICA included various speakers, including curators from the Tate Modern, and a number of interesting points were discussed, but no conclusions really seemed to be reached. A video of Oh What a Lovely Whore was shown and then Sebastian Boyle spoke about it. Oh What a Lovely Whore was an exhibition, which looked more like a party really, that happened in 1965 and seemed to involve people getting drunk and smashing up pianos to turn them into new forms of instrument. Tino Sehgal's 2007 This Success/This Failure exhibition was also talked about, which simply involved a gallery full of actual children playing.

A few notes:
- "Play is crucial in sublimating aggression" - Read.
- "Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays" - Schiller.
- What happens when participation is forced?
- Being subversive by not playing.
- Invigilators at art galleries hinder play.
- You are not allowed to be delirious.
- Playing is not the same as gaming.

Last week, I went to the Sandpit, "a project of Hide and Seek: London's First Pervasive Games Festival", which took place in Shunt. Inside London Bridge Station, there are a few actual streets, which I didn't even realise were streets, and in one of those streets, was a little doorway which led to an incredible underground club. It was dark in places and the venue seemed gigantic and dotted with random things, like a milk-cart, which people sat upon, and a large treasure chest, which seemed empty when I opened its heavy lid.

I played the Gossip Game and pretended to be a cross-dressing electrician, but failed to gossip enough to reach many conclusions.

Pieces of paper were passed around that may have involved biting and games such as this certainly seemed reminiscent of the playground. I remember a particular playtime when a whole school of children were turned into bats.

mikej_uk and I got into a discussion about unethical games from the 1980s and tried to think up our own. A whole range of strange games were available for the Atari 2600. such as the infamous Custer's Revenge, where Custer was supposed to have sex with a Native American woman tied to a pole, but also Bachelor Party, and Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em. As a child, I remember playing a quite explicit text adventure, but that seems quite normal in comparison to those games.

imomus also commented on the Hide and Seek Festival and pervasive games: Pervasive urban gaming: count me out, and in and raises some interesting points. He also links to a book review of Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool, which links to an article about a playground for the over 60s. My parents seem happy to still play in playgrounds that were designed for the under 60s and I hope I still will be when I am 60.

Hide and Seek then wrote a response: Thinking in (and out) of Pervasive Urban Gaming and also raises some points that have also been mentioned in some of the papers I've been reading about pervasive games.

City of Sound also give a lengthy description of the street of the future: The street as platform.

I've also been reading about card-games such as Gloom: The Game of Inauspicious Incidents and Grave Consequences (via fridgemagnet) and wearable electronics, such as the Lilypad Arduino and satin_candy's Catbag. I've also been reading about the Maida Vale sand creature and hope one appears in Highgate.

I went to the Digital Geography in a Web 2.0 World conference and listened to a talk on "Web 2.0, Neogeography and Virtual Worlds" by Andrew Hudson-Smith, which showed a demonstration of MapTube, which allows you to mix up maps, and apparently all maps created on there also appear in Second Life. He also talked about how games can use visualisations of cities and gave out a booklet on "Digital Geography: Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments", which tells you how to make photographic planets (such as by using Flexify), creating photo-overlays in Google Earth (using PhotoOverlay Creator). I also listened to a talk on "3D Visualisation: From Lab to Field", which showed demonstrations of software that could tell you exactly what mountain you were looking at. I often confuse mountains.

I have also been doing some work and reading papers about pervasive games, immersion and presence in games, and gameflow. I just need to actually write my project proposal now,

Adventures? Well, robinbloke and I sat on strange stools that had tails and drank smoothies in the Rainforest cafe, amongst the fake vines, and the constant announcements saying, "Your adventure is about to begin", so perhaps it has.