…dear boy, events. Lying about the future into the tannoy of the Arnolfini; running around Bristol chasing a giant ball around an infinite pitch (and making my debut as a commentator for Korean Lazer Ball); watching Quantic’s new film and seeing him trainspot records afterwards; meeting lots of local authority people who were really keen to think about the future; sorting out my dissertation and getting started finally. Lots of other things.

Right now I’ve just booked a place in the airport car park (am off to the coast near Málaga for a few days) and I’m transferring Tito Paris to my phone for the flight. One bid for something interesting to get off in the morning, and I’m done for this week. And when I get back I should talk about some of these things in a bit more detail.

I’ll probably start with the Ghosts of Birthdays Present, though. If you’re in Bristol over the next couple of weeks and fancy helping out some of those marooned in the hereafter, let me know in the comments.

I’ve been talking to various people about a game, Resonance, that involves arranging yourself in shapes with other people and casting spells using your bodies as glyphs on the nodes of the pentagram, weaving superstition and magic and the occult together through space and concrete. They’re not talking about exactly the same thing, of course, but Dan Hill and Matt Jones are lumped together by Bruce Sterling as being heralds of a new pervasive urban alchemy, an open sorcery revealed through lumps of plastic and metal. I’m encouraged by the sympathy between Resonance and their more thoughtful perspectives, but I kind of still wish I was the only person making Kircherian links between these technologies and older ways of knowing the invisible. I am rubbish at sharing.

You are apprentice weather gods, waiting to do your final test. This is a practical test: just as you’ll have to once you’re a proper weather god, you’ll need to listen carefully to the local shipping forecast and make sure all the weather in it happens where it said it would happen – all before the next broadcast, in an hour’s time. And you’ll want to make sure that when the weather happens in a region, it happens because of you and not a rival team of apprentices. The weather can only happen once, and you only get the marks if you made it happen.

So you’ll need to gather round the wireless and listen carefully to the locations and the sort of weather that’s due to happen there. Then you’ll need to plot a route through the regions mentioned in the forecast, trying to find a path that gets you the greatest number of marks. Do you want to race through a series of consecutive regions that are easy to cover but are pretty low-scoring? Or are you going to race between the two regions at the opposite ends of town to pick up the high marks from squalls, turning to gales later?

Once you get to a region, if you’ve arrived in good time, you’ll see a Commuter. Your job is to do the correct weather to the Commuter and take a picture as proof. You’ll need these pictures of Commuters in their sunny handkerchief hats and rain-soaked macs to give to the examiners in order to pick up your marks.

Straightforward, right? Listen to the forecast, choose a route, throw buckets of weather over the Commuters, get the marks and get ready to listen to the next broadcast. But you’ll have to keep an SMS ear out for the odd plan-changing Weather Advisory. And is it your imagination, or is the Forecaster slowly showing signs of having been in his cupboard for too long?

I just got in from iglab 7, or thereabouts, trying out the first go on Cargo, simon & simon‘s new game. I’m a bit sore from running, and my feet are wet, but I think it’s a winner – some sort of impossible mix of noir, paranoia and mission impossible films starring Tintin.

We started in a pub, as did other teams, with the location given to us by text message (“they know who you are and want you dead”), in which we had to find an envelope to get started. Our host was pretty into the whole thing despite knowing less than we thought she did: she was acting like she was playing us the whole time, though we found out later she was pretty much improvising and hadn’t been asked to do most of what she did. Watching us look behind pictures and barrels behind the bar must have pretty amusing for someone who’d been asked just to look after an envelope and hand it over when asked. But I’m ahead of myself.

The game started with a call to a specific member of the group telling them where the cargo we had to safeguard was, and where we had to take it: the envelope had more information. Specifically, there was a boat waiting for us at Castle Park, at 8.45, that would take us to safety if we had a florin each for passage, plus one more for the cargo with some ID. We had to earn the florins for the journey by scavenging them from various locations (hinted at by location-specific photographs) or by busking on Corn Street. Some of us went busking, hiring instruments from Mother’s Ruin with the tokens included, while the rest went scavenging or up to Stoke’s Croft to see about some fake ID.

Long story short, running down St Nicks Market playing your own chase music is pretty much good times, even if hanging out with an assassin wearing a Homburg called the Moose and trying to pass yourself off as some other people can get a bit nervy. After calling it a day busking, and taking a rain-soaked detour up to Trenchard Street to hang around the car park in a fruitless search for fake coins, we regrouped ready to storm the ferry point with our cargo protected by our sacrificial flanks. The thrill of being ambushed by the Moose, the diversionary conversations about Florence and shoes and who you can really trust, the sense of achievement when we finally reached the boat with our cargo in one piece – these were things left untouched by the constant rain. Good game, and tightly planned, though there were the usual first-run glitches. Nothing major, though, and it finished with a Watershed full of wet happy people talking about how much fun it had been.

What always amazes me about these sorts of games is how well they reveal the willingness of people to pretend and join in with make-believe: how ready everyone is to down tools and play as if they were in charge of themselves again. There was a real sense of jeopardy within the teams, a fear in those marked for death that’s hard to say is pretend. But more important than the thrills was the way it bent the line between what was real and what was not. Our landlady had handed us a coin we assumed was a game florin but was actually a florin from elsewhere that had found its way into the till. Boundaries between real and pretend are pretty fragile when you test them, and the ways coincidence or happenstance take on new meanings when you give them a new context are pretty unsettling.

Good times, as always from iglab and simon, and if you get a chance to play in February I’ll see you there.

The countries of _______land and _________ia have a tense, glacial relationship: while not at war, diplomatic relations are strained, and public expressions of frosty goodwill are belied by the covert jockeying for advantage between respective espionage agencies. The two are not equal, however: where ___land is a free and open democracy, proud of its moral and military superiority, ____ia is a police state whose borders permit only a few privileged or innocuous individuals to pass in or out, whose citizens can neither trade nor travel freely,where every telephone conversation is accompanied by the silence of another listener, and strangers are feared and mistrusted.

Despite the differences between them, there are still things that are prized by both sides, of course: money, influence, knowledge. It was in pursuit of this last item that agents from ___ia kidnapped a woman known only to you by her codename, the Princess. A brilliant young scientist, her work on macro-scale harmonic resonance led directly to the formation of the elite group of which you are a member. As the government of ___ia have long suspected (but your own has never confirmed), her work is more than purely theoretical — using the discoveries of her and her team, the covert agency to which you belong have developed ways of creating and manipulating special frequencies, frequencies which can be combined together to cause sympathetic vibrations in objects that cause them to move, to change shape, even to shatter.

This last ability is going to prove crucial if she is to be brought back to the safety and protection of ___land. Cruelly imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon, guarded day and night by crack troops sworn to uphold the glory of ___ia, her rescue would still be a straightforward matter for the special forces of ___land, were it not for the cage of solid crystal that surrounds her. If this were broken, our special forces would make short work of the guards and bring her safely home in the time it takes to raise a flag and sing a verse of the national anthem. But the crystal is impervious to all common tools of destruction. The cage’s makers laugh at sledgehammers and chisels, at diamond drill bits and laser technology: the weapon has not been made, they believe, that will release their prize. Such is their confidence that a mood of complacency is even rumoured to have infected the shock squadrons manning her gaol.

Their confidence is misplaced. The agency of which you are a member has the skill and knowledge necessary to shatter the crystal into a thousand impotent shards. All that is needed is for the members of your cadre to align themselves in the appropriate geometric figure for the frequencies you generate thus to sing in harmony with the molecular structure of the crystal cage and so break it into tiny pieces. Your vital mission is to journey to ___ia, arrange yourselves in the pattern designed by the boffins in the back room, and show the Princess that her work has reached its full potential: after which, of course, the heavy mob move in and it’s back to the old country for tea and medals.

Things being what they are, diplomatically speaking, getting into ___ia isn’t as straightforward as it might be, and your team have had to use the only channels available to them. At the time of writing, the only way to travel between the two countries is as part of some sort of cultural exchange programme. You, and the rest of your team, are all going to ____ia on a bird-watching visa, and at your every waking moment will be accompanied by a team of ‘cultural advisors’ intent on steering you towards the rarest and most sought-after specimens.

Make no mistake: this is a tricky business. How are your team going to find sufficient time to align yourselves in the necessary fashion without alerting your hosts to the fact that you may be more than simple ornithologists? Will your minders realise your intent, and double their efforts to make you stand where you don’t wish to stand? And — perhaps most perturbing of all — can the human brain withstand the frequencies needed to see this mad caper to its conclusion?