What a blast. So much to see and do, didn’t manage half of it and what I did I’m still digesting. If they manage to do it again next year, get yourself down there. Look! Korean Lazer Ball!

And here’s Mercury, shortly after yet another rule change, this time one about making animal noises:

I’m still reeling from seeing the dedication of the iglab crew and their associated plotters. You are all superheroes. What an effort. Taking over the disused bar next to Watershed to use as a base, shipping props and people from Europe and the US, persuading people to run around like loonies making animal noises: play never looked like such hard work.

Personal highlights: txtFiles, Comfort of Strangers as usual, playing HipSync in the Lousiana, seeing the Moose come home, watching Mercury and KLB. Regrets: not making it out for Journey, which sounded as if it properly had people confused about the difference between reality and fiction (whole other post on this, I think: early AR stuff had people worried about the effect on people’s minds, but even this low-tech competition had people scared in police cells and clambering across Temple Meads roof), missing Rainbow Rain, failing to get three people together to try Dan‘s mScape game and generally feeling as if I was arriving ten minutes late for everything. Got to be in it to win it.

Harpbeat went well, I think: enough people joined in, which I wasn’t sure about, and no-one left or looked fed up. In fact we had a pretty good time running around on Queens Square for half an hour (one girl said it was the best game she played that weekend, which from a six-year-old means something). So most of my fears about it not working didn’t come to pass. But I’m still not sure it’s very robust as a game: it seems to be a lot harder than I thought for people to move around, while the singing thing seems a little pointless in some ways. If people can do it then why not just sing a song? And if they can’t then it’s just frustrating. And as Lyndsay pointed out, people don’t think of their note as a particular note, more that it’s the one that comes between the notes either side: people define their note to sing in the context of the other notes in the harp. Which Frege ought to have told me, really.

So I’m looking at a bit of a change of direction, though I think it might involve a lot of soldering. Watch this space.

Thanks Simon! And Simon! And Duncan! And Clare! And Helens, both of them! And all the lovely stewards! And everyone who joined in! See you next year!

A game for an even number of people

Mechanic
Two people make up a string: when the invisible line between them is crossed or broken, they both sound their note. Each end of a string should choose the same note to sing: sounds are fine, but words and complex phrases are probably going to complicate things a bit. Groups of strings together make up a harp: if someone walks between all the pairs of the players (or plucks the strings of the harp) at the right speed then a tune gets played.

Building blocks

• Strings (pairs of players: one pair is one string)
• Harps (groups of strings. For the moment let’s aim for no more than 5 strings per harp)
• A plucker (non-player: their job is to walk a continuous and predictable path at a regular rate, around which harps arrange themselves)
• Conductor (non-player: their job is to set the tune that the harps are trying to produce and to generally organise things)
• An audience (made up of all the other strings who aren’t in a harp just now, plus anyone passing)

Story
The usual arrangement for concerts is to have clever players and stupid instruments. In Harpbeat, the instrument is clever and the player is the mindless one. Players make up harps, which have to work to make sure the player plays the right tunes on them.
[The point of this is to ensure that the harps have some kind of pressure or tension they need to resolve (in order to make this a gamey activity), without being in direct competition with the plucker (because after all he could just walk away and win, if his intent was to thwart their efforts). Having an inexorable and non-negotiable force to work around should produce enough frustration/tension to make it fun, without setting up an empty competition between the harps and the plucker.]

Gameplay
The conductor sings the tune for the first harp to try and mimic. Harps have to:

• Choose notes for each string
• Work out how they’ll arrange themselves around the plucker
• Go and do it

The audience respond appropriately. The other harps have a turn at the same tune (with their audiences responding in kind), after which the conductor decides which harp got the most positive response from the audience (the winner!).

This basic model of gameplay can be made more challenging, which would probably be welcome after people have had a go at the first tune. For example, tunes could use the same note more than one time (conductor adjusting gameplay) or they could be played faster (the plucker adjusting gameplay), or just be more complicated (conductor again).

Making it harder (variables to tweak)
The factors that members of strings have to balance when aiming for the correct tune are:

• Pitch (can you sing the sound you’re meant to?)
• Tune complexity (can you remember it? How many notes are in it? What does that mean for your performance?)
• Location (are you standing in the right place in relation to the rest of your harp?)
• Speed (what happens if the plucker speeds up?)

Of these, the best candidates for tweakery are probably speed and complexity, given that these dictate the others, or at least make them harder. Speed is a pretty straightforward variable to tweak (the plucker just walks faster) and the only thing to say about that is probably to warn pluckers not to go too fast without realising; don’t tweak it by accident. Tune complexity needs looking at more carefully, I think.

The main things that go to make up the complexity of a tune here are length (testing the memory and the amount of time people have to not screw up for) and the number of notes involved. The number of notes involved itself complicates things in two ways: more notes (more people) makes harps larger, and so more complicated to manage, and repeating notes makes greater logistical demands on the harps, as they scramble in a confined space (the plucker’s path) to get themselves in the right places in time. Tune complexity probably gives us the best opportunity for structuring the experience of the players, and as messing around with too many variables gets difficult, let’s limit the size of harps straight away and aim for no more than 5 notes in a song for the moment.
So.
First tune: uses 5 notes, no repeated notes (close encounters), 5 notes sound
Second tune: uses 5 notes, first and last note the same, 6 notes sound
Third tune: uses 5 notes, first note is the same as the third note, 6 notes sound.
Needs a bit of work. For example, do we want a silent string, to act as a rest/”note-off” option allowing us to repeat notes immediately (allowing us to do twinkle twinkle?)

The other stuff
Costumes: does the conductor dress up? Does he have a melodica instead of a baton? Does the plucker have headphones in, listening to something else? Can we get hold of an electric wheelchair and sellotape the joystick in a circle, letting the plucker go to sleep/be unconscious/be wearing a blindfold?

(or, the harpbeat of the city: some notes on a game for igfest).

Look at the wires radiating from a telegraph pole: imagine what chord would be struck if they each sounded as an aeroplane flew behind them.

Two people are ends of a string: they agree on a sound and when something passes between them, they each make the sound. If the obstacle dwells between them for a while, the sound could be long. If it moves on rapidly, the sound might be short. Both ends of the string should make the same sound (though perhaps once players are adept they might be able to be the ends of several strings, having to keep watch on more than one connection: another game).

The string could move itself, being plucked by stationary objects as the two ends race past them (so a pair of players could pass either side of a series of lamposts or pillars, varying their speed to produce different rhythms), but I think a more rewarding experience would be given when the ends are stationary and something outside the players’ control plucks them: a boat, a convoy of buses, a crowd of people.

So that’s the basic mechanic: two people making a noise when the line between them is broken. What can you do with that?

I don’t think it would be practical to assume any confidence in pitching a note, or in musical theory, or even in singing in tune, at least to begin with. So perhaps the first game is just to stand in a line, each string choosing (or being given) notes of a recognisable tune, or even a scale, and the game co-ordinator walking along it at different speeds, to give everyone a chance to practice.

Once that’s lost its novelty, perhaps the game is for a group of strings to arrange themselves in a way that means a third party plays them: watching for someone walking purposefully across the square and taking up appropriate positions in time for the song to be heard. This isn’t a winning game: the satisfaction comes from having created something together, in having used the constraints of the game (sing this note, don’t voice until something external plays you) to produce a melody.

That’s one game on its own: perhaps there’s an igfest theme, a tiny music of five notes (think windows startup or the Close Encounters motif) that people can perform, listening to each other as they look for a walking plectrum in the crowd.

If we’re assuming no particular musical talent, though, for us to be able to use different notes reliably we need a cue, some kind of pitch-pipe. Perhaps one on people’s phones? Could be an mp3 on phones, could be an app generating tones.

Once they know what note to sing people can do chords! If you find people with tshirts/markers that match yours, you can get together and sing your notes only to discover that together you are Jazz and do-wop all rolled into one amazing creative ball.

There’s another possiblity: planning a sound, if the urban activity near you is regular enough. Take an afternoon to decide on your sound, then place your strings so that when people move they play you: turns a singing/performative game into one with some strategy and planning.

It’s late: time for bed. Sure there’s something in here to uncover.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, recently. More specifically, about how we perceive it, and relate to it, and talk about it, and I’ve been wondering if we wouldn’t benefit from having more ways of making it visible. I don’t mean just ways of representing it passing: clocks are good at that, and there are plenty of ways the passage of time reveals itself that are transparent. Rather, I’ve been thinking about how to make the implicit passage of time explicit, to break something that seems temporally static into pieces that make it clear to us that time was passing when it happened, whether that stasis in time appears to us because something is instantaneous or because it seems to persist as part of our surroundings, the context in which temporally more active things happen.

From one of our meeting rooms you can see some trees standing in the flagstones outside the old IMAX building. The trees are young, with a slim trunk and a clear head of leaves on top, like a child’s drawing: the leaves are large and well defined, and if the sun shines brightly enough the trees cast clear shadows. I was struck, recently, by the indissoluble link between the tree and the shadow, and thought how satisfying it would be to be hold the shadow in place as the sun moved slowly round, breaking that link. As the shadows of the other trees crept across the flagstones, the discrepancy between them and the one shackled in place would become more visible: the angle between them would tell you how long it had been held in place.

Not literally possible, of course, and probably for the best. But I thought perhaps there might be a way to mimic this, to fix the shadow on the ground somehow so that it would be clear that wherever the shadow might be at present, at some point in history it had been elsewhere. You can get hold of photosensitive paper fairly easily, I think, but I wanted something that would act faster than paper. At the moment, I’m thinking about evaporation. I want to find some kind of mixture that would stain the ground at about the same rate that it evaporates, so that all you have to do to fix a shadow would be to spill this fluid over it and wait. If the sun was particularly strong that day, the shadow would be sharp and defined: if it was cloudy, or windy perhaps, it would be blurry and indistinct. The shadow would tell you not just that time had passed but also something about the weather: from a shape on the ground you could read the history of the sky.

The thing I like most about this idea is that you could make pictures by fixing overlapping shadows, if you had an object with the right shape in the way of the sun. I’d love to hand out vials of this shadow fixing elixir with a picture and GPS co-ordinates: from the angle of the shadows in the picture you’d have to work out when to pour the liquid on the ground in order to reproduce it. Or perhaps you’d just have a set of times and a location, and when you stepped back from the shadows you’d fixed over the course of the morning, a message would reveal itself. Lots of games. But in all of them, you’d have to think about the relationship between time and the world, and when you see it and when you don’t, and that would be, I think, a good thing.

Spent the last couple of evenings playing games in the sun and the rain with Interesting Games Lab: snakes and ladders with a pantone twist in a multistorey car park, searching for lovers and dancers and hiding behind pillars around Harbourside, training human dolphins to do tricks using only applause, playing werewolf and standing in the square playing Geometry Wars on the side of a building. Fun fun fun.

The Comfort of Strangers game is playing at the Come Out and Play festival in NYC in a couple of weeks: I’m hoping they’ll bring it along to Hide and Seek in London at the end of June. There was something kind of magical about weaving a team together from nothing more than proximity, and playing a game outside gives you new eyes for a familiar landscape: in the end, though, I think I just like running around and hiding.