The above is a picture of a piece by Niklaus Rüegg, set in a village on the border between France and Belgium.

I want to make a game with this idea, handing out the same 16 frames to teams with cameras and imagination and seeing what they bring back. Everyone gets a “Suddenly..!”, a “POW!” explosion, a “Meanwhile, back at base..”, and a “But – “, and maybe a few dry-erase speech balloons, and an afternoon to go and use the city as their source. Maybe commuters crowding onto a train could be recast as henchmen rushing to their stations. Or a flock of pigeons could be accompanied by a single “Fly, my pretties!”. Or a frame could be strapped to a bike for authentic speed lines.

I’ve got no idea how you’d judge it. Perhaps you’d get credit for smuggling in certain locations, or for particular themes, or for managing to subvert comic convention, or just for running around town in spandex dressed as Captain Super. Perhaps the best one would be from the team of film students who make a comic out of other people making comics, though that could just as likely be the worst. Maybe the most popular one would be a collaboration between a six-year-old and their grandpa.

Anyway, I’d like to see it, and if I make it back to Bristol in time for the next Igfest I might see if I can do something about it.

It’s Igfest again in Bristol, and they’re asking for game submissions inspired by English folk traditions. I won’t get to be there, which is a shame, and I’ve missed the deadline for submissions, but you never know, someone might be short of a game and these might come in handy.

Morris Minor dancing

Wearing fake Morris minors (Bernie Clifton ostrich style) players reverse park, move off and negotiate a mini-roundabout (playing the part of a maypole, representing the sacred circles of a more pastoral England), to the sound of the pipe and tabor/picnic hamper, while a fool dressed as John Betjeman recites directions to the nearest out-of-town Tescos in rhyming couplets.

Tam Lin

Following the script of the ballad Tam Lin, players have to hold on to something they love as the opposed faery team change it into a roaring lion, a black biting dog, a black hissing snake and a bar of iron (or other modern variants).

Knights asleep under the hill

Players have to creep through the circle of sleeping knights, to reach the chalice without sounding the bell that wakes the sleepers.

Mayhem!

Players run through neighbourhood in spontaneous fashion, carrying flaming torches and hurling stones at foreigners. Winner is the last person hung at the county Assizes.

Smugglers Moon

Two teams, smugglers and customs, each have to infiltrate the other team by dressing in their costume and passing themselves off as something they’re not. Only problem is there’s a limited number of costumes, and they all start the game on someone else: your task is to persuade one of the opposing team to swap costumes with you, or leave them no alternative (bribery, threats of harm, etc.) Winning team is the first team to be swapped, at which point the customs agents (previously smugglers) arrest them all and ship them off to Exeter for the hangings.

Knights of the Conference Room Table

Players are seated around a circular table and each try to add an agenda point (recent decrease in chivalrous acts, increase in littering e.g. swords left in stones all over, lack of virgins for unicorn hunts). Winner is the first to persuade the anonymous Green Facilitator to call a comfort break.

Exscallybur

Find the lady hiding a sword down her tracksuit.

All yours! Looking forward to seeing the Igfest pictures, sure it’ll be another fantastic time.

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.

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?