NOTE TO SELF: If there's a good chance the last person I lent my thumbdrive to may have changed its name, make sure to double-check before lending it to Kevin Slavin to use in a presentation.
So, I spent most of the weekend running around the city testing out some of the Big Games that were featured as part of the Come Out and Play festival.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, read this:
A few years ago I was involved in this thing called PacManhattan which was basically a giant game of Pac Man played around Washington Square Park. The idea was to take the concepts behind traditional game design and blow them out - huge gameboards, hundreds of players, games that last for days. The stuff we were working on, combined with a handful of other people thinking and experimenting with large-scale, real-world games fueled some of popularity behind a this genre of "Big Urban Games" (which, more often than not, are amazingly fun and totally change your perception of familiar urban spaces). Anyway, this past weekend, some of the PacManhattan alumn and other ITP superstars put on a Big Urban Games festival called "Come Out and Play" - three days worth of people running around in the streets playing games.
Okay, so over the weekend I got to test out five of the 30 (?) games. Here's a run-down:
Take Space Invaders, project it on the side of a building so that the screen becomes five stories tall and then add some range-finders and video-tracking that allows a player to control the ship by running around - run left and the spaceship moves left, right and the ship moves right, wave your arms and the ship fires. Awesome (and done by Hawk.H from ITP!)
The one-sentence pitch: "kill your enemies with kindness". 116 people opted in to play (!!) which became 58 teams of two. Each team was assigned a weapon and a weakness via text messaging - a phrase you'd say to other teams to kill them or which other teams would say to kill you. Upon killing a team, they'd join your group and you'd inherit their weakness.
Will McD and I teamed up and got assigned "Have a spectacular day" as our weapon and "Get cheered on in a big way" as our weakness. The game board was 10 blocks (48th Street -> 58th Street on Broadway) and with 116 players it was tough to tell if the people on the street were players or tourists. Well designed, as the game had that perfect mix of sneaking looks at people ("are they tourists or players?"), awkwardness ("oops, they're tourists") and reward ("we caught 5 groups and expanded from 2 people to 20"). Read more here. Also, Joystik recap.
We took an early detour from Cruel 2 Be Kind (btw, we had picked up Christian by this point) and jumped in a cab towards Pier 40 to check out Crossroads, Kevin + Frank's GPS phone game (which is being featured as part of The Good Life exhibit exploring play + public spaces).
While Kevin + Frank gave us the pitch, we checked out the rest of the stuff on display at Good Life - most of which was existing or future-planned architecture... [photo credit: Bradley Walker]
... which normally isn't my thing (me = dumb about architecture), but check out this skate park that is being designed in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Seriously, the whole water-park-as skate-park reminds me of something out of SSX. (Randy, didn't you have some video of kids skating here.... or maybe that was an actual abandoned water park? Huh.)Continued...
Pearl Jam show + Air Guitar Nation + Super Mario Theme Park (!!) = Best Weekend Ever?
So this is soooo two weeks ago (er, Wed May 3), but I randomly met up with Mr. Kevin Slavin at Spring Lounge (after LVHRD @ M1-5?) who was hanging out with a bunch of kids who were in town for the GEL conference ("good experience / design" conference).
Special guests included Paul.S from Apple and Nora.A from Burda Media (remember thisnight?). Anyway, the GEL conference sounded like a good time (me = not invited. Sniffle) so Nora + Paul told me to come check out the GEL open-bar after party (which was conveinently sponsored by Google).
So I did. And met up w/ Ms. Nora (and other internet celebs such as Xtina from Glowlab + Lili.C from Microsoft + Jason from Blogger) Thursday after work at Exit Art. Free drinks : good drinks :: Free sandwiches : _______________ (answer: "good sandwiches").
When the free drinks ended, we jumped in a cab and met up w/ Slavin (again) at some random Japanese noodle shop in the East Village (Xtina says: Uminoie)
Where we dined on fine udon (Japanese noodles) and Shochu (Japanese potato vodka?). Read: crunked.
And then busted out some Sing Sing Karaoke Revolution (me = Warrant's "18 and Life"). Bonus points to Xtina and Paul.S for flexing their Japanese fluency in a rendition of "Linda Linda" by the Blue Hearts (awesome, btw).
Thursday. The Wired showroom was throwing another party courtesy of Flavorpill. We got there early (again) thinking it would be packed (free drinks + some fancy DJ) but alas, it was pretty quiet. We downed two freebee Dos Equis, grabbed our new friend Theo and headed over to Spring Lounge.
We randomly met up with Steve Ross on the street and Youngna through the miracle of dodgeball, had 800 beers at Spring Lounge, nearly got in a tussel with some salty fireman at the bar after he called Randy "Skipper", and chatted up these two random girls from Smith College. Grellan rocking his 1am hair at 9:30pm. Theo planning her escape.
Got the text from Slavin that he was hanging out at The Hotel on Rivington so we packed up and headed out.
Had to pose against the firebox on Spring + Mulberry for old time's sake. Listen, I'm like 5'9. This thing is taller than me. And Gabe hurdled it. Legend. (Read the story and watch the video. Come'on, it's Friday!)
ps: #229
The Hotel on Rivington: the fanciest hotel I've ever done been at. We whisked by the bouncers in the front, snuck our way up the elevator and into the lobby bar ("Lobby bar is for guests only, sir") and met up w/ Slavin and his entourage.
Fourtinately for us (them?) most of the high rollers had called it quits already. Passed Jeff Jarvis on the way out. One of the German VCs representing on the right. Dan.M and Mike.S from Team Socialight also saying hello.
Special thanks to the entourage for the champagne and Brooklyn Lagers. Youngna rounded up some of the suits for a photoshoot. (YP, pics?uploaded some pics)
From: Randy
Subject: Re: the cosby show
Date: December 9, 2005 12:32:06 PM EST
To: Dens, Grellan
(last night we were getting these super-cool group portrait photos taken by youngna in the rivington hotel with the rich germans and just before she takesthe picture, dennis whips his shirt off. they had no idea. it was hilarious.)
More photo shoots in the backroom.
They asked us to leave right around here. (Sorry, cute bartender)
So we got in the elevator and went up to the 20th floor. No luck finding the exit to the roof so we just ran around the hotel hallways for a while then left. In bed by 2:30 (ugh).
Woke up this morning to a good 4 inches of snow in NYC with an even better forecast for Vermont. (Two days of snow followed by a warm Saturday = perfect!)
Sorry in advance to all the holiday parties I'm skipping out on this wkd (Google + Spiers' bday + Pete.S + Sarah.B). I hope we can still be friends.
Leaving around 8pm tonight. Wendy's @ Exit 40 by 9:30. Last call at Snow Barn at 12:05am. Five dudes in the hoverpod = Meat Rover. Good times.
About a year ago, I was asked to work on this project called ConQwest - a Big Urban Game featuring 120 kids running around various cities shooting semacodes with camera phones and dragging 20-foot tall inflatable game pieces through the city streets. It was good times (and we did pretty good work... ConQwest highlighted in "One" magazine + won both a Clio and a Silver Pencil from the One Show) - so special thanks to crew who travelled to five cities in five weeks: Kevin + Liz + Frank + Mattia + Naomi + Jess.
Version 2.0 - aka ConQwest 2005 - just finished up and Mike and Dan (pals from grad school) are now part of the ConQwest alumni. There's a wrap party tonight which should be a pretty good time (though probably not as good a time as what went down a year ago)...
ps1: Just looked at the Clio thing for the first time and noticed I'm listed as a "Media Planner" which is awesome since that is what I was supposed to do once I graduated from college anyway (me = majored in Advertising, focus on Media / Account side of things). Ha.
ps2: ConQwest is a registered trademark of Qwest Communications International Inc.
Today = the one year anniversary of PacManhattan. Last year, while I was hustling to finish my grad school thesis project, I was taking another class at ITP called Big Games (taught by Frank Lantz). The goal of the course was take the traditional elements of game design and see what happens when these ideas move off the game board or computer screen and into the real world.
Our final project as a class was a life-size game of Pac Man played out in the city grid around Washington Square Park. We had players in the street racing around, constantly reporting their location back to a central control room. Each person in the control room was in touch with one of the players in the street, telling them where to go and what do to. Player location data was tracked using software - Pac Man was allowed to know where the ghosts were, but the ghosts were not allowed to know where Pac Man was. It worked out pretty well. That's me in the Pac Man costume during the first game. A week later the game was featured in the NYTimes Sunday Styles section.
Anyway, that was a year ago. This year Frank invited me + Kevin Slavin (from ConQwest fame) and Joost (a phD student at Columbia) to sit in on the class' final presentations. There wasn't much sitting in - groups in the class had created three games, two of which we got to play.
First up: Payphone Warriors. 15 people divided into 3 teams. Each player was given 10 quarters and a map of the surrounding NYU area, highlighting payphone locations. The goal is to generate as many points as possible by "capturing" a payphone for an extended period of time. To capture a phone, all you need to do is make a call from it (hence the quarters). For every minute you control a phone, you earn points. If someone makes a call from that phone after you do, they now control that phone and start generating points.
Hey, ConQwest - the camera phone + semacode + scavenger hunt + big urban game I was working on last fall (remember? 5 cities in 5 weeks?) was just featured on the cover (!!) of "One, a Magazine" (an advertising / design mag). Rumor has it we're up for a One Show Award. (click pics for more info)
After 5 consecutive weekends of ConQwest, we finished up in Phoenix and took a field trip over to the Phoenix Internation Raceway for some NASCAR action.
slavin
