No Talking

photo Liz Milner

Still having problems with the SMS game tests. We had an attempt at the drinks evening but a bunch of co-coincidental bugs thwarted us (our fault for not resisting the temptation to tweak between software testing and launch). Luckily Simon J had cooked an idea up with Duncan Speakman that gave us a chance to actually try something live. Duncan was keen to test out a few ideas we had in common and his insight was to keep it simple and to follow our instincts. Good advice. No Talking is an mscape experienced in a group and was first run with various PM Studio residents and guests on 27th Feb.

The piece strung together a series of tasks which players were invited to perform at given locations around the PM Studio. The objective of the piece was to encourage group coordination out of simple instructions given to individuals and without verbal communication. Feedback from players was positive, they enjoyed the collaboration and the cheeky instructions. The development team had their own highlights: Simon J the marching in step across the Pero's bridge; Duncan the pointing at the most beautiful building; Simon E amused by Ben Templeton counting the group in carrying out the instruction: 'No one else knows it but you are the leader. Lead the group to the falafal stand'. Sadly everyone immediately sussed out that each had exactly the same instruction.

photo Liz Milner

Of course, specific insights into swarming were hard to come by but the value of No Talking was probably more to do with the practicalities of staging group experience. It also confirmed that our conviction that pervasive media experience has to be mediated over audio channels. Any screen based media simply gets in the way of interacting with the physical environment.

Finally, No Talking was a first chance for us to get to grips with mscape. We are working with HP labs on this project, specifically with a prototype version of mscape which includes network comms; Tom Melamed from HP Labs has been holding our hand with this. We didn't get into network data with No Talking, we wanted to keep it simple for our first outing. That will have to wait for the next stage of the project…..news of that here next time.