Swarm Toolkit games at iglab

So we finally go play our SMS games. The two we played yesterday were Scramble and RGBargy. Actually we played RGBargy with some people at the PM Studio during the day, we did play Scramble at iglab though. The game went well but im pleased to be moving away from this area of testing. Moving now into testing using urban games and mScapes. Me and Duncan had two other games we were play testing at iglab too. HipSync (Previously called LipSync) and HollaLuLu both got their first outing last night. Both were pretty successful. It was amazing to see how quickly people developed a visual language to communicate with each other in HipSync. For the first few rounds infact I thought we'd made it too easy. The tracks we selected were all from pretty distinct genres, Rock, Electronic, Celtic and er Chris Isaak. We played it for about 5-6 rounds decreasing the duration each time till the last round when people had 5s to get into thier groups *and they could do it…*. HollaLuLu was a winner too. The spectacle of a city square filled with people hollering and running and trying to find the others in their group was truly beautiful. But for me the greatest strength of this game was the feeling of insurgency. The way the players took ownership of the public spaces they entered and the palpable presence they had in each of the spaces they entered. This is a lot to do with the numbers. We had 16 people playing last night so there were a mix of moments when people were safely wrapped in the blanket of the crowd and moments when people felt exposed and foolish. I think games like this function best when the density of the playing population allows people to experience both these social relationships. Perhaps feeling just a little foolish at some point helps to enhance the pleasure provided by the crowd and its legitimacy. Like Melvil's Ishmael says as he lies in bed "because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast".

anyway here's a short vid

/simonJ