This programme ran from 2008-2010 at the Pervasive Media Studio. For more projects like these please visit the Studio website.

Projects 2008

Company Profile

Since taking part in Media Sandbox, Simon Johnson and Simon Evans founded Slingshot (formerly Simon Games). Slingshot make street and pervasive games, which often utilise technology. They offer game consultancy; run iglab and igfest; and produce games for brands, NGOs and public sector organisations.

Journal Authors

Simon Evans

Simon Johnson

Swarm

by Simon Evans and Simon Johnson

The Swarm project culminated in the Comfort of Strangers – a street game in which players scored points by identifying and keeping close to their team mates, whilst avoiding the other team. Players carried Hewlett-Packard iPaq PDAs that were set to detect other devices nearby and drive player's scores up or down.

Influenced by Swarm Intelligence - a type of artificial intelligence based on the group behaviour of decentralised systems such as insects - Simon Johnson and Simon Evans explore street games that connect people locally to promote social effect and solve problems. Games can be informative, thought-provoking or just plain fun. Drawing on the history of storytelling, theatre and cinema, games have the power to provide rich, and often moving experiences.

Simon Johnson and Simon Evans have since formed Slingshot, a company that creates social game experiences: slingshoteffect.co.uk

Journal Entries

Journal Entries

No Talking Video

Mon 14 Apr, 2008

No Talking from iglab on Vimeo.

More

Swarm Toolkit games at iglab

Wed 12 Mar, 2008

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.

More

No Talking

Tue 11 Mar, 2008

photo Liz Milner

More

Game tests

Thu 21 Feb, 2008

The aim has been to create some quick game experiences to test out some of the concepts we outlined in the first weeks of the project. We wanted something simple that would involve individual agents and objectives but also the possibility of ad hoc collaboration. These were not scientific experiments but intuitive investigations into game play and social groupings.

More

Book work

Tue 5 Feb, 2008

We met for the first proper day's work back at the beginning of January at the Evans Studio farmstead in the Forest Of Dean. After dealing with the practicalities - setting up a work schedule, responsibilities and objectives - we started in on the theory and boy is there plenty of that. We are looking at non-linear dynamics within pervasive media systems, specifically swarms.

More

Pages