Last Friday I popped along to Playful in Conway Hall. Playful is a one day conference about games and play of all kinds, not just computer games. One with very few mentions of 'gamification'. This years theme was introduced by an enthusiastic Toby Barnes as scifi and disappointment in the future. The first speaker Al Robertson explained what this has to do with play, describing scifi as playing with possible futures and scenarios.

Living with machines

Louise Downe spoke about bathrooms. In particular the frustration of automatically flushing toilets that flush unexpectedly or refuse to be flushed twice. When machines don't behave the way we expect them we make up our own set of rules that we think govern them. As she said: "Intimacy with machines really requires trust, trust that they think in the same way that we do".

Richard Lemarchand on the other hand decided to deliberately manipulate the rules we expect games to follow. In the game Uncharted when the player is in a calm village they wanted a way to slow down the game and change the tone. Without warning or explicit notification the 'punch' button changed to instead give a handshake to a villager. Only players attempting to punch friendly passerby's would notice this. He pointed out that “people are not necessarily mean, they just want to see what happen if they try things out”, pressing buttons just to see what happens.

Games for kids

Chris O'Shea gave a hurried overview of interactive and digital toys intended for children, appearing on stage earlier in the day than expected because his wife was in labour. To get away from the current games for children which have emphasis on consumption he's creating a constructive iPhone game. The app shows an interactive top down view of a variety of vehicles. Cars, fire engines, rockets. The player has to create the vehicle with it's moving wheels from cardboard or lego to complete the game.

Emil Ovemar of Toca Boca showed the premiere of their new iPhone game for kids which involves frying a broccoli. It looks really good. They create games that encourage "Make believe" play and they do it very well. I spent the train ride home giving a lion a haircut on my phone as a result.

Low-fi pretending

My favourite talk of the day was by Matt Ward, of DWFE on their project Green=Boom. They were interested in the people who design bombs for films and decided to build their own fake bomb. Green=Boom recreates the tense 'Which wire do I cut?' scene from films using a balloon that bursts when the wrong wire is cut. It's brilliantly lowfi, made with bits of cardboard and tape, but is still enough to suspend disbelief. Here's a video of folks trying disarm the device.

In summary, Playful was lovely as usual with a mix of differing perspectives on play. For more on the event there are nice writeups by Nicolas Nova, Kars Alfrink & Wired, photos on flickr, a storify and a liveblog.