Play And Out Come
Wednesday, October 10, 2007

I've been meaning to blog about Come Out & Play, the urban gaming festival in Amsterdam (immediately following the unfeasibly expensive PICNIC) I went to a few weeks ago with Mind Candies Jey and Mike, and Laura.



(photos from lhall)

It was a bit of a dismal weekend in the 'dam weather-wise (not ideal for street games) but very chilled out and fun. We stayed on an awesome houseboat called The Friendship, hosted by an incredibly wired yet wholly loveable dude whose name I've already forgotten. He tried to take us out on his little boat, which promptly failed to start, so he flagged down a friend in a passing water-taxi and took us through the canals right to the PICNIC site itself - deeply cool.

Anyway, the games! Like any festival, we had noble intentions of playing loads of games, but a combination of laziness, drizzle, and a slight grumpiness at getting all our games rejected meant we often forwent participation in favour of lasagna and wine.

Yet, we managed to play two games.

First we played People Watching by Annette Mees, which was a really sweet game - it involved wandering around the local market square trying to identify the stooges (described succinctly on an accompanying document) loitering amongst the civillians busy shopping in the square. And , of course, we won. Here's out heathery trophy:



(photo from lhall)

The whole game was designed to be an exercise in loveliness - even erroneous identifications only resulted in timidly giving a stranger a lucky token and wishing them all the best, which was generally well received :-)

The other game we played at the closing party (because obviously we went to the party) was OMMRPG, although actually it's nothing like the description on that page - two teams each with a laser-shooter on a balcony, four people with mirrors and three people with blocking gloves. The aim is for the laser pointer to find an unmarked mirrorman who can than reflect the beam into the goal to score a point. It was great, basketball style twitch gaming, with rarely a minute passing between a goal from one team or the other.



(photo from Kevan)

These two very different games got me thinking about a basic duality in "games" as we think of them. OMMRPG is in a very real sense a sport - it's just set of rules, and it'd be playable by any group of people with the requisite array of laser pointers and mirrors. People Watching on the other hand is an authored experience - you need someone running it, putting actors in place, coming up with clues, and all that sort of thing.

I guess a lot of games are a mixture of the two. Where's the sport and where's the story in Half-Life? Is a cliff you can't climb up equivalent to, say, the offside rule? In Monopoly, it seems like the layout of the board is a rule, but the names of the places are clearly part of a story.

And for now, I'm too antsy to take this thought much further. I guess what I'm suggesting is that sports are, in a sense, cloneable.

Labels: amsterdam, come out and play, games, ommrpg, people watching, stories

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