This blog article is edited from the developer's blog, where he talks about his work creating physical and installation-based games.
As a game developer I've developed a genuine passion for physical play. I love the idea that the game is not the be-all and end-all of the experience, but merely the springboard for players to make joy for themselves. It's a passion that's led me to dress people up in morphsuits and send groups of friends crashing around the walls of a museum.
What I love about physical play is that it encourages people to come out of their shells, to express themselves, and to perform for each other. So I've been fascinated by bringing that kind of play into a theatre space. I want to know how play changes what players have a bona-fide audience, and how a crowd of a hundred people can bring their own unique personality to games. To find out, I created a show. An Incredible Playable Show.
The Incredible Playable Show was performed as a run of six shows during Nottingham's GameCity festival, where it won the Spirit of the Festival award. It has since run at the Bristol Improv Theatre, and has been invited back to the National Videogame Arcade as their Christmas show, and - due to its popularity - will no doubt be at a number of new venues in 2017!
What is The Incredible Playable Show?
The show is takes three games of my own invention, involving physical interaction, running around and unconventional homemade controllers. It seats alongside classic games reinterpreted with custom hardware, and sees spectators invited onto the stage to become players. There's barcode scanners, WiFi-connected power belts, microphones and secret dossiers. Players must interact with each other and with the audience to play the games - each one is a socially interactive experience.
Still from BBC Click, 26 November 2016 |
Sometimes players take the role of human controllers. Other times they must climb through the audience, who have become real-world obstacles in a digital game. In the final act the audience must work together to solve coded messages, getting out of their chairs to pass clues to each other and share ideas.
As well as creating the games and operating the tech, I donned a ringmaster's jacket and drew upon my improv skills to host the event. Turning games into a show is not just about the tech itself - having a showman to warm the audience and encourage them to perform themselves is half of the magic.
As the show's designer my ethos is that everyone in the audience should get to feel involved in a real way. Even if you weren't on the stage playing you should feel like you made a meaningful contribution to how the events played out.
Match Me If You Scan - Photo by Gemma Thomson |
Additionally I stuck to a design goal of keeping every game relatively low-tech. It’s not about flashy hardware, but rather what can be done by combining simple technology with a theatre space. The charm is seeing games that look like nothing you've ever seen before, after all. So it's important that every spectator understands exactly what is going on in each game, so that they can be surprised and inspired. No networking issues, no lag, and no anonymous voting - game feel is as important here as in any other context.
Similarly, each game was designed to feel significantly different in terms of how players and audience interacted with the stage, with the technology and with each other. I was there to explore, to learn and to inspire, so the more the dynamics varied the more I was able to learn.
The Games
The best way to describle what the show was like is perhaps to explain what the games themselves were. Each game was roughly 8 minutes long, with a period of setup and improvised chatter in-between.
Go! Power Team! Photo by Gemma Thomson |
Go! Power Team!
Four players are invited up from the audience to wear coloured power belts. By donning the power belts they become the four Rangers, and effectively take on the role of human buttons. One player is invited from the audience to become Hero of the Galaxy.
On the screen, giant monsters are shown attacking a city. To defeat the monsters, the saviour must press the power belts in the order shown on-screen. However, every time a new monster appears the four rangers are given a new command by the computer. For example, they may be told to "lie on the floor," to "join hands and spin" or to "hi-five everyone in the audience."
The challenge for the player is to deal with a physical environment that changes as the rangers move around of their own accord. Each time a player fails, another hero is pulled out from the audience to help them, until the team runs out of lives.
Go! Power Team! - Photo by Samathy Barratt |
This game grew out of an experiment I did at JOIN in Berlin last year, and uses the same belts. They're actually just Tesco Hudl tablets with belts taped on, and connect via WiFi to the game running on the computer. I’d been inspired by how the audience in Berlin found ways to interact with the performers. Rangers get to express themselves creatively in how they interpret the commands the computer gives them, often to make the audience laugh.
When the computer prompts Rangers to enter the audience the audience gets to interact with the Rangers too. They also get to help the heroes out by shouting out the colours. The audience’s interaction with the game is loose and flexible, which makes sense in this game. The magic of Go! Power Team! comes from how the participants interpret the real-world rules.
Match Me If You Scan - Photo by Samathy Barratt |
Match Me If You Scan
One member of the audience is selected as the Floor Manager, and given a barcode scanner. Ten members of the audience are selected to be Consumer Products. They remain in their seats and are each given a netball vest with a barcode on it.
During the game, the Floor Manager must to clamber between the members of the audience, scanning their barcodes to make cards appear on-screen. Their goal is to find three pairs of matching cards each round. Every round all the Consumer Products are allocated new cards, with each set of cards becoming harder to tell apart.
Match Me If You Scan was an opportunity to explore the audience as a physical presence. The idea is that the audience, whether they are consumer products or not, form the obstacle course that the Floor Manager has to negotiate.
When designing the show I was keen to vary the soft skills each game drew upon. So while the Floor Manager’s role in the game is very physical, the Consumer Products interact through memorisation and visual reasoning. As the game goes on they’ll need to pay close attention to spot and remember what makes their card different from the others in the set.
Sets of cards became |
