Hey Bruce, (((yo!)))
Having apparently mised the official day of unsolicited email for Beyond the Beyond, I was a bit wary of diving in with our project spiel but ... well, what the heck ...
Funded by NESTA (the UK's national endowment for innovation-type things), (((uh-oh))) Playmakers is a project looking to bring structures of participation, collaboration & so forth to a process of game design. We're making a new game (which involves cumbersome and brighly-coloured camera tripods), which Ivo Gormley (social anthropologist and director of Us Now) is using to structure a documentary about the pervasive / social gaming scene. All the different project layers are being documented on our website.
The basic version of the game (as it stands) is a peculiar hybrid of team sport, scavenger hunt, and television. (((I thought television was ALREADY a hybrid of scavenger hunt and television.))) The basic rules are online, along with a bunch of varients that we've playtested.
There are photos on Flickr, split-screen versions of footage from the various game runs on Vimeo, and discussion about game theory and design on our forum and website. We'll be running various events and playtests in London over the next couple of months, with plenty of opportunities to meet fellow contributors and actually experience the game first-hand.
It's still relatively early days, and we're hoping to pick up some more creative media, tech and gaming types on our Katamari Damacy-style ball of collaborative game design. The more people get involved, the better ... before the whole project comes together in a big mush as we attempt to forge the various contributions into something cohesive and fun, ahead of the game's debut at the Hide&Seek Weekender on August 1st.
Hope that combines with some of your other inputs to spark something interesting, (((great, fine, good luck with that, and try to make sure that the British police don't mistake you for ravers.)))
Justin Pickard
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twitter.com/justinpickard
justinpickard.net
http://playmakers.org.uk/
