review – Page 3 – Hannah Nicklin

Playing In Public _ Hide&Seek Weekender 2012 — image off the conference site, click for full event programme

And Lo! She did return, from the dusty folds of academia she did emerge, and it was good.

So I’ve almost finished the PhD. It’s in ‘metaphorical drawer’ stage. Which is like ‘literal drawer’ stage but saves on printing costs, in that it’s ‘in a drawer’ (I don’t look at it) for the next 8 weeks, and then return to it to do things like write an abstract, introduction, conclusion and generally try and patch any theoretical leaks that have appeared now all the parts have been put together. Then submit. Thar she almost blows!

So yes, now I am returned, here follows a series of blog posts about what I’ve been wanting to tell you about but couldn’t because of The Document That Must Not Be Named.

Playing in Public! I don’t have a massive amount to write about this, partly because I was mid-PhD haze when I went along as part of a panel for the Hide & Seek weekender conference event, and partly because I mostly get stuck in when I have something to complain about. It was just good. Like seriously good. An amazing mix of artists, theatre makers, game designers, developers, venue people, and scales from indie games to a Creative Director from the Southbank Centre. No one wasted any time trying to make a case for games as ‘relevant’ or ‘cool’ or ‘are culture now, please’ (except one PR man who had kooky socks and drank BRAND cola suspiciously obviously) and instead just got stuck into proper ideas and thoughts and provocations. And, do you know what? PRETTY MUCH 50/50 MALE/FEMALE SPEAKER SPLIT. Just like that. And I didn’t hear anyone exclaiming about lack of interesting, thoughtful, provocative speakers, or screaming THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, THERE ARE SO MANY I MIGHT DROWN (of women, that’s a thing). So, well done the Hide & Seek team, I think I love you.

I was speaking on a panel called Regeneration games – how can public play contribute to community life? (They seem to have scoured my flickr feed for a picture there and have an amusing blowy one from my first (well, and only) trip to Paris that makes it look a bit like I hang around boats and have weird angular hair.) Also on the panel were Shan Maclennan of Marine Studios (an ace community regeneration thing in Margate), Kate Kneale of the Southbank Centre, and it was chaired by John Newbigin of Creative England. I wish we’d had more time to chat on this panel, as it began to touch on some really interesting stuff, and I would have loved to have the opportunity to get more into the deep, dirty stuff of what ‘games’ actually means for all of these levels of organisation, and what it can mean for the generation of agency, exploration of systems, and still struggle with in terms of the dangers of coercion. I really, really enjoyed this, though. Turns out 3 years studying a thing means you feel like you know just about enough to have fun explaining your opinions.

In terms of the rest of the event, it was really nice to have the chunkier panel sessions and proper speaker parts broken up with 5 minute segments from indie or up-and-coming designers talking about their work. Continue reading Playing in Public

So tonight I achieved my 2nd career choice; leader of a political party. Unfortunately this seemed to require acting and sounding like a politician. Though probably wasn’t hindered by my secret weapon; a Teacher Voice. It doesn’t come out very often (power/responsibility etc.) but I do have one of those voices that when raised tends to carry, and is reported to make people want to sit down and stare very purposefully at their quadratic equations. Anyway, yes, ‘leader of a political party’, I hear you cry, ‘that’s the interesting bit, expand!’. You’re probably not crying that. But I will expand anyway.

Tonight I went to a first-stages scratch of Coney’s Early Days of a Better Nation at BAC, and fascinating it was. Somehow I ended up leader of this glorious nation, and incredibly uncomfortable for it. A quick ‘what is’; Early Days… was a 2 and a bit hour long interactive (emergent, since you ask) ‘thing’, set in the opening days of a new nation – you are cast as yourself-as-member-of-an-interim-government, allocated a party according to the responses to a short questionnaire (to which I did not give short answers, sorry person who got my form), and then invited along with 4 other parties of politicians to begin deciding on the constitutional points and priorities of your government. A system of beans as pay and allowing people to cast votes is a nice mechanic which makes voting a weighty decision (but these are MY beans!), and members of a tabloid and broadsheet style press hover around the edges, stoking rumours, reporting on events and generally being the eyes and the ears of behind the scenes goings on (that is, what the parties are up to, not what they are voting for). Members can defect to other parties, and certain events occur in reaction to previous decisions that sometimes have difficult or unforeseen consequences (fwiw, I did suggest we add to the ‘universal health care free at the point of use’ constitutional point the caveat ‘for all citizens’, but never mind, I love me an american health tourist). News footage provides the beginnings of a contextualisation, and the events mirror financial crises and decisions from politics, like, what are happening now. Anyway, in the end I was elected as leader following the (SPOILER) sudden assassination of our previous charismatic leader. Our party (Green, some kind of odd libertarian party I didn’t really agree with on paper, but in the end was full of Good People, I think it was the one people got put in if they took the questionnaire a little too seriously) had the most members by this point, and so we were asked to field some candidates, I put myself forward because there were no women candidate from the party (and also because I wanted to), and after a short campaign, I won. And stood on the stage and talked to the press man, and was leader.

So, yes. That’s what it was. And why was I uncomfortable? Because ringing in my ears was something Dan Bye said to me about half way through; “isn’t it interesting, people have been given the task of doing politics, and actually what they’re doing is Acting Like Politicians” – I’m paraphrasing him, but there it is. I spoke to the press in support of my candidacy, was asked questions, and gave short succinct answers about what I believed and thought my party also stood for and was earnest but aware that probably what we were calling for probably couldn’t be implemented. And BAM, I was speaking in the language of the stuff we’re so tired of. There were parties that became extreme, others that played up (monster raving loonies), people who tried to sell votes for beans, people making important impassioned stands that not many people saw and that I respected but probably wouldn’t do, and a couple of centre-ground parties made up of people-taking-things-probably-a-little-too-seriously. There were three leader candidates at the end, and when the other candidate I was on similar political terms with was looking low on votes and I didn’t quite have enough we formed a coalition, he became my deputy and OH MY FUCK I’M THE TORIES.

That’s why I was uncomfortable, but also a little pleased, and excited and wanted MOAR ~~POWER~~ opportunity to Change Things For The Better and it’s fascinating that for all we’re fed up with politics we generally don’t have another language to express this kind of stuff. Sure we’re told we’re playing politicians, so there’s a degree of parodying what we know – but the set up is of the early days of a better nation; how do you build a framework which asks us to think about frameworks in the first place? Because I suppose that’s what I wanted the piece to do, which it didn’t quite do yet, but if it gets even a quarter of the way there it will be astonishing. Or maybe it needs to let us repeat the same mistakes, maybe it needs to be a space to fail, so that we go away and think ‘must try harder’.

Other thoughts, and responses to the questions on the feedback sheet, because it seems like a good way to respond usefully:

Continue reading Early Days of a Better Nation scratch