How late is this blog post? Somewhere in the region of ‘epically’, or if you like, ‘roughly a month’. I shall continue to use this as an excuse, and in fact, as the fracture clinic doctor told me it won’t really be totally all right (not his exact words) until this time next year, I shall be continuing to use it to excuse tardiness in all hand/arm related things for many more months to come.
The good news, however, is that the cast is off, and after catching up with my life, work, writing, passing my first year PhD progress panel, and getting over all the related hangovers, I return to you, Lo, with tantalising tales of my exploits at the Hide & Seek Weekender at the National Theatre!
The Hide and Seek Weekender ran from Friday the 9th to Sunday the 11th of July, and was hosted by the National, in a variety of foyer and outside spaces (I didn’t see any work in the performance spaces, though that doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t any, as there was an awful lot going on). I attended the Sunday, but you can see and download the full program here. I didn’t get much of an opportunity to take photos or videos as I was still be-casted at that point, but I used my MIND CAMERA instead. Here are some of the games, sights and sounds it captured:
The big focus of the Sunday seemed to be on the Delhi Games section, most of which I stuck with throughout the day as it wasn’t too precarious-movement-heavy. Also it was a new interesting dimension on the pervasive gaming that I’ve so far done – rather than just reclaiming physical or tech space, the Delhi Games also played across cultural boundaries. These games variously used skype, facebook, and text messages to collaborate on different playful experiences with two groups of artists and players, one in Delhi, and the other in London. Here are the ones I participated in:
Noah’s International Lark (I can’t find info on who this one was by). This was a simple but effective getting-to-know-you type game played over Skype. Two teams made up of both India and Britain-based participants had a limited amount of time to work out several ‘things in common’ shared by the team members. Each ‘thing in common’ had to include participants from both countries, and was scored (eventually) by how rare it was. The ‘rarity’ score was then multiplied by the number of people in the group who shared the ‘thing in common’. The other rule was that everyone in the group needed to be in at least one of the ‘things in common’ groupings. Sound complicated? It wasn’t. Example: We found that 5 people across both countries had met a prime minister or ex-prime minister. This was considered 4-points worth of rare (5 being most rare) so the points scored there were 20. You see? We discovered things like at least 3 people had physically stopped an aeroplane taking off, that 4 people had been arrested, that every single one of us had sent an embarrassing text to the wrong person. Continue reading Hide & Seek Weekender 2010