fisharepeopletoo

Free All Monsters!

Free All Monsters! is a game for children, families and even grown ups.

You'll use a Magical Monstervision Machine to look for invisible monsters living in the streets around you, then answer questions about the monsters to show your monster spotting skills, and set free your own monsters for other players to find.

To play Free All Monsters! you'll need a Magical Monstervision Machine, a Monster Spotter's Guide for the place you want to look for monsters, and some felt tip pens and paper.

Follow the picture clues on your Monster Spotter's Guide, and they will lead you to monsters that live in the streets around you.

Photos of players at Hide and Seek, London, and igfest, Bristol by Liz Milner, Paul Coulton and Andrew Wilson.

 

When you get close to a monster's lair, use the Magical Monstervision Machine to look for the monster.

When you see the monster, look at it very carefully.

On your Spotter's Guide you will find some questions about the monster, to test your monsterology skills.

First you have to answer a question to show that you have watched the monster carefully, then you have to add scientific knowledge by coming up with a new theory to answer a question such as “ Where does this monster go on holiday and what does it do there?”

Even though some monsters look very fierce and scary, they are really very old creatures who look after the places where they live, so they should never be captured or harmed, just watched.

Every monster that you find was set free by somebody else, and when you have finished looking for monsters you can set free some monsters of your own.

All you need to set free monsters is your imagination and some felt tip pens, paper and anything else you want to use to make a monster.

 

When you have set free your monster it can be made part of the game for other people to find using the Magical Monstervision Machine.

Where Do Monsters Live?

Monsters live outside, in the streets, squares and parks of the places where you go everyday or go to visit sometimes. The monsters live there all the time, in the cold and wind and rain as well as on warm sunny days.

The places where monsters live are the places where everyone should be able to go, and the job of the monsters is to guard those places, and make sure they are always open, free and welcoming for anyone who wants to go there.

Wherever you find a monster, it means that somebody cares about that place, and has set free a monster to live there and guard it.

Where Do Monsters Come From?

“No Gods, just Monsters!”

There haven't always been towns and cities, full of people hurrying to and fro to school or work.

Where now stand shops, factories and offices were once streams, woods and hillsides.

And every one of those places, even the loneliest tree standing by itself on the moors, had a monster to guard it.

The place belonged to the monster, and the monster belonged to the place.

So when towns and cities were built, the monsters had to stay, trapped under the tall buildings made of brick and stone and concrete.

And there they remained, for 200 years.

Until now.

Because the monsters have got very grumpy.

They are fed up of people walking on top of them, and they are really fed up of people squashing them under big, heavy cars.

They want to live on the streets in the places that belong to them, the places where they used to live, a long time ago.

Every time you play Free All Monsters!, whether you are using the Magical Monstervision Machine or setting free your own monsters for other people to find, you are helping to make a world that has monsters living in it again.

And that is a much better place for people to live in as well!

 

Children, families and grown ups have been setting free monsters in Manchester, in London at Sandpit and Hide and Seek, in Bristol at igfest, in Austin, and in Leeds at Pavilion gallery.

Church Halls are Participatoriums

Church halls are good reference points for participatoriums.

They can be home to lots of rule sets - for table tennis clubs and band nights, campaign meetings and Cubs.

Governed by overall rules of civility - stack the chairs and do the washing up when you are finished.

They are one big room.

But it can be reconfigured - for band night put the amps at one end, for a jumble sale put the trestle tables round the edges, for a film screening put the chairs in rows.

There is common investment and ownership, with negotiation and compromise over use.

They are landmarks, and membership is open to everyone who lives round here.

The Participatorium

The participatorium is the place where the people of our towns and cities present themselves.

The participatorium is one space.

The participatorium has no permanent internal walls.

The participatorium must be hackable -  the walls, floor and roof must be cut-openable, and reclosable.

The participatorium must be temporarily but not permanently sub dividable into both open and secret spaces.

The participatorium must be a landmark.

Everyone who lives here is a member of the participatorium.

Guests are welcome in the participatorium.

The participatorium has rule sets.

The participatorium is free.

Let's Close All the Theatres and Art Galleries

And build participatoriums instead.

A particaporium is the place where the people of our towns and cities present themselves.

Where Does Alicious Likkerish Live?

She lives at  N 51 30.397 W 000 07.035 that's where!

So beware!

ThumbBrum

Thumbprint Birmingham is now up and running thanks to a request from the emergent gamers of Barg 

Manchester, London and Birmingham at the moment.

A constellation of cities feels right somehow, especially if we could devolve enough power down to each city for them all to be different while sharing the best innovations from each among them all.

But that's a long way in the future, depending on whether Thumbprint turns out to be meaningful and valuable.

Nice to have Barg involved now though - "this is not an acronym" - what other slogan could anyone ever need!

Coming to a Festival of Social Games and Playful Experiences Near You this Summer

The Monstervision Mk2 Machine in action. The proximity reader in the bottom left hand corner is a lot of fun. Cold, getting warm, and hot readings, which is very nice and child-like.

The game will be made up of a spotters guide on paper, with picture clues to find the lair of the monsters, and questions to test participants' powers of observation when they spot the monster lurking there using the Monstervision Machine.

And questions to test their  "scientific theorising and advanced monsterology skills", for example: "What would be this monster's best friend and why?"

Treasure will be awarded for each correct answer recorded on the spotters guide, and based on a very scientific study at Sandpit 13 the most coveted treasure is Cadbury's Chocolate Eclairs (I thought it would be pic n mix cola bottles, but I got to eat all of those!).

And the nicest part of all is that the 6 monsters for Hide and Seek were specially created to be part of the game by people at Sandpit 13 at the end of last month, using the fluffy orange pencil case.

Poor but 'Appy (and Rich but 'Appy)

Lots of research tells us that more equal societies are better places to live: their citizens are fitter, live longer and are happier.

It doesn't matter if everyone is rich or everyone is poor, equality is good for people.

England is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and I don't think it is going to become more equal ever again.

If it hasn't happened after 10 years of New Labour, it isn't going to happen in the next 10 years of David Cameron.

We are governed by the rich (wielding analogue power), for the rich and that isn't going to change.

So we are stuck with misery.

But we only live in such an unequal country because that's what we choose to draw our borders round.

If we draw our borders round city-states and regions, straight away they are much more equal places to live.

The gap between the richest few percent, the middle and the poorest will be far narrower in Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Newcastle than it is in England.

Without redistributing a single penny, everyone is suddenly happier.

And the best thing about this revolution?

You can start it in your head.

Whether you live in Mayfair or Maryport, just say "I don't live in England any more, I live in..." and whistle a happy tune.

The Reboot Britain Che Scale Challenge Results Are In!

The Che Scale is a handy ready reckoner for working out if policies are radical or just talking the talk.

Whatever the policy is, just ask yourself "If I were a rich and/or powerful person, how worried would I be by this?"

The Che Scale goes from 0 to 5, with 0 being "Ten more years of New Labour? Yes please!" and 5 being "Stuffing a suitcase full of used tenners and clawing their way onto the last Learjet to Monaco."

Anything over 0 has at least something worth listening to.

So, these are the sessions I went to at Reboot Britain, scored on the Che Scale.

Introduction and Welcome from Chairman Nesta 0/5

I wasn't happy with any of this, so much so that it gave me pause to wonder about how, why and in whose interests Nesta are spending a "national endowment".

I might come back to Chairman Nesta and his Vanguard of Innovation another time so I'll leave it there.

Except to say that this would have got minus Che Points except that Che never gets negative. When Che faces a negative situation in his life, such as girlfriend trouble or running out of milk, he gathers a band of armed men around him and sets off into the forest to start a revolution.

Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport 0.5/5

Only 0.5 Che Points but a very enjoyable talk.

It was interesting to hear a working politician talking about what he thought the internet meant for the centre left and centre right in the same way it's always interesting to hear people talk about jobs that mean something to them.

I'm not sure if the phrase "collaborative individualism" can make any sense, but if it does it'll depend on who says it and who hears it.

Fools Gold, Gillian Tait, Assistant Editor, Finacial Times 3.5/5

This was the most radical session of the whole day, presented by a financial journalist who used to be an anthropologist, and had analysed the credit crunch by studying the culture within banks.

The reason the world went bust was because:

- nobody responsible for financial innovation really had a clue what they were messing with
- they were all making too much pretend money for anyone to care
- regulators didn't regulate
- banks were structured like tribes with everyone in the tribe looking upwards not across,
- but, the tribes had no one at the top who knew what all the bits were doing let alone how it all worked
- whichever part of a bank was earning the most ("Who's got the most goats?") did what they wanted.

If I was a rich and powerful banker I'd be threatened by this, because it left nowhere to hide.

To stop it happening again we need to challenge this financial "innovation", and challenge the tiny priesthood doing it.

Then she wished us "good luck" and marched out, which at first I took as fond best wishes but afterwards I thought was actually "fat chance".

Mining the Archives, Tony Ageh 1.5/5

Archives are the raw material of a new industrial revolution, but they have to be opened up.

Let's hope so because I'm not sure the UK has got many other untapped sources of new wealth.

1.5 for the openness and the challenge to existing media.

How Co-design Can Help Reboot Britain, Deborah Szebeko 1.5/5

We should listen to the people who use public services when we try to make the services better.

This will make better and more efficient public services at a time when there is no money left to spend on better public services.

Can't argue with that.

I wasn't so keen on the idea that we should look at national questions through an X Factor style "Britain's Got Problems" type event, but 1.5/5 anyway, because that bit was probably a joke.

Consumer Democracy or a Politics of Citizenship Matthew Taylor 2.75/5

This was quite useful because he said that consumerism is ok in our relationship with services as we use them - we should all expect to get decent treatment - but it's not a good way of thinking about government.

In our other role as the owners of public services we have to recognise that governing is about working out compromises between groups of people who maybe can't all have what they want.

If our opinions are surveyed as consumers of government we are quite grumpy, but when people do take a role in "government" structures, e.g. citizen juries, they prove themselves to be good at listening and compromising.

I've read a lot of evidence of the same kind in a report called "Empowering communities to influence local decision making: a systematic review of the evidence" and I think it's all very hopeful, so long as it's done on scales that people can get their heads round - very local - and it means something, so there has to be a risk of failure.

Hyperlocality and Active Citizenship 3/5

"Hyper local is bringing geographical scale down." - Kevin Harris, who really does know about this stuff.

The smaller the units are the more chance there is of self-organising, self-sustaining, bottom up problem solving and self government in which people do listen and compromise.

I hope.

But there has to be a risk.

Nothing meaningful ever happens if there can't be a failure.

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre is full of the risk of failure: if not enough people in your neighbourhood can be bothered to take part, you get less money to spend. Tough.

Straight Line Thinking Stops Here, Alan Moore 0.25/5

This was about as much use as crystal aura cleansing. Lot's of natural metaphors and folksy stuff about communities and sharing.

0.25 just for not being Chairman Nesta.

How we learn to stop worrying and love local government 3/5

Local government as a convenor ( I quite like that word just because it reminds me of 1970s trade union shop stewards on the 6 O'clock News).

If you think of local government as the convenor of a process of citizenship at a very local scale (I can't quite bring myself to say "hyperlocal"), that is again quite powerful and hopeful I think.

The more sense people have of themselves as part of a local citizenry, the more of a challenge it is to the centralised state.

How People Power Can Reboot Britain, Lee Bryant 3/5

Three points for saying that government contracts should be parcelled up into small seed funding awards for small businesses, social enterprises and so on. These businesses would try and work out solutions, with the best ones making themselves obvious, and the same money would be working twice, with even the cost of the failed ideas being repayed as support for businesses that were trying to be innovative, some of which might well use the knowledge gained from their failed innovations to come up with successful, and unexpected, new ones.

And the same three points again for talking about failure at all, and pointing out that even if 60% of the ideas failed that wouldn't be any worse than the big contracts the government gives out now to consultancies.

And again for suggesting getting rid of "process based" improvement based on setting targets from the centre and enforcing them.

Howard Rheingold 2/5

Media literacy as an ongoing personal state of mind that questions sources of authority, and that convenes collective action (my use of "convenes" to paraphrase I think, rather than him saying it in so many words.)

And that was it. Home in time for tea.

I went to Reboot Britain with very mixed expectations, and all-in-all got plenty out of it, though I might have been even happier in a plain old conference about technology and local government.

The Mk 2 Machine in Action

The Mk 2 Magical Monstervision Machine in action capturing monsters in Lancaster.

Big thank yous to Paul Coulton and the cell of inventors in Lancaster.