fisharepeopletoo

Bike-Eating Monster

Bobolink, a new monster set free in London by illustrator Edward Ward, inspired by the thieves who stole his bike saddle from outside a pub.

Monsterquences! Free London's Monsters at Sandpit #8 at the ICA

I had a fantastic time doing Free London's Monsters! at Sandpit #8 at the ICA.

There was the usual SMS gateway failure of course - never work with children, animals or cheap SMS gateways in time sensitive contexts - which meant that the 50 monsters sent by text message didn't show up on Thumbprint till about three hours later.

But somehow that just brought out the liveness of the event.

While I was sitting with my head in my hands in despair about five minutes after we started (some day I'm going to get my own SMS gateway that is actually reliable!) my evening was being saved by the ingenuity of the illustrator Edward Ward and the enthusiasm and sense of fun on the Sandpit participants.

Edward handed out little text message sized pieces of card for people to write on, and when he started to disappear under a blizzard of monsters coming back, he shared out felt tips - from the fluffy orange pencil case - paper and monsters and got people to illustrate someone else's monster.

That's a new game in itself, and over the course of the evening two groups of people at the event (Emily and Ali were one, and another mystery group) also invented Monsterquences.

Here are two Monsterquences monsters: one two

And this is the Liber Monstrorum [Book of Monsters]

I enjoyed myself so much, in fact, that I'm going to go down to London specially for Sandpit #9 this Saturday, to see what I can learn from taking part in some of the other games.

Sandpit #9 is Saturday 7th March, at the Barbican from 7pm.

All Of My Pretties

they might be monstrous to you, but to me they are beautiful.

Free London's Monsters! at the ICA Sandpit

Free London's Monsters! is going to be part of the Sandpit pervasive games event at the ICA on February 18th.

Monsters will be set free as soon as you conjure them up by the usual magic spells (imagination, thumb power and Thumbprint)

But there will also be an illustrator who will be drawing the monsters as soon as they are set free, and an "art table" with paper, pencils, crayons, felt tips, glitter and glue so that everyone taking part can illustrate their own monster.

The pictures of monsters will be projected onto a wall of the ICA, and there will be some prizes for the best ones.

Here is more about Free London's Monsters! on the ludocity pervasive games wiki, and some details about the event if you are in London* and are a friend of monsters.

*Thinking about it, you could play remotely.

My Superstruct Prize

OK, not really mine. A participant called Lord Samwise did all the spadework.

But I made my own contributions to Quantum Governance, not least strong support for the idea of replacing nation states (so nineteenth century) with self organising constellations of city-states from anywhere in the world.

And some quantum silliness including turning the UEFA Champions League into a non competitive league (as in the Hanseatic League rather than "league" meaning a ladder of competition) of self governing city-states.

And that ghosts should have votes in city-state legislatures.

Anyway, we won the MindStruct Award, "created and awarded by Jane McGonigal and Kiyash Monsef... for the superstructure that provides the most delicious and satisfying food for thought."

Which we got because "Quantum Governance is the most fulfilling thought experiment we’ve witnessed in ages. You took a strange little seed of an idea and you played and played and played with it, until you turned it into a feast."

Word of Warcraft

The Arts Council have asked me to give a talk to the people who work in literature in our region - publishers, writers and so on - about technology and literature.

So I'm going to talk about World of Warcraft, Superstruct and Five Trees Forest

That's sort of "Fictional Worlds, CrowdFiction and The World as Fiction".

Well, they said I could talk about anything I wanted, and that's the presentation that I'd like to hear.

We Love Technology 08

We Love Technology 08 is on Thursday 20th November 2008.

If you are interested in games, mobiles, physical computing, computers_everywhere, stories, fun, writing, misuse and most importantly participation, this really is where it's at.

If you do make the trip you'll find that We Love Technology talks about those subjects in a modest and welcoming but unique voice that can't be heard clearly anywhere else.

That voice is modest, in part, because it comes from Lisa's amazing ability to find the people who share it, ask them to talk about what they enjoy, and allow the meaning to emerge from that.

This year the event is presented by the clan alone, and all the better for it.

"ithankyou!" Installing a Pervasive Game Played with Nokia NFC Phones

That's the installation kit for Five Trees Forest - posters, magic chocolate bars (NFC enabled!), comments book, landmark posters (with an NFC chip stuck on them), and they all fit in the big green magic box.

On Friday afternoon I spent fifteen minutes going round the building with posters and blu-tack putting up posters, and hey presto, a building is turned into an enchanted space.

That's the Museum of Lost Things on the door (the Museum is always closed otherwise you'd go in and find all the things you'd lost, and there would be no exhibits left).

Because we are using NFC enabled mobile phones, I'm hoping that players will need hardly any introduction in how to play - just a demo of how to use the phone to read the NFC chip and that's it - the game itself should tell them everything else they need to know.

To test that out I've tried to give the players as little technical instruction as possible, and I'm not even going to hand the phones out to them myself - I'll show the receptionists in the building how to use the NFC function, and they'll show the players, who will pick up their phones and begin when they come to reception to collect their post in the morning.

Anyone who has ever installed and run any sort of pervasive game event using technology, which can get to theatrical levels of complexity and faff, even down to pains-in-the-arse like the wifi not working in the venue, will be standing up and applauding me right now.

And creating a mixed reality infrastructure using posters takes me right back to City Poems.

Advanced Technical Research and Development with Nokia NFC Phones

Ready for a run through of Five Trees Forest, with a Nokia 6131 NFC phone, and NFC tags that allow sprites to jump between our world and the Five Trees Forest.

You can see the Down the Back of the Settee Mines (lots of treasure to be found there of course!), Wise Sheep, Graveyard of Milk Bottles and Ancient Slide of Sprites (kept shiny by the bums of countless generations of sprites!)

Of course, those places really look like this:

We've found with Nokia 6131 you can't use NFC phone-to-phone, and one of the events I wanted to happen in the game was for pairs of players to have to find each other and swap sprites, so we've had to improvise and stick an NFC tag on the back of the phone to enable that interaction.

Though the new Nokia 6212 does do phone to phone according to Touch.

The 8453

Our creative technology clan can beat your creative technology clan at any game you care to mention, from table tennis to World of Warcraft.