fisharepeopletoo

Occupy Bristol and Free All Monsters! @Occupybristoluk @OccupyLSX

Monster Makers from Rossendale in Pennine Lancashire.

 

Press release, apologies for the press release tone.

Calling All Bristol Monster Makers

Saturday 3rd December, 1pm-4pm

Bristol children, and even grown ups, have the chance to create monsters that will travel all around the world as part of a new mobile phone game.

To make a monster, children use the power of their imagination and the pens, paper and art materials provided to conjure it up. The monsters are then uploaded into a mobile phone game called Free All Monsters!

The game has players all around the world who use their mobile phone as a Monstervision Machine to look for invisible monsters visiting their local streets, and monsters created in Bristol will regularly be seen as far away as America and Australia, as well as on the streets of Bristol.

So far more than 300 monsters have been created by children and grown ups, and these monsters have been spotted more than 4000 times in total around the world. Children who take part are awarded a unique Monster Makers badge.

Andrew Wilson, of the Advanced Monstrology Institute said “Making monsters is a great way to practise being creative, and to imagine the world differently.”

Adults as well as children are welcome to come along and make monsters. Dr Paul Coulton, also of the Institute, explained “Grown ups often say that they aren't creative, but we've found that everyone enjoys drawing monsters if they give themselves chance.”

As well as monster making there will also be a monster spotting trail in which players must find monsters living in Bristol city centre and prove their Advanced Monstrology skills to earn a Monster Spotters badge. Families and grown ups who want to take part in the monster spotting trail need to have an iPhone and should download the Free All Monsters app, but there is no need for an iPhone to take part in Monster Making.

The monster making session and monster spotting trail are both free events as part of a range of activities for this week's Community Day at Occupy Bristol.

Families and grown ups should come to College Green between 1pm and 4pm on Saturday 3rd December.

To spot monsters made in Bristol at any time, download the Free All Monsters app.

 

The respected monster Mean Green Giraffe Bee.

 

Stories for Mixed Realities

If you read Lord of the Rings (or Persuasion by Jane Austen or anything else) on the bus on the way home from work you're in a mixed reality.

Even gazing out of the window daydreaming you are.

I wonder if the stories we are starting to write now are the ones to be told in the space between the bus and the book.

Dictum Bebo Application

Another example of asking questions as a structure for participation, a nice myspace and bebo application called Dictum.

In this case the questions are more a way to think about a world view and important choices than to tell autobiographical stories, but the two are quite close - past and future actions almost.

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.

"Here is one I ate earlier"

One interaction I really wanted to have in Five Trees Forest was for two players to meet and for their sprites to hop between phones.

The Nokia 6131 didn't seem to be able to do that (without writing an application for the phones, which we didn't have the time or cash for), and the solution we devised of sticking chips on the back of the phones didn't work well enough to risk.

So instead I wrote some enchanted food into the storyline, and players meet to exchange chocolate bars with sprites trapped inside.

As it turns out, this seems to fit very nicely with the fairy story, Alice in Wonderland feel I've been trying to create.

And if you get a bit peckish during research and development...

"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.

Five Trees Forest Pervasive Game Using Nokia NFC Phones

Five Trees Forest is a pervasive game played with Nokia NFC enabled mobile phones.

The Five Trees Forest is an invisible world that is in exactly the same place as our world.

It has landmarks, like the Down the Back of the Settee Mines

characters like the Wise Sheep

and baddies, wicked witches like the Big Flip Flops witch.

The only creatures that can jump between our world and the Five Trees Forest are sprites, and when they are in our world, sprites like to live in mobile phones because the batteries keep them warm, and the radio waves make them giggle.

To pick up and drop off sprites from the Forest, humans just need to hold their phone up to the secret signs that mark places in the Five Trees Forest landscape, and their sprite will hop into or out of the phone.

Sprites talk to humans by sending messages that appear out of thin air (humans sometimes call them text messages), and ask magic questions like "If you were a ghost, who would you haunt and why?" in order to win treasure, and fight the wicked witches.

The answers to the magic questions from all the players appear on the map of the Forest, so that humans become part of the story and history of the Five Trees Forest wherever it appears.

The Five Trees Forest will be found first in a trial at the Media Centre in Huddersfield, then at Norton Sixth Form College in Sheffield as part of the Off the Shelf literature festival, then at a secret location in London (it's a very large media organisation, but that is TBC).

fivetreesforest.org

Magic food in the Five Trees Forest

Installing the Five Trees Forest

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.