Come Out And Play Festival & Cody Brown

The Come Out & Play Festival ran this weekend, and we participated by playing and by serving as the core support group for the Festival. Support meant manning sign-in tables, wrangling players, plugging stuff in – pretty much like you'd imagine. If you knew who we were, then you knew we were everywhere.

Urban games have become popular in the last few years as game designers have come to think of the city itself as a game board. New mobile technologies and locative media [cellphones, SMS, and the like] now make it possible for players to spread out with coordinated competitions that turn the metropolis into a digital pitch. As the organizers put it, "In the last few years, there has been an explosion of street play, from mixed-reality games that combine the virtual and real to big games that transform cities into gameboards to the time-honored traditions of stickball and scavenger hunts. Collectively, we call these big games or street games, games that transform public spaces, games that you play in the real-world. Too often, street games are only discovered after they've finished. Come Out & Play is an opportunity for you to experience these games for yourselves."

Come Out & Play turned New York into what "Time Out New York" called New Dork City: "Just as that crazy Christo transformed Central Park into a work of art, the three-day Come Out & Play Festival will turn the city into a giant board for large-as-life street games. Approximately 20 events, varying from camera-phone-enabled scavenger hunts to a Wi-Fi location-based competition from the guys behind the meta–video game Pacmanhattan, will take place throughout the city."

MTV was there for the opening night, and Wired magazine picked it up, so you know the urban game thing is hot. And the games were fun, for the most part: Paul Caine was involved in a stock market game that took him to Wall Street in the wee hours; stock prices were bid competitively via SMS messages. "It was really intense."

We were delighted that one of the games selected for the Festival was by Carleton Cinema & Media Studies graduate Cody Brown. Cody is finishing his masters in Georgia Tech's outstanding Digital Media program, where his advisor is no less than the esteemed Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cody did his comprehensive project at Carleton on videogame theory, and has carried that work on at Georgia, among other things. His site, Avant Gaming, today is among the leading sites for game theorizing.

Cody's game, Pervasive Minesweeper, "takes the classic videogame Minesweeper to the streets. Teams of four individuals race against each other to complete traditional Minesweeper puzzles played out across a 4-square block urban area.

As with traditional Minesweeper, the goal of Pervasive Minesweeper is to uncover all tiles in the game space that do not have a mine under them. In Pervasive Minesweeper each tile is a city block within a 4-square block area. The tiles ares manipulated by a ShotCode control panel hidden within each city block. Each player’s ShotCode compatible mobile device is paired with their team’s puzzle to prevent cross-puzzle tampering.

Each team is given a clue sheet as to the location of their sixteen control panels. At this point, a timer for the team is started. Once a control panel is located, players may open a tile or flag it as a potential mine. If a tile is opened and it is a mine, that team’s game is over. If there is no mine under the tile, a number is revealed on the team’s xhtml display. The number will tell the team how many mines are touching that tile (left, right, above, and below). When a team has opened all tiles on their game-board that do not contain mines, the team has solved their puzzle and their timer stops. The team that completes their puzzle in the least overall time is named the champion and awarded accordingly."

Three Roadtrippers joined the game, Cody's brother and new media special major August Brown, Rachel Teagle, and Jenny Oyallon-Kollowsky. We shot a nice little video which will appear on Roadtrip in a few days.

Comments

[tihopilik]

Hello

I can't be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don't have anything to say recently.


G'night

[GamingTed]

That event sounds like a blast. Is it something that gets held every year, or was it a one time thing?

Side note:Never been a big fan of minesweeper myself, but I am all for more classic single player games being redone with a multiplayer theme. It just adds a lot more fun to be able to play with more people.