The previous book we edited with Jaakko, Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games is now online and available for free download. It includes several papers on pervasive larps, which are probably of interest to the readers of this blog.

Bjarke Pedersen and Lars Munck write Walking the White Road: A Trip to the Hobo Dream, a story on a six-person larp in the form of homeless vagrants walking Danish countryside on a quest to bury their friend. They dressed up as Danish road knights, drank copious amounts of alcohol and walked for a few days. The problem? In some point, when every outsider treats you like a hobo — you look like one, you smell like one, you act like one, you are slightly drunk like one — there’s no stepping out of the character anymore.

Matthijs Holter writes Exhuming Agabadan, a post-mortem story of an ARGlike pervasive larp on inner development, ways of seeing the world and playing alone. The game would have striken a chord with the artistic statement Martin Ericsson wrote for Pervasive Games, except that the vision of Agabadan failed to become reality. Holter’s strikingly honest post mortem may help you avoid the mistakes of Agabadan.

Marie Denward and Annika Waern write Broadcast Culture Meets Role-Playing Culture, a story on how the pervasive game of Sanningen om Marika was created and developed in a collaboration of people from two very different cultures: People with backgrounds in television and larp coming together, trying to build something that is not television nor a larp.

360° immersion in Dragonbane

In addition to these three, there are numerous cool stories that touch upon the themes discussed in Pervasive Games. For instance, J. Tuomas Harviainen discusses the Happenings in the context of larp, also reflecting them against the ideals and practices of pervasive larp. Johanna Koljonen writes a detailed account of Dragonbane, the most ambitious attempt at creating 360° illusion in larp so far. In a similar vein, Heidi Hopeametsä discusses immersive playstyle in her story of Ground Zero, a 24-hour larp about weathering a nuclear holocaust in a bomb shelter.

Playground Worlds was published in Solmukohta 2008. We covered this year’s book, called Larp, the Universe and Everything, earlier.

Recently I was the treasure in a treasure hunt. I feel I need to explain this.

A dear friend of mine organized a small treasure hunt for a mutual friend who had recently gotten married. She arrived with her husband in a new town on a train and had to go to the tourist info and give a password to receive an envelope that contained the first clue. The pair then followed clues for a few hours, having lunch, visiting a museum, buying chocolate, and finally finding the end treasure– me. (I’m a friend who lives in a different country and I then led them to a dinner held in their honour.) Still, even for a pervasive games researcher this is a little bit embarrassing.

Compared to many of the elaborate games I have participated in or read about this year, this was not very complex. However, when the pair told with a mix or excitement and embarrassment about negotiating which of them had to walk up to an unfamiliar clerk in which places and tell the password, I saw the fun ambiguity that drives people to participate in pervasive games.

Th picture is from Malmö graveyard. It has nothing to do with this treasure hunt (it is even taken during some other season) except that that was the last stop on the hunt. It is by Andreas Blixt.

I’m again reading up on participation and happened on a piece written by Allan Kaprow. The brilliantly titled piece, Notes on the Elimination of the Audience, was originally published in my favourite book of all time, Kaprow’s 1966 book-as-a-piece-of-art tome Assemblages, Environments and Happenings. This is a book I want to hug, caress and hide under my pillow. And no, I’m not even going to check what it costs on eBay, I get my fix by visiting it annually at the library of the aesthetics department in the University of Helsinki. But I digress…

I actually run into this text again while reading Participation edited by Claire Bishop. I had forgotten how clearly Kaprow not only outlines Happenings as something that have no audience and where everyone involved is a participant, but that he makes a few explicit exceptions for what we’d call pervasive Happenings:

I think that it is a mark of mutual respect that all persons involved in a Happening be willing and committed participants who have a clear idea what they are to do. [...]

There is an exception, however, to restricting the Happenings to participants only. When a work is performed on a busy avenue, passers-by will ordinarily stop and watch, just as they might watch demolition of a building. These are not theatre-goers and their attention is only temporarily caught in the course of their normal affairs. They might stay, perhaps become involved in some unexpected way, or they will more likely move on after a few minutes. Such persons are authentic parts of the environment.

A variant of this is the person who is engaged unwittingly with a performer in some planned action: a butcher will sell certain meats to a customer-performer without realizing that he is a part of a piece having to do with purchasing, cooking and eating meat.

Finally, there is this additional exception to the rule. A Happening may be scored for just watching. Performers will do nothing else. They will watch things, each other, possibly actions not performed by themselves, just as bus stopping to pick up commuters. This would not take place in a theatre or arena, but anywhere else.

Now, the last part moves a little father from the core of pervasive games, and seems more related to what Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskus does. But the two former exceptions are pretty much what happens in pervasive games. I have to say that I especially like the sentence: “Such persons are authentic parts of the environment.” I wish I had written that, like, in connection to Killer or Masquerade or something. But then again, I never would have had the courage to use a bold word like “authentic”.

Top image from Household, 1964, photo Sol Goldberg/Ithaca Journal. Quoted from Assemblages, Environments and Happenings. Bottom image from Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process, 1960, photo credited to Cameraphoto.

The latest issue of Second Nature, a special issue on games, locative and mobile media, looks interesting. I have not really had a change to read it, but what co-editor Rowan Wilken writes in the introduction whets my appetite:

The fact that mobile media refocus our attention on where we are is not necessarily noteworthy in and of itself, rather it is significant for the raft of further questions it opens up for contemplation and debate. How does mobile and locative gaming impact upon notions and experiences of play, place and mobility? How does labour, and especially the notion of “immaterial labour”, operate in relation to (and become enfolded into) our embrace and consumption of mobile media, particularly mobile gaming? What are the forms of “presence” that are particular to locative and other forms of mobile media? And what of the corporeal; what are the kinds of body-technology and body-place relations expected of and prompted by gaming, locative, and mobile media?

We wrote a piece on pervasive gaming research to a Finnish book on public space, called Julkisen tilan poetiikkaa ja politiikkaa. As the book came out, we found an inspiring story on Akayism from there, one that struck a chord with our research. Päivi Kymäläinen works as a senior assistant of human geography at University of Turku, and she agreed to guest blog some of the juicy stuff for us.

The Barsky Brothers Akay & Peter have actively created new social spaces in the streets of Stockholm for twenty years. They have worked under the name of Akayism which they call a state of mind rather than art. The guys themselves do not call their work art as they resist dividing some urban actions as more important (art) and less important (e.g. graffiti). If not as art, Barskys’ projects could be seen as interventions to the street life that is often defined by restrictions and power relations that may be invisible to the public. Barskys’ work experiments with such urban life that is taken for granted, and explores the moments when something unexpected happens in the everyday life of the city.

For the Barskys, the city is a living room, “a place where furniture can be rearranged and things fixed up”. Moreover, the city is also “a place where things disappear and are replaced with something new”. The effort of many urban planners is to make living rooms in urban space, but only seldom these efforts succeed. Urban planners rely on long-term solutions: buildings, parks and infrastructures, which are not enough when creating a living room. The development of the social space of the urban living room requires also temporary elements which are created in various urban actions – such as in the ones of the Barskys.

"Why does it always have to end like this", they asked at Albano

Most projects of the Barskys have made interesting interventions to the city life. Here I mention two of the projects: Albano House and 12m³. In Albano House, the Barsky Brothers went to an old industrial area in Stockholm that was going to be demolished. They built a hiding place from where they documented the destruction of the area and how the buildings were torn down. By their presence and by writing some texts to the buildings, they expressed their skepticism about the changes in the area.

Cliffhanger architecture of 12m³

Another intervention, 12m³, commented on the housing problems of Stockholm by building a house that dangled from the side of the cliff in an urban park, raising questions about ownership as the house seemed to be out of reach of regulations of the City Planning Office. The regulations were unclear as the Office regulates what can be built on land – not what hangs in the air. After the legal questions had been widely discussed, it become clear that even though the house had been illegally built, no one could do anything about it. The house could hang there as long as the Barsky Brothers wanted. With their project, the Barskys criticized the bureaucratic order that prevents using creative ideas in solving the housing problems.

In these projects, the Barskys made visible some power relations that usually remain unnoticed. In some sense, their work can be regarded as critical geography that does not stick in academic discussion, but happens on the streets and tries to transform urban space. Of course nowadays there is much happening in this respect: also urban studies have turned from the monumental and stable aspects of the city towards acknowledging the temporary events, things and meanings of the city.

Read more on Akayism from Urban Recreation, the book by Akay & Peter.

Christmas at another Akayist housing project, Traffic Island.

Images cited from www.akayism.org, except for 12m³, which is cited from Urban Recreation.

Earlier guest bloggers: Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo on SecretCPH, Illuminatum on problems of pervasive larp, Steve Payette on accessibility, Bjarke Pedersen on Chernobyl, Neil Dansey on apophenia and David Fono on Come Out and Play 2009.

The Wednesday’s story on SecretCPH again brought up an old pet peeve: How hard can it be to come up with names for pervasive games?

I mean — Ludic Nation calls the game SecretCPH in most places, but after the game the registration site now calls it Secret Copenhagen: The Spies, while their Ning community site has the heading Secret: Copenhagen. Of course, they walk solidly in the footsteps of the ARG genre, following the nameless thing that the very creators call both The Beast and The A.I. Web Game, and fans with many more names. Remember — those guys who created I Love Bees / ilovebees? The game that for some reason has the Wikipedia URL as Haunted Apiary?

Reminds me of Alias Online Adventure, Alias Web Puzzle and Alias Web Game, and their various seasons whatever they were called before the sites went down. Funnily, the fan-produced Omnifam (or Alias: Omnifam?) is a bit more consistent with its name than the official Alias ARGs, even though those fans managed put up a credits page without giving a label to the thing they claim credit for.

I understand that often the names are created by players and fans during runtime; the designers didn’t create the Wikipedia page that remains undecided between The Art of the Heist and Art of the H3ist, but I suppose fans would know if the creators were consistent. McKinney’s excellent presentation on the game is posted as Art of The Heist, but opens up with a title The Art of The H3ist. This undecided approach might be one reason why Motor Trend News also called the game The Art Of The H3ist and The Art of the H3ist. With four moving parts, there are at some 23 ways to spell that name wrong.

I’ll forgive Stolen A3 since I believe that was a fan-created derivative of a website url. Heroes Evolutions is also forgiven, since they apparently were explicit about changing their name from Heroes 360 Experience. Seasons and iterations are complicated, I’m not even going to get started on Nokia Game — or on wondering Nokia 20Lives was a Nokia Game or not.

If you engage in funny spelling, make sure you know what you are doing. I don’t think the creators of vQuest can agree whether it’s actually VQuest or not. The same goes, I think, with PacManhattan, Pac-Manhattan and Pacmanhattan.

In our own IPerG project (funnily spelled as iPerG in all too many slidesets) we had skills too. Only after writing two papers and a bit more on a game called Prosopopeia, I first heard the complete name having been Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll. Well, the game documentation website remains solid on the original name. Having learned from our experiences, we determinedly poked our book case authors for precision, as only the designer could tell that the correct name for the 2121box game was Mystery on Fifth Avenue, not In These Rooms of Wood and Stone as we had thought (that is the correct name of the book  that came with the mystery).

Some of this stuff has budgets upwards from one million eurodollars. Wouldn’t it also benefit the business to establish clear brand names for the stuff you’ll put into your portfolios?

Please?

</rant>

Our sixth guest blogger is Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo from Copenhagen. He’s a Danish larper and larpwright, who’s had his fingers, among other things, in The White Road, Tre grader af uskyld and System Danmarc that were mentioned in Pervasive Games. He reports his experience of SecretCPH.

SecretCPH was something in between a larp, an ARG and a reality game. As players you played the part of agents from three different agencies which competed with each other to find a secret which had arrived in Copenhagen. The game ran for two weeks, from Sunday the 8th to Sunday the 22nd of November. The game was mostly based on QR Codes, two-dimensional barcodes readable with mobile phone software such as BeeTagg Multicode Reader.

The introduction to the game was a clue hidden in Ørstedsparken, Copenhagen. The clue led you to a registration page, where you signed up for the game and chose an agency. I was notified of the game by way of their Facebook group and registered on their website.

Your agency gave you different missions on a personal webpage, which you scored point by completing. For example, in an early mission you had to photograph yourself in action (my agency Kappa9 was branded as modern action heroes, so I of course made pictures of myself attacking other people). The Network (another agency branded as cold-war spies) instead had to break a code. Later missions included choosing a safe house, which we photographed and uploaded to our agency-network-page. The game also featured a few missions including physical action for example one, where we stalked a courier and planted a barcode chip on him – we successfully delivered by sneaking close to him and dropping it in his backpack.

Agent Wolf of Kappa9 prepares for attack

The last mission of the game was a timed run between the agencies. The evil agent Bartok had killed the courier and now dared the players to win in a game to free another agent, “The Lady”. Each agency was limited to choosing one participant for the last mission, which I found a bit strange. Typically in ARGs they try to gather as many players as possible to the end event. We were all invited to a live event which concluded the game. The original, now dead, courier was replaced by his former handler, so the story of the secret was circular and returned to its starting point with the secret leaving Copenhagen yet again.

All in all, it was a great game, it was good fun to participate and do missions. However, if I had not known so many of the other players beforehand, there might have been less chance of me following the game through to the end. This was because it was quite confusing to keep up with the different communication channels. In the end I was following three web pages and receiving both in- and off-game information by email (see SecretCPH in Ning, Twitter and Facebook,).

The missions sometimes required very short reaction time: one mission required you to be someplace in the center of Copenhagen two hours after the mission briefing was accessible on your personal page.

Its hard to tell exactly how many players we’re involved in the game. I met eight active players and know that there was at least three more. There was however many more profiles created on the different network-pages but I don’t know whether any of them were active. Participation was free — except that I got tired of the lousy internet-browser on my old cellphone and felt the urge to buy an iPhone during the game.

I fancy myself a larper first and foremost, and therefore feel an urge to compare it to larps. I have organized larps which had many similarities to this game. SecretCPH had a lot of the trappings of regular role-play, such as characters, a story and a common fiction: For instance, we were asked to create agents with codenames and choose an agency with a clear identity, and of course those personas evolved a bit during the game. On the other hand, SecretCPH did not expect or encourage role-play. There was a little social interaction with non-player characters, but it was very limited and only concerned a single player from each agency in the last mission. For the rest of the game we were told to stay away from the Courier, The Lady or the evil agent. And finally there was no way the players could possibly change the outcome of the story.

Guest blogger Wolf in action

To summarize: SecretCPH placed itself between several genres. Somewhat an ARG – but it was mainly happening in the physical world. Somewhat a larp – but it shared small-to-none creative rights with the players. Somewhat a game – but you had no way of comparing you point score with other agents. But on the same time it played to some of the strengths of the different categories – the mystique of ARG, the live experience with costumes and doing weird stuff of larp, and the recognizable form of game-like missions.

SecretCPH was run by Adam Mayes of Ludic Nation, as a beta test of the game system. Apparently the plan is to run something similar at Roskilde Festival in 2010.

Photos by the author, taken as a part of the game.

Earlier guest bloggers: Illuminatum on problems of pervasive larp, Bjarke Pedersen on Chernobyl, Neil Dansey on apophenia, David Fono on Come Out and Play 2009 and Steve Payette on accessibility.

Planning to run or attend a course on pervasive games in your university? Reading our book, wanting to dig deeper in a particular field?

Well — good news: We put a Course Reader page up, where you can find recommendations on further reading. It’s a living document (and the part about pervasive technology still on the ToDo), so please feel free to comment and contribute.

(Please don’t take it as an attempt to establish a “canon” — just a collection of stuff we found well-written, inspiring, original — or things that we couldn’t fit between the covers well enough.)

Photo from Momentum promo shoots.

One extremely cool activity that we couldn’t properly fit into Pervasive Games is infiltration. Infiltration.org defines the activity as “going to places you’re not supposed to go in general”, from urban exploration to dropping into conversations uninvited, and so forth. The bible of the sport is Access All Areas by late Jeff “Ninjalicious” Chapman, which we found one of the most inspiring reads while writing our book — it’s adventurous, daring and reckless, but still firmly grounded in a healthy dose of common sense, and solid if unconventional ethics.

To motivate you to buy a copy of Access All Areas, I’ll cite their website on the topic of hotel pool infiltration from their guide on how to infiltrate the pool areas of classy Toronto hotels — for mostly harmless though perhaps illegal adventuring fun:

Exploring hotels requires a mixture of stealth and social engineering. Unless one sticks strictly to the unused areas of a hotel, there will be many times when one must interact with other people, including employees.

Hotel employees are a lot like bears: though they’ll certainly attack you if you act scared or run from them, under normal circumstances they would really prefer to avoid a confrontation altogether. They know all too well that any sort of conflict with a hotel guest could result in serious punishment, so they’re as scared of you as you are of them.

An infiltrator fantasy: The health club of Toronto Royal York hotel

Later on, he goes into specifics, hotel-by-hotel, like this:

The best tactic to take at the Four Seasons is to stash your backpack somewhere, borrow a hotel towel from a cleaning cart or a supply closet, and then brazenly walk past all the cameras and all the staff straight into the pool changeroom. If you’re confident that you know exactly what you’re doing, they will be too, and no-one will have a chance to shoot you a second look until you’ve already changed into your bathing suit and showered. Half-naked wet folk all look equally casual, so there is less chance of appearing out of place. Furthermore, wet people aren’t very threatening, so there is a greater chance of simply being dismissed as harmless.

The Four Seasons facilities are absolutely five-star: a large indoor/outdoor pool, a deep whirlpool surrounded by mirrored walls, and segregated steam saunas in the changerooms. The changerooms are luxury itself, providing every variety of head condiment available, as well as fully-stocked individual shower stalls and an automatic shoe polisher. An automatic suit dryer is also provided, and a helpful staff member was even so kind as to offer me a plastic Four Seasons bag in which to carry my wet bathing suit (a wonderful credibility prop to use on my next visit).

Personally, I’m too much of a chicken to engage in this thing myself, but I can’t deny that it would be extremely interesting to try it out in good company — I can understand how you might develop an addiction to this kind of thing.

Until the end of the year, you can get a bundle of Access All Areas and all 25 issues of Infiltration for $50, but the real bargain is the book at Amazon for mere $17. Take my word for it, this is an excellent buy — and if you plan to feature urbex in your game without serious hands-on experience, it’s absolutely mandatory reading.

Photos cited from www.infiltration.org.

What happens when someone in a marketing department sees what Improv Everywhere is doing and wants to cash in. I could bear this for 60 seconds. I dare you to watch the whole thing.