One of the things I have been wanting to study for some time now is pervasive paidia. We have been moving in that direction, towards looking at pervasive activities that are not really games, but less structured play. If there was funding, one of the first things I’d start learning more about would be skateboarding. I have always found skateboarding to be fascinating: it is playful, an act of appropriation and rebellious. It is a sport, yet there is an undeniable beauty to it. It is urban, yet originates in suburbia. It is free, yet very constrained.

Skateboarding is pervasive play, but there are also forms that qualify as pervasive games. Recently we learned about Helsinki Cup, a team competition for skateboarders where contestants receive missions such as earning money as musical street performers, fast-talking into getting to play records in a club, swimming in fountains and shoplifting.

The Finnish competition seems to be a small-scale variation of the King of the Road challenge that Trasher magazine organized annually until 2007. Here is description from a review of the 2003 King of the Road DVD :

For those uninformed: 4 skateboarding teams (Deluxe, eS, Tum Yeto, & Volcom), each made up of 5 team members, a team manager, a photographer, videographer, and Mystery Guest, make their way across the country scoring points by documenting themselves accomplishing various team challenges. Points are scored by doing tricks listed in a book (distributed to each team), performing challenges relative to the city they are in, by picking up their Mystery Guest, doing the highest, longest and gnarliest things (as judged against the other competitors), and accomplishing a list of other various miscellaneous challenges. At the end of the competition, the team with the most points wins the competition and bragging rights in 2004, where supposedly they are to defend the title.

Fun! There are a lot of videos out there (such as this), but they are a little difficult to understand if one is not part of this particular subculture.

There is a secret coming to Copenhagen, a courier carrying a thingy that stays in from the 8th to the 22nd of November. Looks like the thing will include a variety of tasks from flashmobby to killeresque, treasurehuntlike and even ARGish. Cellphones and barcodes are involved, and I wouldn’t rule out an occasional playful public performance either.

I have no real clue, but we have a scout on the site, so if it’s cool, we’ll hopefully get a witness report.

So, Danes, go sign up on the home page, and check out the streams and groups at Twitter and Facebook.

First come first serve.

Banksy did a graffiti piece in Sutton, South London. They usually don’t stand for vandalism there and generally have a more of a zero tolerance attitude towards graffiti. But it’s not really vandalism, now is it, since it’s Banksy, and everyone loves him and he is sorta, kinda a real artist, and people pay quite high prices for his works, and, hey, if it’s good enough for Brangelina, it’s certainly good enough for Sutton. So they voted to keep the piece.

Of course, some other vandals have now sprayed their personal tags over the original piece. So naturally the council is now considering if they can restore the graffiti.

I find this fun for three reasons. One, I just generally like Bansky and the weird reactions that he provokes. Two, this shows that there is a backlash against Bansky. Frankly, it’s surprising that it took this long to surface. He has been moving towards acceptance – and he certainly has made some money and can thus be branded a sell-out. For me he almost jumped the shark when he instituted the Pest Control fake police – something that I feel goes against what he has been preaching. And finally, three, this just underlines how the whole struggle over public space is far from clear cut.

Pics by Robin Gunningham (via Gawker)

Check out The Prototype Experience by two Belgian companies, an “alternative marketing agency” Sponge and “creative bureau” One Million Dollars. The Prototype Experience is simultaneously an ad for the console game Prototype and a very compelling demo on how to use Facebook connect for using your life to add a bit of pervasive spice to empower an experience.

Try it out, the really nice, immersive, creepy trick takes just a few minutes of your life.

The gloomy world of Prototype

No US phone number needed, but you have to have a Facebook account.

Thomas Dreher writes an interesting, piece on Pervasive Games: Interfaces, Strategies and Moves on a German website IASL Online. Since it’s not published in a conference, a book or a journal, I figured it could perhaps use the little publicity we can give it here — it’s been out in English since October 2008, but I found it only last week. Also, he takes a few punches at our direction, which makes me all the happier to blog about it!

Basically, he argues that we should drop concepts like magic circle and immersion, as they do not properly apply to openness of pervasive games:

The theories on pervasive games by Montola, McGonigal and Brown omit some central aspects because first they follow the integration of ethnological play research in theories on computer games and second they modify these theories of closed game systems for games in surroundings. My central thesis is: Abandonment of the confines caused by the reuse of game research concepts based on the “magic circle”.

He’s perhaps a little more understanding towards the writings of Eva Nieuwdorp and Bo Kampmann Walther, but he argues that the current concepts should be dropped; instead, we should investigate interfaces instead:

All presented theories on pervasive games hark back to theories developed for plays and computer games. Either the authors have not been able until today to fulfill the aim of a sufficiently broad theory adequate for different kinds of pervasive games, or the problem has to be found in the procedure of adaptation causing the loss of important aspects. The interface model offers a restart.

He proposes a three-part analytical tool, consisting of a world-interface, a game-interface and a game-oriented world interface, which should explain pervasive games from the perspective of mediating players’ bodily and cognitive perceptions of the world with their perceptions of the game.

Read our academic archnemesis yourself, in English or in German!

Roots in the Scout Movement

Last spring in Knutepunkt Jana Jevická and Tomáš Kopeček held a presentation about the history of larp in the Czech Republic. Rather surprisingly they started their history lesson during the First Republic (1918-1939), long before Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax commodified role-playing activity into Dungeons & Dragons, generally considered to be the starting point of role-playing games. I have interviewed Kopeček to learn more about the subject. The Czech case is interesting as it shows how games that look like larps, pervasive games or even pervasive larps can evolve not just from role-playing games or theater, but from the scout movement.

The following is an edited version of what Kopeček told me. It is rather long, the longest piece we have published here in the blog, but even so this just scratches the surface (there might be a blog entry on the Czech scout movement in the works). I truly wish that a more comprehensive look at this history will be written for an international audience. Otherwise I am forced to start learning Czech…

Boffer battle from the 1940’s. A page from Rychlé šípy comic.

An important figure in this story is Jaroslav Foglar (1907-1999), who is famous in Czech as an author of books for young people. Foglar was active in the scout movement, and was directly inspired by the books of E.T. Seton. Foglar’s own books are fiction, but they depict youths and scouts – and the games they play. The first relevant book is from 1936 and is called Přístav volá (something like Harbour Calling). In the same year Foglar started the youth journal Mladý hlasatel which focuses on active teens. The next year he started Čtenářské kluby (Eng. Readers’ Clubs); independent children’s groups playing games and learning on their own without direct adult leadership.

Following Steve Payette’s Facebook stream, I picked two more things to follow-up on his guest story on disability and pervasive games.

First one, a video of Extreme Wheel Chair Driving, something like skateboarding meets parkour on wheel chairs. Looks like something that puts you into one.

Another prototype I picked from Steve is Demor, a GPS shooter game for blind and sighted players. I think it’s an accessibility concept prototype, about sound-based 3D interaction. It’s not really a pervasive one; you just need an open field to play it, wear the gear, listen up and shoot based on sounds. I suppose blind players have an advantage in that they hear better, but sighted players can see their environment which might make them move more confidently.

Virtual building blocks your vision in TimeWarp

Pervasive games for disabled are surprisingly relevant for augmented reality gaming: If you dream of creating pervasive games for wearable AR devices, check out the Fraunhofer FIT paper on TimeWarp by Iris Herbst et al., and learn how clunky AR helmet restricts your vision, how sunshine blinds you and how the graphics simply prevent you from seeing things. Add sound effects to that, and the worst case AR street game makes you effectively blind and deaf anyway!

Recently, ABC news featured a case of a reality game prank ending up in a lawsuit. A Los Angeles woman sues Toyota for being selected a target for their pervasive marketing campaign YourOtherYou. Apparently, a friend of the woman had selected her a suitable victim for a fun ‘prank’. For five days, she received emails from a fictitious man called from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police. Needless to say, the woman was not amused when the last mail exposed the prank and linked to a promo video for Toyota’s new car.

The case is a schoolbook example of unaware participation; a reality game akin to the Vem gråter case in our book, where the participants are kept in the dark as to what is going on until the game is over. From Vem gråter we learned that when you don’t know if what you are experiencing is for real or not, you start to invent very serious interpretations of the experience, and that these interpretations are scarier than what the designers intended. In Vem gråter, a fairly harmless character was interpreted as a potential lunatic. In YourOtherYou, the mails were interpreted not as a nuisance but as threats from a stalker.

(Apparently, the prank victims signed a legal agreement form as part of a fake personality test, that was mailed to them before the prank started.  Whether this will hold in court is an open issue; the agreement was in an unrelated context and rather obscure.)

The blogosphere is flooded with condemning comments, all highlighting the obvious problems with the production: that there was no clear opt-in and no opt-out, and that the theme was scary. Still, this campaign was produced, and it was actually a pretty impressive production, with a huge budget and lot of attention to detail that has received at least one award.  How could a professional designer end up with such a catastrophic design, how come Toyota went with it, and how come it was rewarded?

A MediaPost discussion from July 2008 (long before the lawsuit) shreds some light on the issue. The article points out that the target audience for the campaign were men under 35, a group that hate all forms of advertising. So, in order to reach the group the market company found a possible exploit: the target group loves to play pranks on each other. Thus, they came up with the idea to offer men the opportunity to play pranks on their friends.

The MediaPost article is a discussion between three (male) marketing experts who have tried out the experience by sending pranks to their friends. The discussion is appreciative, in particular of the level of detail in giving all of the prank characters an ‘internet life’, complete with myspace pages. The discussion never questions the tacit assumption behind the campaign: that men under 35 have a homosocial and age-homogeneous network of friends. Neither does it actually ever go into the experience of the friends who were subjected to the pranks; instead the participants evaluate the experience from the perspective of the prankster:

OMMA: I enjoyed being able to keep track of the prank on that dashboard of sorts, which let me know what messages my friend was receiving as the prank progressed through its five-day run.

Brady: That, to me, was the interesting part of this, where it had evolved from other things I’d seen. Really, what’s the fun in a joke if you can’t see the expression on someone’s face or find out what’s happening? I thought that was a nice evolution of the prank.

I think that this discussion reflects also how the design team imagined their campaign: they saw themselves in the role of the prankster and thought it would be fun to play pranks on their friends. And if subjected to a prank; well you just have to face up to it, right? The active, strong and rich man under 35 that can afford their cars can also handle a joke. I’ve only found one blog that foresaw that the campaign would end with a lawsuit: Streetflips.com, a currently passive blog run by women.

The book Markus and I are currently working on, Nordic Larp, will obviously feature some pervasive larps. One of those is Samir Belarbi’s 1997 game Föreningen Visionära Vetenskapsmäns Årliga Kongress (eng. The Annual Congress of the Society of Visionary Scientists), an early non-vampire pervasive larp from the Nordic scene played on the “luxury liner” ferry that travels between Sweden and Finland. The game has been poorly documented in English thus far, Johanna Koljonen’s description in the 2007 Knutebook is the only description I’ve found:

An onboard conference centre was rented for the titular meeting. The players stayed in character for the exact duration of the cruise, bringing only character belongings with them (although, presumably, offgame IDs). The setting automatically solved some of the central challenges later identified with the style and especially with larping in “the real world”: providing borders to the game that are solid but feel permeable, managing character movement and communication, and dealing with non-player interaction.

In contrast to a situation in which a person larps in public in his home town, here the player’s private life could intrude on the character’s experience only in the unlikely event that another passenger happened to be an off-game acquaintance. And as for interaction with non-players, the choice of location made sure that they would in some sense be “in character” as well. To Finns and Swedes alike, these cruise ships function as transitional or indeed ritual spaces. It is an unvoiced cultural given that what happens on a cruise does not “count” as part of every-day life. Nearly all groups of passengers define for themselves a new set of behavioural rules for the duration of the cruise, whether the trip to them is labelled “family vacation”, “romantic getaway”, or “graduation blowout” – or larp. Thus the FVV players could assume with some safety that non-intrusive weirdness would be dismissed by the other passengers as some variant of cruise behaviour, rather than mental illness or offensive provocations.

The reason I’m bringing up this game is that the game organizer recently listed some of his influences. I had been under the impression that the Nordic pervasive role-play has mostly come about as a side effect of Vampire: The Masquerade larps spilling to the streets. However, that was not the inspiration behind FVV, according to Belarbi:

To play in public isn’t something new. At this time I studied at an art school and  I was very much influenced by the art movements from the sixties, like Fluxus and Neo Dada. I was also familiar with Augusto Boal and his ideas about The Invincible Theatre – a method to perform short undercover plays in public. The objective of those plays were to enlighten the spectators and force them to take action and becoming part of the actual play.

Belarbi also mentiones that playing a variant of Killer inspired by the film Gotcha! was an inspirational in respect to FVV. I am quite excited about this as in Pervasive Games (which, I just noticed, is priced at €22.60 at Book Depository, hint, hint) we list Fluxus, Invisible theater and of course Killer games as historical activity forms that are similar to what is today called pervasive games. We did not claim that there was necessarily a causal connection between these – mostly because proving that would be close to impossible in many cases. Yet I am filled with joy to yet again find a little bit more proof that the history we constructed in Pervasive Games is not just conceptual.

Addendum: Belarbi clarified in an email to me that Vampire: The Masquerade was also something he was very much aware of. He also mentioned an article that was published in the Swedish live action role-playing magazine Fëa livia (Belarpi was the editor in chief of the magazine at the time) in November of 1995: Live ute bland vanligt hyggligt folk. By a freak accident, I happened to be in a place that had most issues of Fea in their library. The name of the article, written by Daniel Krauklis, translates roughly to Larping out amongst normal decent people. Krauklis writes about Vampire larps that spill onto the streets, how Killer is a clear predecessor of Masquerade and how Augusto Boal’s Invisible theater could inspire street larping. He also talks about how playing in the real world gives you a rush, making the game more exciting. Basically this article, though a little naïve, draws a roadmap for what would later be called pervasive larping.

I ran into Krauklis the day after finding the article (sometimes these things just have a way of working out). He recalled that that was pretty much the time when the Swedish larp community started reading theater history and theory. So Krauklis confirmed that Boal, Killer, Fluxus and theater history not only had a direct influence on Belarbi’s Föreningen Visionära Vetenskapsmäns Årliga Kongress, but also on Knappnålshuvudet (Eng. The Head of the Pin), the lighly pervasive larp he co-organized in 1999.

Accomplice looks interesting. Is it a show? Is it a game? Is it a tour? They say it’s an “experience”, to my trained eye it appears to be a commercial productization of a Fincher -style game, something that looks like a casual Game with a few larplike elements. You can play it in downtown Manhattan, Greenwich Village or Hollywood, for $55-$65 for a few hours of play, a few drinks and snacks included.

Part game, part theater, and part tour, Accomplice productions are unlike anything found in a theater, sending its audience on an actual journey through the streets of the city. Armed with a few initial bits of information, participants are sent on a mission, aided by clues and mysterious cast members strewn throughout various locations such as streetcorners, bars, out of the way shops, and seedy alleys. Audiences in groups of up to 10 traverse the city streets, piecing together clues of a meticulously crafted plot.

The pages are of course a bit mysterious, so it’s hard to go to details of what the game exactly consists of, but it all sounds very much like, say, Shelby Logan’s Run for a supercasual audience of tourists or birthday party groups. And look at these hundreds of 4-5 star audience reviews in Zerve!

Their video section shows an nice amount of screentime in eyeball-catchers such as Jimmy Fallon and Regis and Kelly. Like this one:

…and yeah, it’s been around since 2005. There’s no radar that’d catch all this stuff.