Action One Interaction

I was in London last weekend taking a look at Conspiracy for Good (by the way, that is the official name of the thing, the creative director confirmed it). I had a good time playing, but won’t get into the analysis yet as the game is still going on – and so is the research. Basically this Action One was a trasure trail leading up to an intense initiation ritual and a swat attack. In a way it also acted as a tutorial for the later parts.

The people behind the game have been doing a pretty good job of producing recap videos on what has happened. You can find the web stuff leading up to the street events on their site and the juicy bits of last saturday below.

I will say one thing about the design, though. This is a pervasive game that targets not just the usual crowd, but is aiming for a larger audience. It is a combination of a treasure trail with some puzzles, pervasive interaction and larp-like elements thrown in. Some of the participants just want to do the treasure trail and don’t really care about interacting with the ractors (i.e. interactive actors), whereas others love to play with the characters they have seen online and try to trick the security guards and so on (in the top . One elegant solution to this is that the participants got all kinds of hand-outs in the beginning of the game, all branded with the spira logo. They were told to hide the logos. What seemed to happen, though, was that the ones that hid the logos were not harassed (as much) by the actors as the ones who did not bother to hide it. The players also had wristbands that marked them as players, so in essence there were two levels on ludic markers: the I-am-a-player wristbands and the the I-want-to-play-with-other-people logo. A great way to establish multiple interaction patterns for different player types.

The second action happens this Saturday.