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imomus1. While the less fortunate were working in offices yesterday, Hisae and I were shopping for antler plushie hats and giant koalas:
Our ludic credentials and annoying privilege established, I can now proceed with today's serious business.
2. A message from someone called Alex Fleetwood appeared on Click Opera yesterday: "Hi Momus, I run a festival of mixed reality games in London. We would like you to come and play something with us in June. You can read a bit about the festival and see a film we shot last year at sandpit.hideandseekfest.co.uk."
3. So I watched the Hide and Seek Festival documentary, which is an introduction to this thing we're going to call PUG, or pervasive urban gaming. What is PUG? According to the Sandpit site, "pervasive games transform the city into a playground, make your heart race, change the way you see the world, get you playing nicely with others".
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4. Hide and Seek isn't the only PUG festival; there's one called Come Out and Play in Amsterdam. "Turn Amsterdam into a playground!" is its slogan. "When you play a computer game, you interact with what is on your monitor, even if you're outside playing on a mobile phone. You don't interact with your physical environment. Now, computer scientists from Fraunhofer FIT want you to play outside, sharing the outdoor experience offered by children's games".
5. So this has to do with taking computer gaming experiences and attitudes into the real world. Immediately, the phrase "the digitisation of everyday life" starts crackling between my plushie stag horns. It isn't necessarily a positive thought; in rapid succession I get visions of MTV's Jackass show, of campus shootings by kids who grew up with Resident Evil, of HUD masks and Second Life, of Peter Sellers in "Being There"...
6. What happens when you turn a city into a playground? Well, one thing that happens -- or did in the Middle Ages -- is Mob Football, "played between neighbouring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people, struggling to move an item such as an inflated pig's bladder to particular geographical points, such as their opponents' church". Count me out!
7. And yet... count me in! Because isn't this everything cool about the future as well as everything appalling about the past? Isn't this Flash Mobs and Situationism and Certeau and Homo Ludens and the thing we do when we've scaled the very pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: replacing the Work Ethic with the Play Ethic?
8. And yet... and yet... isn't this everything terrible about the present, too? Isn't this the compulsory fun of management training weekends that "break the ice" and "get you out of your shell" to "bond as a team"? Isn't this enforced audience participation, repressive desublimation, a Butlins redcoat holiday organised by Nathan Barley and his huge team of kidult assistants?
9. What happens when fun and games become values you can't question? That's the question I asked in Sweden when I gave my Down with Fun lecture at the Krets Gallery. What happens when even straights who collect stamps talk about "getting my stamp collection fix" or when a design website asserts dogmatically that "if it’s not fun, it’s not design!”? Fun and games, at that point, become orb and sceptre, ball and chains. Liberation, at that point, becomes difficulty and differential calculus. It becomes emotion, idealism, seriousness, quietness, dignity.
10. How much "hide" is allowed to reside in a festival called Hide and Seek? In other words, when your aim is to get people out of themselves, are you forcing extraversion on introverts? What about people who dislike the weekend, and dislike what alcohol does to humans, and dislike what's happened to districts like the Lower East Side and Friedrichshain, districts which were once quiet and liveable but are now full of galumphing players bellowing at the tops of their desublimated lungs?
11. And how "pervasive" does Pervasive Urban Gaming have to become? So pervasive that it not only invades the city but penetrates and pervades the shields we all raise in the city to protect ourselves and our different ways of living, our precious, precarious cultural ecosystems which can co-exist only if they -- precisely -- don't pervade? What, in other words, does PUG do to multiculturalism and diversity? Because, just as every microculture in the city has its own gender relations, so every microculture in the city has a different sense of personal space, a different way of playing. We won't all necessarily get on, even after the application of alcohol. Some of us don't even drink alcohol.
12. Hisae and I, when we're alone, put on silly voices, call each other silly names, have in-jokes and references nobody else would understand. When other people are around, though, we don't do that. It would exclude, baffle and embarrass them. It would be rude of us.
13. This unethical exclusion, this flagrant rudeness, is something Charlie Booker and Chris Morris rammed home time after time in Nathan Barley, the story of an infuriatingly ludic prankster / media node who constantly flaunts his freedom and disinhibition in front of unfree and inhibited people. Here he is playing Online Tramp Racing from Russia ("Totally dereg, yeah?"):
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14. Nathan's utter callousness is soon apparent. It's the callousness of someone talking loudly and happily into a cellphone while others around him suffer in silence. It's a normal, everyday callousness, one societies geared to competition and the inevitability of inequality tolerate much better than societies geared to collectivity and equality. If you can't beat them, join them; shout happily into your phone too, or pretend to. Play Scum Vegas.
15. But there's something wrong with you if you don't feel just a little bit guilty for playing while others work. I mean, it's a pleasure too, like being the only one awake, or being king, or the only man in a huge group of fit women, or the only consumer in a world of producers. But it's a bit evil, and you should remember that. Look, look, here:
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That's people from the Soho Project making fun of road diggers by saying they're playing Tetris. People playing while others work, and pretending that other people working are really playing.
16. What's the Soho Project? It's a make-your-own-reality game from a London media company created by the same people who're running the Hide and Seek Festival. The company was called Fictional Media -- a sort of Endemol of the streets. "Players signed up via a Facebook app, created a fictional identity, did missions around Soho, filmed them and uploaded them to YouTube," Alex tells me.
17. Look, here they are telling us that real Soho people are actually not real:
[Error: unknown template video]
"All of these people are fake and they're actually controlled by one person in Germany... Soho Second Life."
18. And here they are, most damningly, most Nathan Barleyishly of all, talking about a homeless person and saying "This tragic case of this guy lying down -- he's doing very badly at strip poker -- he's already lost both of his shoes and is feeling quite depressed about it." And it's a real homeless guy, stretched out on the pavement:
[Error: unknown template video]
19. But -- and it's a big but -- the people telling us real people aren't real people... aren't real people. What's more, Fictional Media has made another group of not-real people who are their rivals, their antithesis. "Once you started playing in Soho, you became aware that there was a Resistance who believed that Fictional Media were disrespecting the history and culture of Soho," Alex explains. "The resistance operated out of a tent just off Brewer Street and were dedicated to doing zero-tech beautiful things, infecting mission videos and overthrowing the company". They're mostly very cute girls, these resistance kids. Here's their "training video":
[Error: unknown template video]
20. Like God or Endemol, Alex from Fictional Media has already anticipated my objections and populated his world with people embodying them. People much more telegenic than I am, too. "We were trying to dramatise a choice for players," he says, "between a forward-thinking, ludic, technologically enhanced, corporate, sanitised Soho, and a culturally embedded, historically sensitive, luddite, anti-global Soho. Also between selling out and getting on, and keeping it real, poor, artist in garret etc." He's even got the dialectic going much more neatly than I have: "The truth is that both sides couldn't help but embody the other - the evil corporation generated numerous instances of viral happiness and creativity, and the Resistance ended up hacking the website in order to triumph."
21. Whether I or you like it or not, Pervasive Urban Gaming is the future. That's why I, personally, want in. And out. It's not just Alex and Endemol who are working and thinking and playing this way. It's British Telecom, pouring millions into the TARA engine (Total Abstract Rendering Architecture) and MARI (messaging architecture for real-time interaction), which they tested in Encounter, "an urban-based, pervasive game that combined both virtual play in conjunction with physical, on-the-street action". And it's reality TV. And it's ubicomp. And it's the future of the internet, and of meatspace, and how they're all merging in one huge, utterly real, unreal game.
22. It's also Tate Modern, where a performance piece by Tania Bruguera recently saw actors playing equestrian policemen controlling the crowds from high up on horses. The crowds obeyed -- what else could they do? A real policeman on horseback looks pretty much like someone just playing the role. The spectacle and the reality merge; one can control us just as easily as the other.
23. And isn't that what the Situationists were always saying, anyway? "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation," said Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. "The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." So all this play-acting is the problem. But it's also the solution, which, Debord says, is "radical action in the form of the construction of situations". And what's that if not play, play at the scale of 1:1, play that pervades the whole city?
24. So, when it comes to Pervasive Urban Gaming, it's a no-brainer. I have no choice. Count me out and count me in.
Our ludic credentials and annoying privilege established, I can now proceed with today's serious business.
2. A message from someone called Alex Fleetwood appeared on Click Opera yesterday: "Hi Momus, I run a festival of mixed reality games in London. We would like you to come and play something with us in June. You can read a bit about the festival and see a film we shot last year at sandpit.hideandseekfest.co.uk."
3. So I watched the Hide and Seek Festival documentary, which is an introduction to this thing we're going to call PUG, or pervasive urban gaming. What is PUG? According to the Sandpit site, "pervasive games transform the city into a playground, make your heart race, change the way you see the world, get you playing nicely with others".
[Error: unknown template video]
4. Hide and Seek isn't the only PUG festival; there's one called Come Out and Play in Amsterdam. "Turn Amsterdam into a playground!" is its slogan. "When you play a computer game, you interact with what is on your monitor, even if you're outside playing on a mobile phone. You don't interact with your physical environment. Now, computer scientists from Fraunhofer FIT want you to play outside, sharing the outdoor experience offered by children's games".
5. So this has to do with taking computer gaming experiences and attitudes into the real world. Immediately, the phrase "the digitisation of everyday life" starts crackling between my plushie stag horns. It isn't necessarily a positive thought; in rapid succession I get visions of MTV's Jackass show, of campus shootings by kids who grew up with Resident Evil, of HUD masks and Second Life, of Peter Sellers in "Being There"...
6. What happens when you turn a city into a playground? Well, one thing that happens -- or did in the Middle Ages -- is Mob Football, "played between neighbouring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people, struggling to move an item such as an inflated pig's bladder to particular geographical points, such as their opponents' church". Count me out!7. And yet... count me in! Because isn't this everything cool about the future as well as everything appalling about the past? Isn't this Flash Mobs and Situationism and Certeau and Homo Ludens and the thing we do when we've scaled the very pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: replacing the Work Ethic with the Play Ethic?
8. And yet... and yet... isn't this everything terrible about the present, too? Isn't this the compulsory fun of management training weekends that "break the ice" and "get you out of your shell" to "bond as a team"? Isn't this enforced audience participation, repressive desublimation, a Butlins redcoat holiday organised by Nathan Barley and his huge team of kidult assistants?
9. What happens when fun and games become values you can't question? That's the question I asked in Sweden when I gave my Down with Fun lecture at the Krets Gallery. What happens when even straights who collect stamps talk about "getting my stamp collection fix" or when a design website asserts dogmatically that "if it’s not fun, it’s not design!”? Fun and games, at that point, become orb and sceptre, ball and chains. Liberation, at that point, becomes difficulty and differential calculus. It becomes emotion, idealism, seriousness, quietness, dignity.
10. How much "hide" is allowed to reside in a festival called Hide and Seek? In other words, when your aim is to get people out of themselves, are you forcing extraversion on introverts? What about people who dislike the weekend, and dislike what alcohol does to humans, and dislike what's happened to districts like the Lower East Side and Friedrichshain, districts which were once quiet and liveable but are now full of galumphing players bellowing at the tops of their desublimated lungs?
11. And how "pervasive" does Pervasive Urban Gaming have to become? So pervasive that it not only invades the city but penetrates and pervades the shields we all raise in the city to protect ourselves and our different ways of living, our precious, precarious cultural ecosystems which can co-exist only if they -- precisely -- don't pervade? What, in other words, does PUG do to multiculturalism and diversity? Because, just as every microculture in the city has its own gender relations, so every microculture in the city has a different sense of personal space, a different way of playing. We won't all necessarily get on, even after the application of alcohol. Some of us don't even drink alcohol.
12. Hisae and I, when we're alone, put on silly voices, call each other silly names, have in-jokes and references nobody else would understand. When other people are around, though, we don't do that. It would exclude, baffle and embarrass them. It would be rude of us.
13. This unethical exclusion, this flagrant rudeness, is something Charlie Booker and Chris Morris rammed home time after time in Nathan Barley, the story of an infuriatingly ludic prankster / media node who constantly flaunts his freedom and disinhibition in front of unfree and inhibited people. Here he is playing Online Tramp Racing from Russia ("Totally dereg, yeah?"):
[Error: unknown template video]
14. Nathan's utter callousness is soon apparent. It's the callousness of someone talking loudly and happily into a cellphone while others around him suffer in silence. It's a normal, everyday callousness, one societies geared to competition and the inevitability of inequality tolerate much better than societies geared to collectivity and equality. If you can't beat them, join them; shout happily into your phone too, or pretend to. Play Scum Vegas.
15. But there's something wrong with you if you don't feel just a little bit guilty for playing while others work. I mean, it's a pleasure too, like being the only one awake, or being king, or the only man in a huge group of fit women, or the only consumer in a world of producers. But it's a bit evil, and you should remember that. Look, look, here:
[Error: unknown template video]
That's people from the Soho Project making fun of road diggers by saying they're playing Tetris. People playing while others work, and pretending that other people working are really playing.
16. What's the Soho Project? It's a make-your-own-reality game from a London media company created by the same people who're running the Hide and Seek Festival. The company was called Fictional Media -- a sort of Endemol of the streets. "Players signed up via a Facebook app, created a fictional identity, did missions around Soho, filmed them and uploaded them to YouTube," Alex tells me.
17. Look, here they are telling us that real Soho people are actually not real:
[Error: unknown template video]
"All of these people are fake and they're actually controlled by one person in Germany... Soho Second Life."
18. And here they are, most damningly, most Nathan Barleyishly of all, talking about a homeless person and saying "This tragic case of this guy lying down -- he's doing very badly at strip poker -- he's already lost both of his shoes and is feeling quite depressed about it." And it's a real homeless guy, stretched out on the pavement:
[Error: unknown template video]
19. But -- and it's a big but -- the people telling us real people aren't real people... aren't real people. What's more, Fictional Media has made another group of not-real people who are their rivals, their antithesis. "Once you started playing in Soho, you became aware that there was a Resistance who believed that Fictional Media were disrespecting the history and culture of Soho," Alex explains. "The resistance operated out of a tent just off Brewer Street and were dedicated to doing zero-tech beautiful things, infecting mission videos and overthrowing the company". They're mostly very cute girls, these resistance kids. Here's their "training video":
[Error: unknown template video]
20. Like God or Endemol, Alex from Fictional Media has already anticipated my objections and populated his world with people embodying them. People much more telegenic than I am, too. "We were trying to dramatise a choice for players," he says, "between a forward-thinking, ludic, technologically enhanced, corporate, sanitised Soho, and a culturally embedded, historically sensitive, luddite, anti-global Soho. Also between selling out and getting on, and keeping it real, poor, artist in garret etc." He's even got the dialectic going much more neatly than I have: "The truth is that both sides couldn't help but embody the other - the evil corporation generated numerous instances of viral happiness and creativity, and the Resistance ended up hacking the website in order to triumph."
21. Whether I or you like it or not, Pervasive Urban Gaming is the future. That's why I, personally, want in. And out. It's not just Alex and Endemol who are working and thinking and playing this way. It's British Telecom, pouring millions into the TARA engine (Total Abstract Rendering Architecture) and MARI (messaging architecture for real-time interaction), which they tested in Encounter, "an urban-based, pervasive game that combined both virtual play in conjunction with physical, on-the-street action". And it's reality TV. And it's ubicomp. And it's the future of the internet, and of meatspace, and how they're all merging in one huge, utterly real, unreal game.
22. It's also Tate Modern, where a performance piece by Tania Bruguera recently saw actors playing equestrian policemen controlling the crowds from high up on horses. The crowds obeyed -- what else could they do? A real policeman on horseback looks pretty much like someone just playing the role. The spectacle and the reality merge; one can control us just as easily as the other.
23. And isn't that what the Situationists were always saying, anyway? "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation," said Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. "The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." So all this play-acting is the problem. But it's also the solution, which, Debord says, is "radical action in the form of the construction of situations". And what's that if not play, play at the scale of 1:1, play that pervades the whole city?
24. So, when it comes to Pervasive Urban Gaming, it's a no-brainer. I have no choice. Count me out and count me in.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-18 11:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 12:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 01:39 am (UTC)This one's easy. The more people are doing it, the less interesting it is. Transforming the urban space into a playground is only an achievement so long as it actually remains an urban space underneath.
I read this article and I think of the dudes who played a game of frisbee golf through a performance my band was doing, nearly concussing my brother in the process; I think of self-involved, self-satisfied assholes who have found yet another way to tell the world that they have enough social or cultural privileges that they can repurpose public space; effectively claiming a 'me' ownership over what should be ours. The ability to decontextualize one's environment is a class marker... you ever read the J.G. Ballard short story about the man who conceptually reduced his wife to a collection of geometric shapes, and then drastically reorganized her?
In other words, icky poo yuck. It's stuff like this that makes me come over all bauhausy.
(True situationist act: the recent picketing of scientologists by members of 4chan, collecting on the street and chanting internet memes in the pursuit of nothing specific and then disbanding. They've achieved the holy grail of this kind of art: authentic mindlessness.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 01:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 02:30 am (UTC)Are you serious? I grew up with Resident Evil and I have no prior history of violence (except for a few mild instances of course). For me, violent video games take away some of my violent thoughts. Dear God Momus, don't listen to the media! Don't listen to Jack Thompson! None of those people have ever played the games they're rallying against!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 02:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 02:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 02:49 am (UTC)There's more to the raids than memes and catchphrases. (http://www.dailymotion.com/SA-Anonymous/video/7341208)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 03:02 am (UTC)Most of us have an unfavourable opinion of the drinking and drug culture that seems to permeate throughout the UK, even if you're a part of it; It's so prevalent because the truth is that clubs and bars are generally shit unless you're intoxicated. We all complain about how expensive everything is in London, but nobody really presents us with any alternatives so we're constantly shelling out cash to keep ourselves occupied. I really wanna pat the team behind this on the back, at least they're trying to bring something about thats free and somewhat thrilling. Thats a good thing.
and yet, there is something undeniably wanky about this project, -- the idea of people in their mid 20s and 30s running around playing tag, whilst some media type is there annotating the entire thing calling it "a narrative where the city is your cinematic backdrop"...
Alex man, call a spade a spade -- this is schoolyard playtime for adults. Stop justifying it by shouting INNOVATION every 30 seconds while youre doing it. You're onto something good, it doesnt need hyping and over-analysing with buzz words and marketing speil.
Overall, my opinions of this are positive. but it's most definitely only a summer activity. Winter is for books and videogames.
astronomomus
Date: 2008-02-19 03:40 am (UTC)Hisae is most lovely flower in garden. *bows*
Re: astronomomus
Date: 2008-02-19 03:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 04:14 am (UTC)SO MINIMALIST!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 05:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 05:16 am (UTC)shows you how privileged childhood can be
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 05:18 am (UTC)OMG IT'S BACK TO NORMAL QUIT PLAYING GAMES WITH ME MOMUS
New Babylon
Date: 2008-02-19 05:40 am (UTC)The merged idea of gaming, urbanism and architecture came together with Situationist thought and Johan Huizinga theory… mind you, not through a video-game specifically, but this earlier example of ludic architecture: Constant Nieuwenhuys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_Nieuwenhuys)’ New (http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/exhibitionInfo/exhibition/15904) Babylon (http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html).
In this sense, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon is the ultimate pervasive (http://www.pervasive-gaming.org/) game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_Game) that’s more along the definition of ‘playing’ than ‘gaming’ (or a sandbox game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game), “a genre or mode of some video games for open-ended, nonlinear play”), a game broader than the traditional environment of a screen, a game-space that you cannot disconnect from and is constantly coinciding with the space that you live in (as gothikfaerie says; see eXistenZ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXistenZ)). It’s a proposal for a future society (http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/situationist/constant.html), “a society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play, in which traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the social institutions that it propped up”.
New Babylon’s model is the playground, the place of child’s play, where traditionally, you leave as an adult to work, loosing freedom to do as you want – to run free. It’s imagined as a place where you never work, where you can perpetually be a child. Such state of affairs would not stem from Marxist revolution, but from a technological revolution, liberating its occupants from any burdens to do whatever comes into their minds. But a playground is a bound space of total control (http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/architectural-weaponry-interview-with.html), and in Constant’s project, “you never get out of the playground”… even when eXistenZ ends, one character asks: “But tell me, are we still in the game?”
Superman
Date: 2008-02-19 05:58 am (UTC)I've loved you from a distance :)
Date: 2008-02-19 06:02 am (UTC)Re: Superman
Date: 2008-02-19 06:03 am (UTC)At least that's what I imagine their conversations are like. Correct me if I'm wrong Momus!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 06:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 06:29 am (UTC)I'm just talking about the public protests. I'm sure their lobbying efforts will provoke their own special galaxy of lulz.
This is a curating issue. Anonymous says that what we have here is a ragtag collection of freedom fighters striking a blow against a wealthy, sinister cult. If you frame the protests that way, the best that can be said is that the turnout was kind of impressive for a bunch of shut-ins. Net impact on the COS = zero; the phrase 'epic fail' comes to mind.
Curate it another way - as an irrelevant group of self-selecting egomaniacs held together by a vast patchwork of inane mythology, choosing as their target a relevant group of self-selecting etc, and attacking them by wearing comic book masks and shouting. Viewed this way the adventure becomes a huge success, a commentary on social organization, groupthink and futility. Add in the catchphrases and you get bonus dadaism.
I'm just trying to help.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 06:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 06:35 am (UTC)(I love games). I hate wanky people who call games Art. Though sometimes games can be Art. (Oh god, am I at it too?)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-19 06:37 am (UTC)