1. Ipad as board game/hungry hippo

I was ever so excited to use the iPad not as another consumption device (but this has become a very strong user story for me – Comics, more music, tv programs from the 80’s, more games, more things) but as a way to play games with others in the same room (a e-board).  I have been surprised how well that some of the board games have translated to asynchronous play (I am talking Carcassonne – although some games have become glacial as @antimega stated)

What seems to be one of the most fun and engaging uses in our house has been multiplayer, semi-physical games.  It started with labyrinth 2, and has progressed to multi pong, and recently marble mixer.

These games are simple to understand (obvious just by looking at them), the synthed real world actions work well, and the most fun is the trash talk, the victory dances, and the showmanship.

Russell has talked about the potential for the introduction of other physical device to add to games, such as gogos, and non static enabled trinkets.  If Lego figures could interact with games as game pieces I would be a happy man.

2. Psychogeography as a game

I have become a battered student of Psychogeography over the last 3 years. I was introduced to the theory by a piece James Bridle wrote years ago, I have spent hours in wikipedia, strange french texts, Iain Sinclair books, and mini city experiments.  I have also tried to transport some of the exercises to the Peak district, where I live.  What happens if you ignore paths, ignore rights of way, and travel across the countryside ignoring rules of movement, and following more arbitary paths.  What do I learn, how do I see the place differently?

There are many ideas of this yet to be condensed into a lucid point.

However, a lot of the Psychogeographic writing seems to lack any inbuilt ludic expression. A massive focus on play, but no mini-games. Tonnes of narrative, tonnes of playful approaches to looking, discovery and exploration, but little further rules or mechanics. It’s like a game with one rule and a generative end state.

With a lot of recent games and experiments, we are building a real sense of space into things. Light cycles across the Lake District, tubes without architectural distractions, the wind crossing fields of grass. These come from a game first and take a place second. I wonder how these work if we take a place first – a game for the new library building in Birmingham, a game to discover more space, a game to increase serendipity and fill you with wonder, a game that makes you sneak around a place finding alleys and holes.

I may just be getting old, but I am buying more things again.  Music, well no: completely MP3 now, but books. Old books. Old 60’s traffic reports. I’m not sure why. The yellowing of the page, the smell, the comments written in the paragraph by an unknown reader of more intelligence than myself. Richard is constantly reminding me how nice a piece of vinyl looks, smells, rotates, and of course sounds.

Ben reminded me to buy a subscription to Stack, an unknown magazine arrives, some I like, some I don’t Ben writes more here. But it is the paper use, the varnish use, the size, the fact that i can throw it down when the phone rings, I can shove it in my bag, the physical interplay.

I used to love Airside’s T-shirt Club.

Why do I keep making notebooks with old album covers? Why am I buying custom mac book pro covers made from ww2 blankets? Why do I buy another subscription to Field notes, just to collect the covers?

Although now a little derailed Matter had a great idea – the wonder of a parcel through the door. The wait to see if the ebay purchase was a good as promised. The need to have Star wars figures on my desktop. The returned love of cycling, and the new love on being on a dinghy.

No idea, still something here.

I keep getting drawn back to an era where music videos were great. Peak MTV2. it was a time where you could spend thousands, use great directors, try random artistic ideas, Bjork, The roots, Shadow, Unkle, Michel Gondry, Jake, Coppola, Spike Jonze. 4 minutes of wonder.

Adverts are doing it again now back to Chris Cunningham, no dialogue, new music, images, a punch in the face, a stroke of the hair, a hug. Emotional selling. When is the web going to have a place for this?

Good riddance to splash screens, flash microsites, and 3d virtual immersive experiences, and I am as much a monk of Swiss Otl Aicher, Josef Muller Brockman grids as the next helvetica tattooed design Nazi from Germany. but these simple designs worked because of the white space, the imposing text, the vectors of power, the single use of colour, the space to imagine.

With heavy US lead, programmer web design, we get pages crammed with text. 3/4 columns of writing, instapaper holding 2.4 Kms of Dan Hill’s writing.  345,876 unread RSS feeds. Inboxes bulging with the text of missed opportunities.

Not sure how we can tie these together but we need to.

1. STB/TV – Canvas/Google TV – its a two screen world, we keep going back to this – I was at netchannel

2. Behavioural nudge games

3. Ball bearing games