I’m so excited about this…

A little while ago yarn bomber Shado Stitch did a call out for suggestions for their current yarnbombing project. I got in contact with them and told them about Gilding The City and explained the idea behind it.

Last night they posted their work!!! Check out how beautiful this is:

You can see more of the bomb here: http://shadowstitch.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/30-heart-necklace-gilding-city-3rd.html

I’m SO thrilled that Gilding the City has inspired another artist to create something and so excited about the end product! I love how the necklace is still totally intact too, so anyone who finds it can come along, take it away and wear it. It’s gotten me thinking about how I make the Gilds and how I’d like them to be able to be reused by the people that find them.

I’m also excited to find that the yarnbomb has been installed in Edinburgh, a place I visited a few years ago and fell in love with. Everything about this yarnbomb/Gild mashup is pretty damn exciting really

I encourage you to go see more of Shado Stitch’s work, you can find them on blogger, twitter and Facebook.

I’m really thrilled about the interest that Gilding the City is getting. To date since it’s launch (on the 2^nd of Jan 2012) I’ve sent off around 20 pieces to cities around the world.

So far they’ve gone to:

My Move in Birmingham

UK:
Brighton
Birmingham
London
West Sussex

USA:
Cohutta, Georgia
Portland, Oregon
Seattle, Washington

EUROPE:
Paris, France

And closer to home, there should be one appearing in the tiny town of Mia Mia in Victoria any day now.

I’m really humbled that this idea has gone so far, so fast. And it’s awesome to be able to introduce a whole new bunch of people to the idea of Turnup Stuffing. A lady who emailed me yesterday included a photo of a bit of jewellery she’d found that day on the streets. How inspiring is that?

I was in town the other day and I decided to go take a quick visit to a couple of the sites where the Gilds were installed, to see if they had lasted. I’m sad to say that LINKS were all gone, but oddly enough the two down Hosier Lane, one of the accepted graffiti lanes in Melbourne, were still there.

I’m assuming that the others were cleaned away by official council cleaners, if it were people taking them then the ones down Hosier Lane would have been gone too, and it’s a strange thing to think that there are places in the CBD where street art are clearly acceptable. You would think that it would be an all-or-nothing policy but clearly it isn’t.

It does make me think that if I want the pieces to last, that I should put them down the graffiti lanes, Degraves St, Hosier Lane, Croft Alley and the like.

One of the reasons I’m doing this project is that I want to present work straight to the general public. Speak to the person in the street, literally. I have found that work in galleries are only seen by people who go to galleries. If you want to talk to people outside that sphere, you need to take the art to where those people are. Some of those people walk around the Melbourne CBD and so that’s where I want to put these tiny pieces.

Gilding the City says a number of things.

It tells people that I think the city is beautiful.

It tells people that I think enough of the city to spend some time creating decorations for it.

It tells people that not all of the trash that litters the streets is useless.

It tells people that just because things are broken doesn’t mean theyre not beautiful.

Gilding the City also rewards people for looking around at their city. It encourages them to look again at walls and buildings that have become so familiar that people no longer see them properly.

It also reminds people that not all street art is painted up on the walls.

And it takes a stand for street craft, which has been almost completely represented by yarn bombing, up until now.

These are some of the reasons and meanings behind Gilding the City, apart from the obvious one that making jewellery for the city is fun.

One of the recipients of a Gilding for Portland asked me if I had any preferences for where of the type of location to install a Gild. That made me think, do I? But I don’t think I do, not instructions to give out to the others anyway. I see Gilding the City as a collaboration between myself and the installers. I give them freely each piece and they can put it where they please.

I was going to say that I don’t really plan which ones go where, but that’s not strictly true. My first ever Gild was specifically placed outside Craft Victoria, and it was one of my favourites, Victorian Mourning Brooch. Bringing back the street craft, one piece at a time. They were closed at the time for the January break, so it might not have even been there by the time they got in, but it was symbolic, creating something beautiful and leaving it outside for them to find.

Some of the Gilds are placed because their size or shape is aesthetically pleasing in the chosen setting. Some are placed in certain spots because of the symbology involved, or that the theme seems to suit the surroundings. And some are just placed because there was the opportunity to do so.

This all leads me back to placement down graffiti alleys. If I limit myself to those, then the Gilds will stay longer but wont reach as many people. If I put them out on the streets where everyone can see them, they will only be around a shorter period of time. Either way, I’m limiting the amount of people who will be able to see them. So what to do?

I feel this is the ongoing dilemma of any artist who has ever installed their art on the streets.

The most sensible thing to do is not worry how long the pieces will stay and instead continue along in the vein I’ve been doing it in, which is placing them in both types of settings, as they fit.

I’ll keep you posted.

Gilding the City was launched about a week ago with the first installation around Melbourne. It’s now spreading around the world!

I am a member of the playful UK society Agency of Coney and since this is a playful project, I sent a general email out to see if anyone would like to participate and Gild their own city.

I got (and continue to get) a fantastic response from quite a number of people who were keen to install a piece in their home town.

So yesterday I sent off the first batch of pieces to start Gilding other cities. The packages went to London, Brighton, Brimingham, West Sussex (UK) and Cohutta, Georgia (USA). Currently there is another package on my coffee table with two pieces bound for Portland and Seattle.

I’m so thrilled that this project has gone international and I’d like to thank all the people who offered to Gild their cities. Hopefully there’ll be a bunch of photos heading my way of the installs, which I’ll share on the blog and on the flickr page. And do let me know if you’d like to Gild your city too!

I’ve just embarked upon a new temporary street art project called Gilding the City and I wanted to let you know about it.

When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Pippi Longstocking, the strongest girl in the world. One of the many things she did to occupy her time was to play a game called Turn Up Stuffing. This is where you walk along and keep your eyes firmly on the ground, and anything that turns up, you stuff in your pocket. As a small girl, I was entranced by this idea, and so walked around with my eyes on my feet, wondering what I would find. I’m pretty sure I rarely ran into trees and in playing this game I started a lifelong habit.

When walking around the city, you see an awful lot of broken glass, leaves and trash, but you also notice a lot of broken or lost bits of jewellery, pendants that have snapped in half, twisted rings that don;t fit anymore, stray beads that have made brave leaps off bracelets and necklaces, fake jewels that have come loose from their moorings and random items that you can’t really place but have clearly come off something, somewhere. So, I collected up all these tiny, shiny, interestin’ bits I spotted but for years didn’t know what to do with them.

There are a number of threads to this story. Stay with me!

A few years ago I started noticing little guys made out of trash nailed to walls, posts, fences and all sorts of other places around town. A bit of internet sleuthing helped me discover that these are all Junky Projects, the work of Daniel Lynch. You can see a collection of photos of these awesome little guys here. I saw an interview with him where he said that he picked junk off the streets and created these little sentinels, who watch over people and remind them that what they throw away is still around. He mentioned that he was not introducing anything extra to streets already overcrowded with rubbish, but that he was just refashioning the trash he found into little silent warnings to humanity. I loved that idea, of making art from things already in the streets, rather than introducing more.

About mid 2011 I came across the work of Melbourne jeweller Caz Guiney. She has had two projects which fired my imagination. The first was in 2003 called City Rings, where the artist embedded 14 of her handmade rings in places around the CBD. People could find them and take them away, or not. As Caz was funded by the Australia Council for this project, there was the inevitable beat up in the media about ‘wasting tax payers money” and branding it as a “treasure hunt”.

My interest in this project stemmed from the idea of creating something beautiful and then leaving it behind for people to find. It’s why I also love The Toy Society, but I can’t talk about that now as I need to wrest this post back to it’s original point.

The reverse of Caz’s City Rings is her 2008 project, Precious Nothing in which the artist took casts of textures of the CBD and things she found in the street, including broken safety pins and pigeon poo, and cast them in gold. The one image that stuck with me was the texture of the steps at Flinders St Station, turned into a bright shiny (but pitted) wide gold ring. It was incredible to see trash and the very pavement I’ve walked on recontexualised as precious. It was a beautiful thing (and I really wanted to own the ring!). Caz’s website has gone but you can find the original listing on the Craft Victoria website here.

The last influence on the Gilding the City project was at the end of 2011 I was lucky enough to see Magda Sayeg do a talk in Sydeny. Magda is the lady who invented graffiti knitting in Texas about ten years ago. She spoke about the origins of the work, and how she viewed it. She talked about how graffiti is seen as a male dominated art form and that by introducing hand knitted items into this sphere, she is reintroducing the feminine and delicate, the hand made and heartwarming, into what was, back then, an art world dominated by flat, if colourful, brick walls. It was a massively inspiring talk, she’s a highly intelligent woman who has thought a lot about street art and her art form, and listening to her talk about her adventures installing knitted cozies on street signs a whole bunch if ideas and inflences crashed together in my head and suddenly I knew what to do with all that busted jewellery I had been collecting for so long.

Graffiti jewellery! I wanted to take all those broken and discarded items and create beautiful things out of them. I wanted to make them as gifts for the city, to give the city itself something to wear. I wanted to reinstall those broken bits of jewellery from the streets I had found them, but refashioned and recrafted into something wonderful.

And thus, Gilding the City was born.

Check out the Gilding the City page on my website here for more images from this project.

Caz Guiney image from here

During the last 6 weeks, I’ve been involved in a residency at the NGV studio called Game/Play, in conjunction with Freeplay and Pop Up Playground.

As part of this we ran 2 Playdays for the general public. Loads of games were played and fun was had. On the last of these Playdays, I ran a playful event called Midnight in the City.

We wanted a drop-in station where people could hang out and do stuff if they came while other games were already running, or when nothing else was going on. So I created Midnight in the City, where people were invited to graf, tag, pasteup and generally decorate a blank cardboard city.

Check out these great photos from the day!

We were reliably informed by her mum this was not her first graffiti

As the sun went down and we packed up, we left the cardboard city in the studio for people to admire the artwork for the last week. I was really happy how it went and Midnight in the City will certainly be reappearing again at another Pop Up Playgound event soon.

This morning, in one of the sheds scattered around my work we found a dried out, desiccated rat body. It’s like rat jerky, it’s quite unpleasant. Discussing it with a workmate, she said “it’s weird that the… (and here she paused while she tried to remember the word)… rat people… you know, didn’t find it last time they were here.” She was trying to remember the business name of the guys who look after the rats on the property. But the term ‘rat people’ was so vivid, and suddenly I found myself trying to figure out a game where the players are rat people who invade the city at night.

Around noon, I headed out for lunch. Standing at the corner, waiting for the lights to change, I glanced down. At my feet was a mysterious sign, painted on the concrete. I stared at it for a moment, trying to figure it out. Was it a clue? A puzzle? It looked like a waterhole from an Aboriginal dot painting. I wondered what else it might signify.

Then the lights change and I was off again.

As I crossed the road, I realised that I’m now always on the lookout for anything odd or out of place. Anything that might signify the start of a game, or the next step into one. Anything that I could use for a game.

This is the thing about researching games and play. Everything around you is suddenly loaded with so much more meaning, so many more possibilities. It’s such an exciting world to live in!

I was reading the Hide and Seek blog the other day and I came across a written essay by Coney’s Tassos Stevens, which is beautiful and talks all about the possibilities of the world when you engage your playfulness. I wanted to quote some here because it sums up so perfectly how I’m thinking at the moment:

Play is make believe at the double. I look at something and I first see what it is, or at least what I believe it is, be it Simon Russell Beale, a banana, February 14th. But then I make believe what if that what is were something else: Hamlet, a revolver, the feast of St Valentine. What if. What is.

I love how that is explained. Look, engage your imagination and look again. Discover the potential of what is right in front of you.

Tassos is an incredibly lovely man filled with incredibly lovely ideas. You can find more of his work on his blog

Now that I’m researching games, I’ve also found I’m looking at people differently. Reading Jane McGonical’s Reality is Broken, she says that one reason people play games is to find and join communities of people like them. And when I’m walking down a street, I start seeing people for the first time. Not bodies around me, but individual people. I see that when people stop to talk to each other, they are doing so through shared connections. A lady stopping to talk to a woman with a baby shares a story of when her children were young. An old man waiting by the lights with me comments on the weather we’re both sharing. People are looking for an inroad to contact, and they grasp these tiny, shared experiences as the door.

As a real world game designer (I’m still searching for a term I like) I think that games can offer that community sense, if only for a short time. When we were playing the scav hunt in Launceston, we suddenly were part of a community. Most participants were dressed in some sort of orange, and because we’d spent about half an hour before the game hanging out at the venue, we recognised each other on the street, we helped each other with clues and directions, while waiting around for things to happen we had common ground to talk about, cool stuff we’d just done or missed, plans for the immediate future, it gave us a link with these people and opened the gates for the flow of connection and conversation to start.

I was reading Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum the other day, and I’m telling you, if you are interested in learning about and/or designing participatory events for fun, for cultural institutions or anything in between, you need to own this book… Anyway, in it she was talking about an experience she had in a gallery once where there was a little stage and a couple of items and it had instructions to use the items to take tableau photos. She decided that she wanted to do it, so she handed her camera to a stranger named George and asked him to take a picture. Then he suggested one, and she suggested another. Pretty soon they were roping other people in and taking photos of them too. Over the page from the story, Nina has a photo of George and she says (and I’m paraphrasing here) “My partner in crime. We still talk over email, over a year later”. That’s a fairly incredible experience that can bond two strangers together like that. Participating in something out of the ordinary with someone forms a connection with that person which can last the duration of the event or for years afterwards. I’m interested in investigating how games open up the possibility of this powerful connection between people.

Often, people are looking for a connection with others. I think that people are looking for shared connections, common denominators between themselves and other people. I think we all like to feel we belong. Subcultures are a strong, visual example of this. Richmond supporters have a uniform and a song, and during match times (and at other times) can easily spot other Richmond supporters, and there’s a kind of kinship with other football enthusiasts, whether they also go for Richmond or a different team. Coming across another footy fan, a person knows the social conventions and instantly has something in common with them, they are part of the community. They can gently rib the other supporter, commiserate a loss or gloat over a win. A goth can move cities, states or even countries and find people they know are going to like the same kind of music and think the same kinds of things. Having something in common with someone is like a fast track to knowing them. You don’t have to go through all the awkward getting-to-know-them stuff, you can just hone in on the shared hobby/taste/subculture ect. And start from there.

But it doesn’t have to be something big, or something that people identify with, to share a momentary connection with people. Both reaching for the same spoon at a café, both standing in line waiting for a bus, bumping into someone can all be a moment for a shared connection.

And I’ve been thinking about this in terms of games. Games give people that common denominator. Walk into a room of people who have never met each other before and have gathered for a game of Lemon Jousting. At the start they are milling around, just talking to their friends. But by the end, they’re happily chatting to everyone, cheering on the winners and commiserating with the losers. There’s trash talk and helpful suggestions being flung around the room.

These people are the same people that entered the room an hour ago, but now they’ve shared an experience that’s out of the ordinary, and that is a powerful connection.

Researching and designing also gives you another filter to see the world. Not just what game could I play with that stick, is that mark on the building part of a game I’m missing, but it encourages you to look differently at the people around you.

My partner in crime, Rob, emailed me about a TedX video on YouTube by the aforementioned Tassos Stevens in which the sound cuts in an out quite severely at the start of the clip.

Rob wrote in the email
“there’s all kinds of technical problems that mean you can’t hear a lot of what he’s saying and i spent the first half of it wondering what game he was playing with it… which makes me think that once you step into that playful space you become the trickster and you can never not be the trickster cause everyone else is always wondering what you’re up to, even when you’re not up to anything.”

I think that’s really interesting. We’ve been a part of a number of Tassos’s games, and we’re both members of Coney, so we know the way Tassos works, and that anything at any moment could suddenly turn into a game, or indeed suddenly you’ll have a dawning moment that what you’ve been doing for half an hour is actually a game, but you’ve only just realised it. It’s playful and sweet and always exciting. But what happens then with that is that people that know what you do and who you are now always on the lookout for the purposes behind what you are doing, even when you’re not, as Rob says, up to anything at all.

But that’s a danger and a reputation that I’m happy to take on.

I think there’s always room for more tricksters.

Last week we headed down to Launceston for the Junction Arts Festival. This was the second year for Junction, which was a smaller festival than the huge inaugural one. Next year will again be a big one, according to the festival director Ian Pidd.

I was fascinated to go to an arts festival that had hardly any theatre and instead was filled with music and participatory events. All the Arts Festivals I’ve been too always have a big theatre component to them, so this was going to be an adventure.

We also prepared ourselves with a game we wanted to playtest around the streets of an unfamiliar city, with a working title of Escape Plan. I didn’t know any of the rules until the morning of play, so it was an authentic street gaming experience for me.

The first day we took Escape Plan to the streets. It’s partly an adventurer game and partly a spy code making and breaking game. I don’t want to reveal too much at this stage, but we explored the concept by doing, an avenue of game design I cannot recommend highly enough, and we had a bunch of fun. We found some flaws, made some changes for next time and were very happy with the experience.

The next morning we headed off down to the mall to play Search Party. This was a really interesting event. Search Party have made it their mission to “explore ideas of community, place and belonging” (from their website) by challenging various cities to a marathon game of Ping Pong. This was a really interesting event. On the surface it’s two Brits in a green and red uniform playing against a seemingly never ending line of locals, and that’s all well and good. But dive underneath the surface and you come to realise that it is a really community bonding moment (or indeed, a community bonding three days). Launceston came together, crowding around the Ping Pong table, chatting to each other and cheering strangers on. There was rivalry between Search Party and the Launies, but no rivalry between the Launies. We were united in our attempt to beat Search Party.

I have to admit that I clearly suck at Ping Pong. I was hopeful of at least not embarrassing myself, but even that was clearly unobtainable. After winning the first point, I lost every single point after that. The crowd felt my pain and I felt that I had let Launceston down. But I was also hopeful that, since it was early on in the festival, that other people would be able to make up for my skill less game and make good my defeat.

I happened to have wool in the Junction logo colours and a crochet hook, so I made them a Moment In Yarn for their efforts and then we wandered away.

We were out for experiences in Junction, and there were a number of single experiences we could have. We met a giant inflatable whale in a park, which was beautiful. When the wind blew, the whale gently rocked, swimming through the air. The movement seemed so right, that a whale filled with air could swim through the breeze. It was beautiful to watch. My favourite part was the looks on the faces of the passersby, who unexpectantly came across a giant whale in their local park. Children spotted it with shrieks of joy and came racing across the park to touch and explore this giant temporary work. It was really heart warming to see the reactions.

Another one of the highlights of the festival was Seek: Launceston, a scav hunt held on the Saturday. It was supposed to be teams of 5, but Terrible Comfort went it alone with 2. We received a little envelope with a pad of paper, a pad of sticky notes, a pen, a map and a set of instructions. Some instructions were easy:

“a limerick about your mother” (5 points)
“5 different kinds of leaves” (5 points)
“A paper aeroplane” (5 points)
“An acorn” (5 points)

Then there were harder ones
“an acronym poem on the word antidisestablishmentarism” (10 points)
“advice from a stranger” (10 points)
“a ghost” (10 points)

But the best ones were the participatory events

“AN OUT OF THIS WORLD EXPERIENCE”
We went down an alley and under a building was a door with a A4 sheet of paper sticky-taped to it which read SEEK:LAUNCESTON WAIT HERE. After a few minutes, we were met by a young man in a nice suit and pork pie hat who motioned us down the stairs, warning us to watch our heads on the low ceilings and overhanging pipes. At the bottom of the stairs we turned a corner and the room opened out into a beautiful cellar bar with a big table. Around the table sat another young man in a nice suit and a bunch of Storm Troopers, each with a pile of poker chips in front of them. There were also two empty seats, which we took. The man in the suit, or card shark, as I will now refer to him, dealt out cards and we looked at what we had. I had a 10 of hearts and a 6 of spades. He then dealt 4 cards in front of him, which when questioned he explained that these could be used in conjunction with your hand to win. There was a 4 of clubs in there, which I was thrilled with. 10+6+4=20, which is pretty darn close to 21, which I assumed we were playing. So I threw caution to the wind, knowing that no one would be able to beat a hand like that, and I threw in all but 4 of my chips. I cockily engaged in some ‘trash talk’ from my secure position of about-to-be-winner. The next round was dealt and then we all showed our hands.

As the Storm Troopers evaluated their hands, it suddenly dawned on me that we were playing poker and not 21 at all, and that I’d lost horribly.

I was much less cocky after that.

We played two more hands, my luck and chips did not hold out and we left defeated in poker but thrilled at the experience.

This was but one of the cool things we got to do in Seek:.Launceston.

We were also set the task of applying for a job interview.

A building had a paper trail up the stairs and into an office where a lady behind the desk asked my name, went into a board room, came back and said “she’s ready for you now”.

I walked into the board room and was presented by a massively long table. At the far end was a lady in a suit peering over her glasses at me. I sat down and she immediately started asking me questions.

“Why do you think you’re suited for this role?”

Needless to say I knew nothing about the job or the company, so I just made stuff up. I figured that my best bet was honesty, so I listed all the interesting stuff I do “I’m an artist, graphic designer, web designer, game designer, craft artist, public programs officer, primary school teacher, puppet maker and puppeteer and theatre maker” she seemed a little stunned, but recovered well.
“what makes you interested in working for us?”
I threw myself into that one “Well, I’ve done a lot of research into this company and what I love most about it is the unlimited potential it has”.

We chatted for a few more minutes then she thanked me and asked me to request a medal from her secretary on the way out.

You received points for completing the job interview and someone would receive more points for actually getting the job. Unfortunately the awards ceremony was a little rushed and we never found out who was hired.

Another clue asked us to “DEFEND YOUR PIRATE HONOUR AT THE DOCKS”

Being strangers to the city, I’m pretty sure we took the longest route possible to the docks, where we wandered around looking for pirates. By this stage we were pretty familiar with the mechanics of the game, so we knew that the thing we were seeking would be easy to spot and there would be someone dressed as a pirate

We were briefly thrown by a boat with a pirate flag fluttering from it, but as the flag was a little faded and the boat seemed deserted, we figured that wasn’t it.

We did recognise another player who came along, and we chatted to her about the pirate thing. We asked if she was a local, which she was, so we asked if there was another port we were missing. We puzzled over it for a little and then two pirates came ambling up the dock.

I don’t want to skim over this point. The scav hunt was what I was until a few minutes ago (when I read Search Party’s website) calling an ‘ice breaker’, where people break the ice they usually carry around them and start talking to strangers playing the same game, but I don’t think that it is just ‘breaking the ice’. I think that some games, like Seek:Launceston are more than just ice breakers, they are community building games. If only just for the duration of the game, we were a community that met and spoken on the streets, that helped each other out and that shared a sense of belonging and connection. I think games are incredibly powerful for this.

Back to the pirates. We had to duel them in a insulting match using piratey terms and insults. It was a lot of fun and with my lifelong semi-obsession with pirates I flatter myself I was quite good. At the end, my pirate opponent faltered to a halt and I collected a medal for my insulting behaviour (a first for me!)

What was AWESOME about this scav hunt was the fun we had doing the participatory events. The poems and the paper planes were all well and good, but the most fun was suddenly finding ourselves in a bizarre situation that we could play in. Playing 21 against Storm Troopers who were playing poker was one of the most surreal moments in my life, and I had a blast!

The other thing I liked about the challenges was the open endedness of some of the tasks. My favourite of these was “a ghost”. A number of teams turned up with a team member draped in a sheet, one turned up with a clear bottle with the Town Hall ghost trapped inside, and as we’d run around the streets I’d been crocheting a tiny white ghost which won that round.

Because there was only two of us, we never would have won, so instead we concentrated on doing the events that interested us, which lead to an awesome day of running around Launceston, discovering things we might have seen otherwise and getting to do a bunch of really interesting tasks.

I attended Freeplay http://www.freeplay.net.au , the Australian independent games festival, on the weekend. It was great to see so many game developers come together in one place to talk about their industry. Freeplay is fairly focused on computer/ video game design, but there are a number of other types of games covered as well (such as pervasive and transmedia) as well as having a number of luminaries from other fields attend.

My freeplay experience started on the Thursday night as the umpire for the Lemon Jousting tournament, produced by the amazingly talented Leena van Deventer. Participants were met at the door of a bar down and alley, lead through the murky depths of the bar, out the back door, down a smaller, darker alley, up a set of old stairs, along a gang plank and through a massive metal door into the Lemon Jousting room. Just getting to the place was like an adventure in itself, the journey was a rabbit hole into the game, a tunnel that leads you away from the real world and lets you enter the parallel game world.

Lemon Jousting requires wooden spoons, lemons and a sense of fun. The object is to run around the room knocking other people’s lemons off their spoons while protecting your own. But we had a surprise for the attendees. We started off the night with a game of Pocket Corpse, run by Harry Lee and John Sietsma. Participants were greeted at the door, given several slips of paper and shown the game. On your slips you drew different body parts, and then had to go around swapping them with other people. Once you had an entire, intact character comprised from all different artists, you could bring it to the organizers who scanned it in and uploaded it to a website. You can see the results here. yfrog.com/kkk687scj and corpse.tallgames.net

Pocket Corpse was a great ice breaker. Most people came in pairs or threes, and might well have stayed that way all night. But this gave them the excuse and need to mingle and chat to other people. It meant that by the time it came to playing Lemon Jousting, they had already been in each other’s personal space, something that was about to come in handy.

The Lemon Jousting competition went well, we had practice and then a knock out tournament. We had trash talk coming from around the world via twitter and it was a great night. I forget who won, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the game and the fun that’s the thing, right? ***EDIT Sam Mayo (@POWERMAYO) just reminded me that he indeed won the lemon jousting and therefore is the LEMON KING. I apologise to Sam for forgetting this important piece of news ***

I only got to attend a few sessions at Freeplay on the weekend, but the talks I did see covered some really interesting topics.

I attended Christy Dena’s How Every Little Decision Can Bring You Closer To or Further Away from Creating Art. All of the panellists were really interesting, but I was especially drawn to the work of Floyd Mueller who runs the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT http://exertiongameslab.org/ . They design and create games at the point where digital technology and intense physical effort intersect. Loving that! Floyd showed a couple of small videos and advised the crowd to build many, many prototypes to learn about the game you are constructing, which I think is really useful advice.

Although Christy didn’t get a lot of time at the end of her panel to do her talk, the super short version she presented was a tantalising snippet of her research and I would love to hear more from her next time!

One of the interesting things about Freeplay is the proliferation of technology. At any other event, when you seen people poking at their phones, you know it’s because they’re bored. At Freeplay it’s because they’re engaged and interested and sharing their thoughts on twitter. This was especially apparent in the Words We Use panel, where some inflamitory remarks were made by the chair and a couple of the panellists. Usually you might find disgruntled comments under a blog post a few days after the event, but at Freeplay you could watch the twitter stream and know what the audience were thinking straight away. They commented on the topics, on each other’s repsonces and carried on a converstation while listening to the panellists speak. It was a fascinating way to engage with the topics raised as they came.

I also sat on a panel, the final one for the festival, called The Next 12 Months. I was joined by Hugh Davies, the chair of Freeplay, Trent Kusters, founder of the development collective League of Geeks and Lisa Dempster, the Artistic Director of the Emerging Writers Festival. The panel was chaired by the charming Matt Ditton, convenor or the Games Design program at Griffith Uniersity. I was in some illustruious company! We all spoke about the future of gaming (obviously!) I was (and still am) all for taking games to the streets, going outside to play. Building games for out in the real world, which is my current focus. Building games for museums and galleries to engage with their visitors in a whole new level.

At the end of the panel, Matt asked us all to sum up our predictions for the next 12 months in 140 characters or less. Thanks to Ben McKenzie (@labcoatman) I can give you the sum up of those sum ups, all summed up in under 140 characters. “Tell us what you want, do stuff in the streets and be good at it”

Bring on the next 12 months!

All images from the Freeplay website