Super quick post just to let you know that I was asked to write another guest post on the awesome crafting website Whip Up, about creativity and health. I’ve focused on my current body of work and what I’m trying to bring about in the viewer – happiness.

I also looked a little at two of the main influences on my practice, Tassos Stevens from The Agency of Coney and the other is my grandmother, which is the reason for the awesome photo attached to this post. I love the happy gingham doll, Nan’s massive grin and the cheeky attitude of my brother.

I’ve been working on a new project investigating guerrilla kindness, called For you, stranger. You can see the project itself here  and you can read a blog post about the first drop here. It was such a simple project to do I thought I’d share how to do it today. Feel free to make your own and spread the joy!

One of the things I love about this project is that baking is traditionally a woman’s role and this project uses mostly building materials, traditionally in a man’s sphere. In fact, during the icing of the cupcakes, I did wonder how much more neatly a tradie would have done it.

There’s a bit of work involved and there also needs to be drying time in between the stages. This batch took me a couple of days all up, but most of that time was drying time for the cakes while I did other things.

Things you’re going to need:

• A can of expanding builders foam (easily obtainable at a hardware store)
• A tub of lightweight spac (spackle) filler/plaster filler (the stuff builders use to fill holes in drywall/giprock, again easily found at a hardware store) I found 100g did about 20 cupcakes and in the end, I needed two tubs to ice all my cupcakes.
• Acrylic paint  in cake colours (I used light brown and darker brown, I like chocolate cake) and icing colour
• Cupcake paper patty pans
• Decorations for cupcakes – I used glitter and a bead, but you can use anything you like
• Newspapers to cover your work surface
• gloves and old clothes to wear while you’re makin’ (if you’re messy)
• some thick cardboard (like a bit of box) for the bottom of the cupcakes
• a craft knife, box cutter, stanley knife or the like

Ok, ready?

Step 1: The first thing to do is to spread out the cupcake patty pans. The builders foam needs to be used in an open area, so if you can, do this step outside. The foam expands quite a lot, all over, so if you just put it in the pans, the bottom of the cupcake will expand too, making for cakes with a rounded bottom that rocks all over the place. So you’ll need a bit of cardboard in a circle in the patty pan first to give your cake a flat bottom to rest on.

Step 2: Put on your gloves. Things could get sticky. Grab your builders foam and read the instructions on the can. Once the can of foam is opened, you need to use it up within about a month otherwise it hardens and becomes unusable. You can use it all up today however, if you have enough patty pans. I got about 40 cupcakes out of the can, aim for a few more patty pans though, as I over filled mine accidentally. Only fill your patty pans about 3/4s. The foam expands quickly at first, but then will continue to expand, so dont be tempted to go back and top up if you think it hasn’t expanded enough. This comes from experience

The tutorial I read online suggested that you use a cupcake/muffin tin to keep the shape right as the foam expands, but I found I didn’t need it, they did fine on their own. Once the cupcakes are poured, they need to set, which takes different time depending on which foam you used. Again, refer to your can for all the details. Don’t be disheartened that, at this stage, they don’t look much like cupcakes. I promise they’ll look awesome by the end.

Step 3:  Ok, so in the picture the cupcake is all lumpy and alien-landscape looking. Luckily, the foam is really easy to carve. Don’t be too worried about getting it perfect, by the time the spac filler icing covers the top half, any little divots and wobbles will just look like cake. So get carving and aim for jsut a basic cup cake dome shape

Taa daa! Cupcake shape!

Step 4: Next step is to paint the cake to make it look more like.. well, cake.

 You can use acrylic paint for this, which can be bought at any craft store and some hardware stores too. To go for a realistic-ish cake colour, I used a light tan-yellow colour and a dark brown colour, swirled them together and painted with that. I didn’t mix the paint thoroughly, which meant that both colours showed through in different patches, which added to the cake effect. You could just paint it one cake colour though, and that would be perfectly fine too.

I folded the patty pan down a little so I could get as low as possible with the paint. As you’ll notice from the photo, I didn’t paint the top of the cake, I figured that the icing would cover that. Later, I worried that the icing wouldn’t cover over all of the white, so I went back and painted the white bit cake coloured too. Next time I do it, I’m going to paint the whole thing first time. That way your icing artistry isn’t dictated by where you’ve painted the cupcake. Again, you’ll need to wait for the paint to dry before you do the next step, this wont take too long though, depending of course on how thick you painted it and how warm your environment is.

A range of cupcakes, before I decided to go back and paint the tops too. You can almost see the rage of cakey colours created by the two paints.

Step 5: Icing and making pretty!

 So I bought a plastic container at a charity shop for this step – once you use something for these type of non-food purposes you shouldn’t let it go back into the kitchen. The utensil in the spac filler is a small cake knife I also bought at the charity shop which was very useful for icing the cakes.

Put the spac filler in your container and stir it a little bit. Sqooge in some paint, I used red and blue to create this purple, mainly because I had no purple. I also needed to add a little water (about a tablespoon) – this thins the spac filler out a little, which makes it easier to stir and ice. You get a nice sheen on it once the water is added and then it acts pretty much like icing.

Ok, onto the icing itself.

After a couple of attempts, I figured out the best way to ice it for me, but experiment and find out what works for you. My system was to blob a bit at the top of the cake, then

I used my cake knife to smeer the icing down the cake to the level I wanted it (I chose to leave a bit of cake showing at the bottom, otherwise it might jsut look like a patty pan filled with icing)

Then I lightly smoothed down all the ridges and furrows from the last step.  The cake is now iced! I did try piping icing on, with a disposable piping bag, but it used up a lot of icing and looked pretty bad, so I didn’t bother with it again.Looking back, if I added a bit more water it might have worked better.

To finish off, I sprinkled glitter on the cupcake and placed a red bead at the top. I made sure that each of the bead’s two holes were accessible so I could thread the tag through later. I did this step outside, but only because it was a nice day. Spac filler can be used inside with no problems.

Now you need to leave the cupcakes to dry. Because of the thickness of the spac filler, it took about 24 hours to dry.

Step 6: At this stage, the cupcakes are finished and done. This next step is only really for if you’re making the cupcakes to leave out or give as gifts. This is the tagging stage.

I contacted Holly from Two Cheese Please, a talented lady who carves stamps, to make me a special stamp for my tags.

I cut the paper stamps into tag shapes, punched a hole through them and threaded them through the bead on top of each cupcake. Then I wandered around the city and left them out for people to find

And this is how happy they made at least one lady

That’s it! Done! Phew, now I want some real cake.

If you do make some cupcakes, either for street art, guerrilla kindess or any other reason, I’d love to see them!

Yesterday I did the first installment of my new project, For you, stranger, in which I distributed 9 hand-made, fake cupcakes around the city and left them there, for anyone to take. I had more to distribute but unfortunately I ran out of time.

Through this work, I am exploring guerrilla kindness. The action of doing something nice for someone you don’t know. I hoped that by leaving these cupcakes across the city, that someone’s day might be brightened because of it. Like all my street art projects, it also rewards those who take the time to look around them while they’re walking around the city. Mainly, however, it was simply done as a niceness to leave for anyone who would take it.

The cupcakes themselves were quite cheery, brightly coloured patty pans, purple icing, glitter and a red bead on top. Threaded through each cherry bead is a glittery paper tag, printed with a hand carved stamp.

It was interesting to design the cupcakes, as I wanted them to look like cupcakes but at the same time they needed to not look too real. If you saw what you thought was a real, uncovered cupcake sitting on a pole somewhere, would you take it? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. So the use of purple as the colour of the icing, as well as being decorated by glitter were deliberate choices to help the cupcake look a little fake. I also bought red beads to place on top, and threaded the tag through the bead, to draw the observer’s eye to notice the fact that the cherry had a hole in it, and was therefor a bead, another clue to the fakeness of the cupcake.

One of the cupcakes I placed across the road from a cafe and I went and had a five minute break sitting in the window, watching to see what would happen.

Lots of people walked straight past it, without even noticing.

A couple of people noticed it, but went straight on walking. More people walked past without seeing it.

A man on a mobile walked past it, came back, stared at it for a bit (all while still on the phone), poked it investigatively and then walked on. A couple more people walked past without noticing.

Then a group of 3 uni students walked past. They stopped, picked it up, showed it to each other, laughed over it, put it back down and kept walking.

By this stage I needed to keep going, so I left the cafe and walked past the cupcake again, it’s little tag blowing in the wind.

I did pass a couple of the drop points later that day and found that all the cupcakes had been taken, which was nice.

On the way home, I checked twitter to find that someone had found one and responded to me “Thanks for the random little gift, it definitely put a smile on my face upon finding it!”. They’d even added a photo of their cupcake. I was so thrilled! I asked the recipient where they found it, they said “I found it at the tram stop near state library. There were so many people around, yet no one seemed to notice it sitting there!”

From my observations out the cafe window, I could tell that’s absolutely the case. Out of everyone who walks past, only a small amount noticed the cupcake, even fewer of those people stopped to investigate, fewer still picked it up and clearly even a smaller amount than that actually took it.

The Toy Society is a worldwide organisation of people who make toys and leave them out for other people to find. On the ‘about’ page of their website, they say Finders are invited, but not expected, to let The Toy Society know they have found a toy, and these notes are also posted here on the blog. But it’s not expected to hear back from finders; The Toy Society is about giving someone something and expecting absolutely nothing in return, which is a real rarity these days.”  They have a response rate of around 10%, which is exactly my response rate too.

The other thing the person said to me was that they liked the idea so much they’re inspired to do something similar! That was more than I could have hoped for!

So I was very happy with this first installment, and I’ll be doing the second round of more cupcakes soon.

My advice is keep an eye on the streets around you, you never know what you might see…

Check out the photos from For you, stranger, here

This is one of those detective stories, uncovering facts and hints bit by bit. It’s the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of the find that I love about this sort of stuff.

Last year I discovered the New Games Movement, an American movement in the early 70s to get adults out and playing games again. It was created by Stewart Brand, and there’s a beautiful explanation on Bernie DeKoven’s (a later member of the New Games movement) website which reads: In many ways, it was part of the anti-war movement. There were sit-ins and be-ins. This was a kind of play-in. A demonstration of community and solidarity.
You can read the rest of that history here: http://www.deepfun.com/newgames.htm

But I was dreadfully enthused about New Games. I bought the two books they wrote about their games, New Games Book and More New Games, second hand from Amazon for only a couple of cents each. When they arrived, I devoured them, taking in each game instruction, pouring over the photos and reading the essays that are interspersed throughout the two books.

I’ll admit, I was so fascinated by the photos that I checked them all out before diving into the book properly, and on one page there was a photo of a bunch of people standing on vans holding up a big banner proclaiming “NEW GAMES TOURAMENT, 4pm-8pm”

Photo from the New Games book, P 22

I didn’t take a lot of notice of that photo, there were a number of more interesting ones of people involved in the actual games and falling about laughing.

But, so, in one of the essays is this amazing phrase: “New Games is also developing an international reputation. The Ministry of Youth, Sport and Recreation in Melbourne, Australia, invited Pat Farrington to develop a New Games program for the state of Victoria. The government provided her with a staff of twenty-five referees and a fleet of four vans to roam the countryside like modern version of Johnny Appleseed, planting New Games as they go.” (P19, New Games Book, 1976)

Good god! I thought, and I went back to the photo. The title next to the photo says “New Games, Melbourne, Australia”. How on earth could I have missed that? Someone in the state government of Victoria in the 70s found out about the New Games somehow and invited them over to my home town to play! If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the number plates on the vans all conform to Victorian plates.

I was thrilled to find that we have a connection to the New Games Movement, and that there is precedent not only in Australia but in Melbourne for what we are doing. Usually this stuff only happens over the other side of the world!

But, the story does not end there!

R was talking to a very wise and well connected gentleman in-the-know the other day and he mentioned New Games. The gentleman dropped a hint about the fact that New Games was somehow connected to Life. Be In It.

Holy nuts! For those of you who don’t know, or are too young to remember, Life. Be In It was a government initiative to get people off the couch and outside to get active that was big in the late 70s and through the 80s while I was growing up. At our primary school we had a number of Life. Be In It events and my mum had a Life. Be In It calendar up in our kitchen that I used to read while waiting for dinner. It was a massive and influential movement in Australia and I’m still thrilled to find out that it was somehow connected with the New Games Movement.

But how were the two connected?

So I went on the hunt. I wanted to find some evidence of the link between the New Games Movement and Life. Be In It. Several internet searches provided very little in the way of information. The Life. Be In It website’s history page says: ‘Life. Be in it.‘ was established in 1975 by the Victorian Government and because of it’s popularity and rapid rate of public awareness – was adopted by the Federal Government in 1978 and subsequently launched in the States from then on. http://www.lifebeinit.org/standard.php?id=879  But no mention of the New Games Movement.

We have in our games library a Life. Be In It Games Manual which I’ve only just started reading. The New Games book was published in 1976 and is chock full of different games they adapted from older games or made up on the spot. The Life. Be In It Games Manual, published in 1980, shares a number of the same games, same title and word for word instructions. That suggests that someone writing the Life. Be In It Games Manual had access to the New Games books, but neither books mention the other movement.

Ooo! Frustrating!

So, going back a little further, I find that “In late 1972, the Victoria government established the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Recreation.” http://www.yacvic.org.au/aboutus/items/2010/11/238656-upload-00002.pdf  The Ministry of Youth, Sport and Recreation was the body that bought out the New Games movement, so it must have been after 1972 that they came to Melbourne. But if the New Games visit sparked Life. Be In It, then it had to be before 1975.

While preparing to write this, I decided to scan in the photo (above) to include with the post. As I opened the book to put it in the scanner, I noticed for the first time what was sticky taped to the open car door just under the banner. A Life. Be In It poster! You can also see in the photo itself (but maybe not the lo-res web version) that a number of the people holding the banner are again wearing Life. Be In It tshirts of various designs.

Ta Daa! Evidence that the two were linked, or at least connected. Life. Be In It was indeed somehow involved in bringing the New Games Movement out to Australia. I couldn’t believe that it was right under my nose this whole time. But that right-in-front-of-your-face makes for the best mysteries…

So I’d love to find out more, maybe next I’ll email Life. Be In It and ask them. But however it happened, it’s still so exciting that a movement that’s such an influence on my games design practice now was so influential to my life over 30 years ago, and I just didn’t know it.

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.