Here at Hide&Seek we’re gradually waking up from our post-Weekender naps: packing away ribbons, sorting through photographs, writing up everything that happened – we’ll have some brilliant photos to share next week.
But while we’ve been sitting around in a daze, all sorts of games events from other groups and designers have been drawing close. Autumn’s looking like a busy time for playing things in London…
Searchlight at the HIde&Seek Weekender 2012 from Hide&Seek on Vimeo. Searchlight came out of one goal: to design an interesting game for Kinect. Working on The Building Is… in Paris left us with a lot of knowledge and ideas about how to integrate technology into real-world physical games, and we wanted to test them out. [...]
The lady opposite me is eating a sandwich from Pret A Manger. She is baffled. “What does ‘absolutely no nasties’ mean?’, she asks her friend, who doesn’t know. Pret’s been around in New York for a good while now, but it still makes no sense at all to most New Yorkers. Pret makes sense if [...]
As the Weekender moves into its final day of talks and presentations, we’re thrilled to be making two announcments. The first is that we have launched an American studio in SoHo, New York, headed up by none other than our very own Margaret Robertson, who becomes Managing Director, Hide&Seek New York. We’re still all a [...]
So here I am at Hide&Seek Directing some Development and I’m excited. I’m on record stating my belief that games can do far more than is currently imagined; and if there’s any studio that’s really taking games to places and people they currently don’t reach, then Hide&Seek are they. Or should I say, us. The Tiny Games project is [...]
On Saturday night of the Weekender, we’ll be at the Old Vic Tunnels for two events: Ross Sutherland’s Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke, and the the Weekender party. They will be astonishing amounts of fun. You should definitely come.
One of the threads of games at this year’s Weekender that we’re really excited about is stuff from Come Out and Play: games that ran earlier this year at New York’s festival of street games, and which we’ve brought over to be part of Hide&Seek as well.
Picture by Mike Massaro
For most of the games happening at the Weekender, one of the things that the designers think quite hard about is explanations: what’s the most efficient and interesting way to get players to understand what they’re trying to do? Do they need written instructions? Performers? Rules added slowly over the course of the game? But there’s one game where none of that’s really necessary: George Buckenham’s Punch the Custard.
We’re now only a week and a half away from the Hide&Seek Weekender – three days of amazing games in and around the Southbank, plus a conference on Monday.
There’s going to be over thirty-five games in total, which is a lot of games to try to explain in a newsletter or a tweet, so I thought that until the Weekender, I might write a bit about one of the games each day: what it’s like, how you play, who designed it, why we’re so excited to have it as part of the Weekender.
And the best place to start is probably with the biggest game on the Ballroom floor, sat in place throughout the weekend: Viviane Schwarz’s Treasure Maze.