Pervasive Games / from 2007 onwards
Alongside these larger projects, I’ve worked on a lot of smaller-scale games for cities and public space.
For example, the True or False Tour, a walk devised for InTRANSIT Festival in which two guides - here Silvana Maimone and Chris Roberts - take a walking group on a tour. At each stop, each guide recounts a story. One tells the truth, and the other lies. Players divide into two groups depending on who they believe; if they’re wrong, they can then try to make up for their mistake by playing a minigame themed around the true story they missed. (Photos by Robert Baker-Self.)
The True or False Tour ran in 2008 and 2009. Chris Roberts, one of the original guides, now runs excellent London Liars Tours independently, and Little Art House Studios runs a similar walk regularly in Penang, with permission.
Semaphoria, a game in which two rival teams have ten minutes to come up with a language that uses only flags - and then have to communicate increasingly ridiculous instructions to their teammates, using only those flags. (Photo from Playpublik.)
The Soho Stag Hunt, the first public game I ever worked on - designed with Mink Ette, Alex Fleetwood and Tassos Stevens. (Photo by Jon Weinbren.)
The Skegness Selfie Hunt, a Matheson Marcault project in which we hid six cutout portraits around Skegness, each portraying a different moment in Skegness history. Anyone who found two or more cutouts received a small prize.
The rules to the Soho Stag Hunt, Semaphoria and some of my other pervasive games are available under a Creative Commons license on Ludocity.