Category Archives: festival

play the city

ehud's pic of pacmanhattan
PacManhattan 2005

Urban gaming is growing in popularity in correlation with the ascendance of mobile devices. Many current games depend on an email or text messaging enabled phone; some of the latest are digital scavenger hunts where the camera phone is the weapon of choice. This weekend at the Come Out & Play Festival, hosted by EyeBeam, you’ll have a chance to play some of the newest games in your own back alley. While not all urban games require tech—some are just about taking advantage of the unique density of the urban environment—the games at CO&P are almost uniformly tech enabled, using mobile phones or projectors or even visits to Second Life as aspects of gameplay.

The Come Out & Play Festival is a street games fesitval dedicated to exploring new styles of games and play.The festival will feature games from the creators of I love bees, PacManhattan, Conqwest, Big Urban Game and more.From massive multi-player walk-in events to scavenger hunts to public play performances, the festival will give players and the public the chance to take part in a variety of different games. Come rediscover the city around you through play.Why street games? Why a street games festival, you ask? Fair questions. Well, we like innovative use of public space. We like games which make people interact in new ways. We like games that alter your perception of your surroundings. But most importantly, we think games are great way to have fun.

Like the Conflux Festival, Come Out & Play encourages us to use our shared urban spaces differently, unlimited by the conventions of that space. But rather than approach it from the perspective of an individual remaking the rules of public engagement, CO&P encourages a game mentality, where the individual (or team) works within a different set of highly prescriptive rules. These rules aren’t the usual rules of public space, which is what makes it fun. But they are the rules of the game, and they cannot be broken if you want to continue to participate. Urban gaming has some root in the thinking of the Situationists—particularly the notion of public, anarchic play—so it seems especially ironic that the play is so structured. Still, I anticipate all the regulations in the world won’t kill the fun this weekend, and the faint whiff of activism will add a pleasant flavor to the proceedings. I’m especially looking forward to Cruel 2 B Kind (if I can just figure out how to get my phone to use email), and the enormous Space Invaders projection (it uses the side of a building as the screen and your body as the defender ship).