Sophie Sampson

You can’t buy smiles like that, you have to earn them. It was far too hot and sweaty to play an outdoor exploration game, but these guys pushed through and did it anyway. Team Fruitbat won the coveted Master of Space and Time sticker and topped the Time*Trails leaderboard at 910 points. For a game which only had a total of 1070 points available, often extremely well hidden including one 10 point spot you needed security clearance to reach, this was awesome.

We learnt masses about game making doing this, as well as (for me anyway) geeking out about London’s history. Most people played it as a collecting game, rather than doing the story trails, which was the easiest way to get into the game. Lowest possible barrier to entry always good, however fun it is developing characters and sending them off on stories.

I also learnt that a lot of early adopters (and Hide&Seek is a good place to find them) now have Android phones rather than iPhones. And that watching someone get on passworded wifi, download an app and then set up a user profile on it is like raking your fingers down a blackboard – just excruciating. I look forward to having ID chips in our wrists so all this remembering passwords becomes obsolete. Another thing – the app needed to be in the worldwide store, not just the UK Apple store, as we had to turn away people from all over the world. The weekender has an international clientele.

Final thing – people like stickers, and stickers that say Time Ninja in particular. I may have tshirts made.

pics by Michael Dales, not only programmer but also ace photographer

This weekend is the Hide&Seek Weekender at the National Theatre, for which glorious sunshine is forecast. It’s also the debut of a new game I made with programmer Michael Dales, which uses iPhone GPS and old maps of the area for an ambient game about time and place.

Michael’s app is called PlaceWhisper, and he originally described it to me as ‘geocaching without the tupperware’. Using a version of google maps, it allows you to place little bits of text in particular places, which can only be unlocked by going to that place.

My contribution was the content. The area around the National Theatre has a fascinating history, particularly in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. It went from an industrial area of warehouses and factories, to an intense focus for bombing in the second world war, to arts centre, precipitated by the Festival of Britain in 1951. Looking at old maps of the area reveals all kinds of fascinating detail, much of which doesn’t exist any more.

I wrote some stories that work as hidden trails – each instalment gives a clue as to where the next piece can be found. There’s also lots of ambient points to collect like coins in a platformer – some are real history, like the locations of bombs dropping on the worst night of the Blitz, and some are made up – lots of overheard snippets which you might have come across if standing in a spot some 50 or 60 years ago. I’m a sucker for period slang, so I’ve put plenty in.

So come and play!

CC Licensed image by Victius on Flickr

Tate Trumps is now launched and in the app store.

Things I learned writing for this game:

1. Colourfields are rubbish in a fight.
2. There are some extremely menacing artworks in the Tate – I didn’t give out tens lightly, but there are several.
3. Disembodied heads are useless. They can bite ankles and roll at people, but if you’re going to choose anything without a body, always go for arms.
4. There’s two or three really good high cards in each gallery. Richard Serra’s Trip Hammer is my pro tip for Battle Mode.

A couple of games I’ve been working on are nearing completion – the first is Tate Trumps, an iphone app designed to be played with the collection in Tate Modern, which is launching very soon. More about that when it does.

The second is a game about science for Channel 4, codenamed Ada. The very glamorous young lady at the top of this post is Ada herself – see a little more of her world here. What can I tell you about her? She was named for Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, she made those necklaces herself, and her scaly friend has a significant role in the game.

Next week I’m taking part in a quite cool experiment with narrative on the web, Crushing It! It’s a comic love story told entirely through social media by an international group of writers for Social Media Week. Ben Macintyre would dissaprove, but you might not. You can follow it on the website, crushingitstory.com, on the twitter list or become a fan on facebook here to get alerts about what is happening. The action starts 6pm Monday 1st Feb.

Follow the development of the idea on the blog of originator Jill Golick, Story2Oh

BBC Technology did a great article with boffin Rollo Carpenter of Existor about the chatbots he programmed for 221B. They are quite interesting to play because instead of a choice of several dialogue options to interrogate a suspect, players have free text input and have to actually evaluate what they have already seen and formulate questions on their own. The chatbots have a certain number of scripted answers, they have to, but the number of possible inputs is infinite.

Caitlin Burns at The Social Robot gave the game and associated twitter content a thorough and thoughtful review that made me smile.

The game is afoot – 221B.sh