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Last week, ESI hosted two cool public gaming events: XGame, a multiplayer collaborative game for SEGD’s Xlab 2011: The Design of Location at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, and Field Frogger, our live-action version of the beloved arcade game at Come Out & Play San Francisco. These two games follow in the footsteps of award-winning ESI games at Come Out & Play New York and Steel City Games Fest in Pittsburgh. I’m going to focus on Xlab here and Pete will tell us more about Field Frogger in an upcoming post.

The power of games is manifold. Aside from inspiring general fun and delight, games can provide an environment for collaboration and community, connect us to our emotions, abilities and behaviors, and create a forum for public interaction and dialogue. In the case of Xlab, our goals were to create a game that would encourage new kinds of interaction between Xlab participants, extend the discussion around conference themes and topics, and provide a new platform for networking.

“Almost one billion people are living in the informal settlements, commonly called slums. This population is projected to swell to two billion by 2030.” A staggering statistic at the heart of the Cooper-Hewitt’s Design With the Other 90%: CITIES exhibit on display at the United Nations Visitor Center until January 9, 2012. This show expands on the 2007 show, Design For the Other 90%. While that show focused on objects that can change the world, this show focuses on systems. That makes it a harder story to communicate, but curator Cynthia Smith and the exhibit team have put in a valiant effort to tell these complex and interwoven stories of intervention.  

Community mapping projects and bootstrapped SMS census-taking are initial themes of the exhibit, pointing out that it is exceedingly difficult to intervene among the uncounted and unseen. After this, affordable housing is front and center, from ingeniously inexpensive durable building materials to complex infrastructure plays. “Incremental Housing” from Chile is a prime example of this. This a program of half-built houses – spines of residential infrastructure that include kitchen, bathrooms, basic structure – while residents are responsible for building out the rest in their idiosyncratic ways.  The net value of the property is significantly raised by the sweat equity of the residents.  

On July 16, a large group of relative strangers came together and shared a unique and positive experience. The annual gathering known as Come Out and Play brought the large field on Governor’s Island to life with a diverse series of physical and mental games that spanned the entire beautiful day and challenged participants to open their minds to new, sometimes goofy, adventures.

ESI Design entered our Live Action Spy Party into the mix, a non-digital version of Chris Hecker’s experimental video game about artificial intelligence and espionage. The game features a Spy trying to accomplish three discrete tasks without being detected by an ever-watching Sniper. The rest of the players act as decoys, performing the playful actions and reactions prescribed on their instruction cards. Live Action Spy Party is a blast to play whatever the role, because there’s always something to do and see, but observers get the extra special treat of watching the performance and trying to identify the Spy themselves.

Two major hardware releases that have recently promised to radically change the game market are the PlayStation Move and the Xbox Kinect. Each of these devices offers a high degree of interactive gaming, but in different ways (we have both set up in competing rooms here at ESI!).

The PlayStation Move is not, as naysayers profess, a glorified Wii-mote. The integration of a camera and sophisticated onboard sensors allow for very accurate motion detection, as well as an augmented reality view of the players. Kids seem to love it. I watched my 8-year-old cousin play Start the Party on her PlayStation 3 and she giggled with delight at seeing herself holding the objects used in the game (such as a mallet, a fly swatter and a flashlight). Interestingly enough, she never had to ask how to play – the system immediately engaged her with games that were obvious and intuitive. The accuracy of the motion sensors during more complex activities, such as Table Tennis, is also yet unmatched by any other simulation.

The Xbox Kinect offers a departure from the controller entirely and feels a bit like magic. The experience is unlike any other in all of gaming and cannot be compared to the Move, the Wii or any other motion-based device. One of the major advantages of Kinect is that the player uses his or her entire body to control the game. Players can simply walk into the play space and immediately take control without a complicated setup.