Blog

On Saturday July 14^th ESI Design hosted the inaugural Family Field Day as part of Come Out & Play 2012 on Governors Island. Each year gets bigger and bigger and is a great way for ESI’s Game Lab to create fun, transformative experiences that encourage collaboration and action. .

All of the Family Field Day games revolved around the theme of time travel with a massive ‘Time Travel Agency” acting as a central hub where participants signed up to receive their time travel itineraries prior to jetting off to play games like ‘Chicken Out’ in Babylonia, The Great Cupcakes Wars’ in the Middle Ages and Aliens vs. Zombies in the year 3 Billion AD!

Hundreds of families taking took part in eight different games, all of whom were safely transported back to 2012 before the end of the day.

Stay tuned for more event details and takeaways from chief time travel agents Debra Everett Lane and Pete Vigeant. In the interim, check out some pics on Flickr.

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.

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.

When ESI Design participated in the 2010 Come Out & Play Festival, we had a great time both designing our own games and getting to know other game designers. Among those we met were Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie Pozzi, designers of the game Cross My Heart & Hope to Die, a life-size labyrinth game with great game-play and beautiful visual design. Recently, we asked them to stop by the office to chat about game design and the importance of play . . . and we asked them some Very Important Questions:

1. What was your favorite game as a child?

Nathalie Pozzi: Hide and seek. I was born on the Italian Alps and I loved hiding in the neighbors' barns. We were not allowed to go there, as we would damage the stacks of hay by jumping on them.

Eric Zimmerman: I had a childhood rich with games. I played classic American neighborhood games like Kick the Can and Ghost in the Graveyard, as well as epic games of Dodgeball and improvised dirt bike races. Dungeons & Dragons was a favorite starting in 5th grade, and I also grew up playing video games, from Pong and the Atari 2600 onwards.

2. What games do you currently enjoy playing (and that you didn’t design)?