Hide and Seek

Yesterday I returned from the Hide and Seek weekender, where a horde of talented game designers converge every summer for a giant festival of pervasive games. The general rule is that most of the games have to be new, and many of them come from the monthly Sandpit events held during the rest of the year.

This is the second weekender I’ve got to, and progress shows in both the excellent organisation and a step up in terms of venue with the National Theatre hosting. As well as many friends to catch up with, there were many, many games to get through. Typically 12 running per day, but due in part to scheduling but mostly sheer physical exhaustion it was only possible to play about 4 per day. Most of them were experimental, and some of them were truly excellent. Since media sources are mostly crediting things to Hide and Seek, I’d like to give a quick run down of the games I played and a shout out to their designers.

James Wallis ran Aliens Among us on the Friday night, which is a werewolf-like game in which everyone dies, rolls new characters, then dies again. Players comprise the Ultimate Defense Force (because apparently the Penultimate Defense Force didn’t work out), tasked with ridding the Earth of alien invaders. Aliens are indistinguishable from humans until after death, and apparently the UDF has been infiltrated… Noone is above suspicion, and players are awarded points for killing members of the opposing team. When killed, your points are used to make a new character, you take a card to see if you’re a human or an alien, and rejoin the fray. It was messy because it had never been run before, and we found a few bugs, but it was very good fun.

Peter Law and Katy Beale ran Explorers, in which blindfolded kings were led around the National Theatre (their palace and gardens), and told tall tales by the explorers leading them in an effort to get them to part with valuable golden toffees to fund expeditions. A difficult game for people who struggle with improv or storytelling, but as a king I got some very funny offers, including having a species named after me, easily conquerable naive people and an ambulatory tree I could ride around on.

I didn’t get to play Bloop, designed by Nikki Pugh, but people walking around blindfolded, navigating by ultrasound with inflatable killer whales on their heads was a decidedly entertaining sight.

International Golf Proxy, by Simon Katan, was a guessing game in which only the host knew where the hole was for sure, and teams had to hit an imaginary ball, with imaginary clubs, to where they thought it would be. By learning their own ranking after each shot, and querying the ranking of one other team each time, they could zero in on it in an attempt to land closest. The different clubs to choose from created a very nice risk mechanic, with some multiplying points, but negative scores if you were in the bottom half of the ranking. Not as complex as it sounds, and really quite eloquent.

Once again Peter Law, with Tassos Stevens, ran a game called Sangre y Patatas, which was basically a real life version of upcoming audio game Papa Sangre. It involved everyone sneaking around blindfolded, trying to be quiet while greeting anyone they bumped into with the word “patatas”. All the while, one player playe a monster who would whisper “sangre”, causing the person to immediately die the most melodramatic death possible. Winners were selected from the quickest monsters to kill everyone, the last survivors of each round, and the hammiest, loudest deaths. Again, this was a very entertaining game to watch as well as play.

Shabbat-Put!, by PlayRite Collective (who I can’t find with Google), was a set of olympic events interpreted strictly by Jewish laws of what you cannot do on the Sabbath. For instance: carry things, or let your hands and feet become dirty on the ground. Events such as gymnastic, relay races and the shotput become a great deal more complex under those stipulations, not to mention silly.

EnterPlay are another group I can’t find a page for, but they do have this listing for Latitude, and ran my favorite game of the weekend. Segue was a game in which teams of people used small pieces of music, printed on a set of seven cards, to control dancers. Representing four countries, four teams clipped music into the hats of dedicated musicians, and each piece triggered very specific dance moves. The dancers had to pass through four checkpoints, collecting a stamp at each, then make their way to a final spot. On completion, all the teams reconvened, the musicians played the full piece and the fragments of dance were assembled into a fully choreographed routine. This game had a really nice balance of puzzle solving and teamwork, as well as good aesthetics due to the music, and a nice climax in the final performance.

Some of these games were highly experimental, and some of them were incredibly simple; the kind of things that would go down well at dinner parties or weddings. Overall, I was very impressed with the quality and insanity of what was on offer (the party at the ICA featured an incredible three-legged dance off, in which people were tied together, formed into a circle and forced to entertain each other). Games culture is really striding forward at the moment. On the one hand, many more game designers understand their wider place in games rather than just the form they deal with all the time, and many, many more people are realising how easy it is to make up a playtest things. Hide and Seek, as well as the Sandpits, are like a particle accelerator smashing game designers together. We highly recommend them.

(CC image by me)