a few interactive theatre links

November 23rd, 2008 • research, social gaming, teaching

A minor link-dump of companies and performances I’ve been mentioning in lectures and workshops over the last few weeks:

1. The Neo-Futurists: Chicago-based company, regularly staging new work but probably best known for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind - 30 plays in 60 minutes.
2. Who Wants to Be? - an audience-led interactive show created by London-based company The People Speak. Applied drama students take note:

Did you know that in the ‘Ask the Audience’ bit of the TV game show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire‘, the audience is right 98.9% of the time? ‘Who Wants to Be’ was born when we realised that if the audience could set the questions, as well as giving the answers, and and making up the rules - we’d have a recipe for social change.

3. Superstruct - the massively-multiplayer collaborative performance forecasting the world in 2019.

the looming squid of pornography

November 14th, 2008 • comedy, culture, research

we’re all undead now

October 24th, 2008 • research, scenes from the web

Zombies have infested World of Warcraft:

As part of the lead-up next month’s Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Blizzard unleashed a new plague across Azeroth last night. Strange crates have been showing up in port towns, glowing green and inflicting anyone who touches them with ZOMBIE MADNESS! Actually it’s a disease that last 10 minutes, after which you become a zombie, maintaining full control of your character, complete with special zombie powers.

None of the above was forewarned in-game: the first thing I knew was an unexpected swarm of undead biting my ankles, followed by a glowing green disease, followed by sudden death at the hands of the local guards when I staggered into town looking for help.

The most interesting thing about the undead plague so far has been the impact on gameplay - more specifically, on ad-hoc group play. Playing as a zombie by yourself tends to be a fairly short-lived experience: enter any settlement and the guards rush to kill you.

But, as films have taught us, a pack of infectious zombies is another matter. So players have started to mob together, attacking towns and major cities as groups. More importantly, zombies are a trans-factional group. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you were a member of the Horde or the Alliance - separated by an in-game language barrier - because we’re all (un)dead now.

It looks as though Blizzard have learnt from their earlier accidental experience with plague simulation, when a design glitch allowed an in-game disease (or debuff) to escape a controlled encounter and spread amongst the general population (where researchers from Princeton University studied it as an example of pandemic disease.)

The dynamic here is a little different. Unlike the outbreak of Corrupted Blood, the zombie plague can be cured by a number of in-game player-characters, such as priests or shaman: contracting the disease doesn’t mean you end up as one of the undead if you can get treatment shortly after infection. In contrast, Corrupted Blood was designed to be contracted only by high level characters, and killed lower level characters so quickly that it was extremely difficult to treat.

And so now we have a pandemic simulator which includes the possibility of medical treatment, but with a game dynamic where being diseased and ending up as part of the transnational undead might actually be fun. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out this weekend when the population of WoW reaches its weekly peak. I’m thinking about re-rolling as a healing character and heading out to join the in-game equivalent of the Red Cross.

Loud, shrill and unvaried

September 16th, 2008 • research, scenes from the web

Via googlechat:

Sent at 11:59 AM on Tuesday

Me: Am reading a voice coaching book from the 60s: “carry a diary with you, and make memoranda of any high, tense, belligerent or nagging voices you may hear.”

Martin: what on earth for?

Me: It’s to correct “stridency” in your speech: voices which are “loud, shrill and unvaried”

Martin: what’s wrong with a screechy voice?

Me: I think it’s the idea that having an uncontrollably screechy voice might interfere with getting cast, rather than screechy = bad

Martin: but Iaeem goeeeng for mr scrEEeEch eeieen the nEEeeew ScreeEEchEEEe film!

Me: I weeeeiiish you the beeeiist of luiiiiccck.

Martin: thaieenk yeee kiiiieend siiir!

Me: sqrueeee!

Sent at 12:07 PM on Tuesday

the other, other festival

July 28th, 2008 • research, scenes from the web

There don’t seem to be any day-passes so I think I’ll be giving the Edinburgh Interactive Festival a miss, but it’s not as though I have much free time this August. “Consumer tickets” are available on the day or from branches of Gamestation, but it’s not clear how much they cost or what you’ll get access to. (It’s also not really online booking if that page directs you to a pdf which you have to print, fill by hand and then post or fax back. Snark.)

Alex Fleetwood - of last month’s Hide and Seek festival - is on a panel on the future of alternative reality games which I’d like to have heard, but I’m hoping I might bump into him via Andy Field at the Forest Fringe anyway. You can download the advertising-rich programme for the Edinburgh Interactive Festival here.

fringe on flickr

July 15th, 2008 • research, scenes from the web

I’ve been playing with flickr’s API over the last few days, experimenting with the idea of visual communities. So, here’s my contribution to the numerous mash-ups on the internet: a live search of flickr images relating to the Edinburgh Fringe festival.

I’m still toying with a few settings, but it’s up and working. More on how it works over here.