BARG London awayday: report
by Nikki Pugh
On June 23rd we girded our loins (some more forcefully than others) and time-travelled down to The London with a rucksack full of cuddly blank avatars liberated from Birmingham charity shops. The aim: to introduce The Emergent Game at Sandpit at the Royal Festival Hall.
We wanted a playing area that people could immerse themselves in, so our first mission was to mark up the game’s floor space. We were hampered slightly by the realisation that we didn’t have enough masking tape, that large trolleys would be passing through, that Ant was having a little girding-related trouser trouble and that it was stupidly hot.
Ernst by Kevan
However, the eventual space staked with little tape crosses looked suitably intriguing, and we soon had our first avatar incarnation: Ernst the time-travelling frog with a dislike of modern architecture and a certain blue hat nattiness.
More characters coalesced, from Larry the Ladybird who sneers at spots, a sticky otter, a Serengheti speeder, an elephant with excellent Stone Soup recipe sense, possibly the most beautiful character we’ve ever had, a Scottish nationalist todger, a monster with a dislike of conspiracy theories, an anti-velo bird and even one player *shock* who took against hats.
This kind of blatant hat distrust could have skewed the whole game, but fortunately Brown Bird With Brown Wings rebalanced the universe with the special skill “looking damn good in a plastic hat”. And it was, indeed, an awesome hat.
Further inter-avatar communications were hotting up with various postcards of joy whirring around, some dancing, plus some balancing of various sorts, more hat pimping and Stone Soup ingredients manufacturing.
by Nikki Pugh
Meanwhile, some of the other avatars were immersed in a photoshoot off-board to document their blossoming relationship through wining and dining to cinema going. This, we felt, was suitably impressive to gain the “Awesome” badge. The “Instigator” badge went to Cornelia the Elephant for her Stone Soup skillz.
We concluded with a final rush of activity as the other Sandpit games wound down, leaving the whole board littered with wondrous pieces of paper and serious character imagining efforts. Thanks to everyone who came – let us know how it was for you :).
There’s also a flickr group if you’d like to share any photos of the evening (or avatars in their new homes) with us.
Remember also that the excellent Sandpit/Hide and Seek peoples are holding a 3-day event in The London at the end of July, so book those super-cheap advance train tickets now.
Thanks for running the game. Ernst had a good time of it, and I really enjoyed the unintimidating, incremental narrative of the game – that I wrote my initial profile card more or less at random, but managed to build a bit of a character story as I took Ernst through the other tasks.
And it was great to see so much enthusiasm and inventiveness from the other players. Although it was sometimes a bit hard to get an overview of what was happening in the game (the score grid did seem a bit littered and kicked around towards the end), I think the fact that you’d occasionally chance on people earnestly setting up strange situations between their cuddly toys more than made up for that. Glimpses and rumours sometimes make the best stories.
Hope to give it another go some time. Regards to Ernst.
Thanks for the feedback, Kevan.
It was a really interesting event to manage: after plonking people into it and getting them orientated, there was very little for us to do except to stand back and watch it unfold… Quite a weird feeling!
Now we’ve got a grasp on how the general approach works, our next batch of questions focuses mainly on the initial entry. In the same way that the first (profile card) mission guides people through the process of quickly giving their toy a character, we need a similar sequence of steps to get people from their first contact with the game through to that point.
It was also interesting how the Sandpit environment meant that we had new players joining in at different stages of the game. How do we best get them playing?