TURN THE STREETS INTO A PLAYGROUND BY RUNNING A GAME IN THE FIRST ANNUAL COME OUT & PLAY FESTIVAL SEPTEMBER 22-24

THE MISSION
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The Come Out & Play Festival seeks to provide a forum for new types of public games and play. We want to bring together a public eager to rediscover the world around them through play with designers interested in producing innovative new games and experiences.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
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Come Out & Play is the first festival dedicated to street games. It is three days of play, talks and celebration, all focused on street games. The festival will have a headquarters in downtown Manhattan where participants can learn about upcoming games and see documentation of completed games. The games themselves will be run in a variety of public locations around New York City. From massive multi-player walk-in events to carefully constructed play performances, there will be something for every type of player. Throughout the festival players and designers will have the chance to interact during games and panels and jointly conceive the future of this growing form.

Street games is an inclusive term for real world games and game-like performances that transform urban public spaces in meaningful ways. Games played in public spaces are an increasingly popular phenomenon and often mix performance art and urban play, inviting players and spectators to re-examine the tapestry of the city. From city-wide scavenger hunts to the real-life games of Pac-Man played around Washington Square Park, these games invite participants to collaboratively re-imagine their surroundings through a set of simple rules. Players begin to see the very layout of the streets as a game board and never look at the city grid quite the same way again.

The festival will feature roughly 15 official events from September 22-24, 2006. Events will take place throughout New York City at a variety of locations and times.

Come Out & Play will enable artists and game designers to exchange ideas and work in front of and with a diverse audience. During the three-day festival, New Yorkers will engage with playful art pieces and games, discovering meaningful and emergent ways to interact in the public spaces of New York City. This festival will provide a unique opportunity for artists and game designers to meet and create engaging experiences for the public.

For more information visit:
comeoutandplay.org

SUBMIT TO THE FESTIVAL
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Have you got a game? We want to include as many different types of games as possible in the festival schedule.

We are looking specifically for games with defined goals and interesting, meaningful choices for the players. These games should be interactive and directly engage the participants. Your game can have a technology component or it can be old school with absolutely no tech; to us, it’s much more important that the game produce an interesting experience for the players. We will be reviewing submissions focusing on these criteria when we select games for the schedule.

The festival will largely be centered in lower Manhattan, so we encourage designers to utilize that area as a base for their games. But it is by no means a requirement. The whole city is fair game.
Most importantly, your game must be playable in New York City during the festival.

Your submission will be reviewed by a panel of experienced designers of street games including PacManhattan, B.U.G., Conqwest, and Seasons of Darkness. We really like playing in fun games. So make sure your game sounds fun and interesting. We like innovative use of public space. We like games which make people interact in new ways. We like games that alter your perception of your surroundings.

APPLICATION
To apply, visit www.comeoutandplay.org/submit.php and fill out an application form.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
June 30, 2006

NOTIFICATION
We will notify you by e-mail if your game has been accepted into the festival schedule by July 14 2006.

We look forward to reading your proposal.

SCHEDULE
Submission deadline: June 30
Notifications: July 14
Festival: September 22-24

INQUIRIES?
Email us at info@comeoutandplay.org

PLAY or VOLUNTEER
Don’t have a game, but still want to play or be involved? Visit comeoutandplay.org to sign up for alerts about the festival.
URL
comeoutandplay.org

I got there early. It was March 16, 2006 and the games didn’t start until 12:15 PM, so I figured that sauntering up to my computer at 12:05 would be plenty early to get a good connection. After all, this was the middle of the workday and people really should have been, well, working. I figured the average American employee would show up at 12:10 with five minutes to spare. After all, when I surf the web at work I try to break it down into three-minute chunks. That’s about enough time to read an Op-Ed piece in the Times or peruse through several music reviews. Dally longer and I can feel the eyes around the office collectively settling on the back of my head as people wonder why I am such a slacker. I click to load a David Brooks column on the nytimes.com then quickly Ctrl-Tab away to e-mail where I stare not at my e-mail, but at the little loading circle in my Firefox browser which tells me when a tab is done downloading. I turn my head quickly from side to side; I have to make sure no one is staring at me. Then I Ctrl-Tab back to Mr. Brooks’ column and read. Then to throw off the scent of laziness, I do a little work for half-an-hour. Rinse, lather, repeat. Five hours later, I’m done reading the New York Times Op-Ed page. And I’ve probably gotten some work done in-between. Granted, I’m a tad paranoid.

But work be damned that wonderful day, March 16, 2006. That day marked the opening round of the annual NCAA Basketball Tournament. On that day each year, from noon until midnight, 16 games of basketball collectively suck the productivity out of the American workplace. It is a hallowed time; a moment of collective anxiety and cheer; two afternoons of socially acceptable web-surfing; two days when the simple ticking up of numbers and ticking down of clocks can be massively entertaining. But this last March 16 was special. This year CBS decided to take March Madness to the level of the real. No longer would those of us stuck in offices have to watch scoreboards and glance through play-by-play descriptions, now we would actually be able to watch the games live with CBS’ new March Madness on Demand web console. The site, powered by CBS Sportsline, provided live video and audio coverage of all of the NCAA games. You could chose to watch any game you wanted, with the exception of the one being played on CBS in your local television market.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one excited. When I clicked on the link at 12:05 I found myself standing, in the virtual of sense, behind 25,654 other people to get inside the arena. Damn faulty assumptions about the priorities of American workers! Now being the last person in a line of 25,654 people is pretty disheartening. In the corner of the pop-up screen a multicolored line scaling ever-upwards indicated my position. Next to the line was a small clock that counted down the seconds until the next admittance. I figured I was done for. That there was no way I would get into this virtual arena. After all, Madison Square Garden only holds 19,763 for basketball games. Ah, but you dear reader, are most likely much smarter than I. Despite the metaphor being employed, this was no brick-and-mortar arena, this was a virtual arena. Admitting in groups of around 1,000, I found myself nearing the beginning of the line after a titillating 25 minutes.

You would think the wait would have scared me off. But it didn’t. The metaphor of the line and the arena was an excellent choice. It bred excitement. You see, I work at a small video game company where the excitement for the NCAA tournament was embodied solely in me. After arriving at work and proclaiming like a kid on Christmas Day, “Oh, who’s excited for March Madness?” and then clapping giddily, I was met with quiet bemusement and blank stares. Only minutes before the games started, I began to question my own enthusiasm. After all, what’s March Madness without group frenzy? How can you be excited about your brackets when you have no one to compare with? But when I looked at that line and the number designating me 25,654th in line, the excitement came rushing back. The simple abstraction of the concept of a mob was enough to restore my frothing excitement. It bound me as part of a community in much the way entering a tournament pool does (don’t worry, I did that too). After all, sports are as much about the feeling of belonging as they are about the game. Quite amazingly from the simple graphic and a slowly ticking counter I was able to extrapolate that sense of belonging.

Finally I reached the front of the line and I was ushered inside. CBS’ web console opened with possibility. Any game was mine for watching. With ESPN open in another window, I quickly scanned the scores to find a close game. A few seconds of buffering and the Alabama-Marquette match came flickering to life. As I settled in to watch, I quickly forgot my three-minute web-surfing rule. I found myself simply watching the game. I also found myself strangely disinterested. I was just watching a basketball game — something I’d done just the weekend before, at home, on a TV, with beer. It turns out that once the video rolled, something was lost. The video made real something that worked better as an abstraction. Normally, during the first two days of past NCAA tournaments, I and my friends would simply watch numbers tick up on a screen. Logging into ESPN, you would watch the seconds count haltingly down while the score slowly, so frustratingly slowly, counted up. And, you know what? I think this was actually more fun. You checked in on the games occasionally to see the score and imagined the action in your head. The excitement of the NCAA tournament was background filler for your mind while you worked for two days. You’d go to a meeting; come back; check the scores. Crap Alabama’s losing and I have them going to the Sweet Sixteen. Write some e-mail. Oops, still losing. Go to another meeting. It gelled perfectly with the point-in-time nature of surfing the Internet at work. You look for a moment, absorb a fact, and then go back to work. But video is too linear for web-surfing. Video demands to be watched. It is resolutely not point-in-time. I quickly found myself unable to do anything. I watched the game in one window while trying to do work in another.

Soon the whole fiction of the crowd had melted away and I was painfully aware that this wasn’t an arena, but straight up television. The announcers would praise a play, and I would find myself staring frantically at the game window hoping to catch a glimpse of “a monstrous jam!” But inevitably the game had moved on. It turns out that regular sports announcing does not work with the partial attention of web-surfing. Announcers must fill airtime, so they must continuously banter and describe each play. This constant stream of video and talk disserves what is so exciting about March Madness. What’s so exciting is that you don’t actually have to watch the whole game. You only watch the exciting parts. It’s a matter of probability really. If you put 16 games on in the space of eight hours; and if you pre-select those games so that only the best teams in the country play; and if you then seed them so a number of the games are evenly matched; well then, some of them are bound to be close. And if you show four games at a time, then it’s likely that at least one of those games will be decided in the last two minutes. Then all you have to do is broadcast whichever game is the closest in the last two minutes. This means that you, as the viewer, get to watch the most exciting part of the most exciting game. So given these odds, it’s a pretty good chance that there will be something interesting on at any given time. You are statistically bound to see some last-second, game-changing shots. This is why I only watch the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. After that, you have to start watching the whole game. And that’s just boring. I can’t remember the last time I watched the actual NCAA final.

Now this minute-to-minute excitement would seem to work wonderfully well as video on the Internet. But it doesn’t. The console allowed you to pick one game. It would show you this game until you decided to watch a different one. But frankly, I don’t want to do all that work. I’m not that interested in any one game. I only care about the good parts and the scores. If there is a last-second shot to win the game, I want to see that. I don’t want to see the beginning of the second half. Beyond that I just want to see scores that tell me how close my picks are to making it to the next round. This is a case of classic point-in-time web-surfing attention versus continuous linear TV watching attention.

What CBS needs to do before next year is find a way to integrate video into point-in-time attention. I thought I wanted to watch every game, but it turns out what I wanted was a list of scores that occasionally open up and show me when there is an interesting play. They shouldn’t bother with broadcasting every game and letting you pick them. If someone cares that much, let them go to a sports bar. What CBS should do instead is keep that concept of the crowd, constantly reminding me how many people are logged on and enjoying this experience. Then they should simply list the scores and push at me highlights of the last two minutes of every game. That way I can check the scores, but only have to watch something every forty minutes, as games are ending. That sounds like something that would fit into my workday. It would dovetail perfectly between the afternoon production meeting and the three o’clock brainstorming session.

When I accidentally closed the March Madness on Demand window, I found myself actually a bit relieved. I didn’t have to watch a game anymore. A yoke was lifted and I felt liberated. I once again felt free to tune in when I desired to find out exactly the information I was interested in, which it turns out is simply the score. I realized I wasn’t missing anything. After all, last-second shots only exist for two reasons: changing the score and highlight reels.

Originally published on PopMatters.com.

What do the painfully oblique term “art” and the wincingly detailed phrase “human-computer interaction” have to do with one another?

Every morning I turn on my computer and log into what I consider to be one of the finest pieces of interactive art I have come across in the last several years. I spend the whole day logged in, staring at the intricacies of the design, considering the ways in which this piece of art has begun to inform and shape my thoughts on the very idea of communication and memory. So successful has it been that this one piece has generated a school of other pieces exploring similar avenues. And at the end of the day I log out of Gmail with an almost wistful reluctance to part with the clarity and moral order laid out by its design.

Now, many people would argue that Gmail in no way qualifies as art. And some days I might tend to agree. Gmail is a work of design, conceived of by a cadre of elite designers and engineers at Google, including Kevin Fox (who designed much of the user interface) and Paul Buchheit (one of the key engineers). Gmail is human-computer interaction at its best. But on other days, such as today, I will staunchly argue that Gmail is a work of art, in much the same way architecture is art or game design is art or Warhol’s silk-screens are art. They are the product of individuals who envision the world in a particular way and conceive a tool to help us see and share that vision. Unfortunately, the art world only considers more prototypical art pieces when considering net art and so misses out on some of the more effective work produced on the Internet.

I’ll explain. But first let’s take a little detour through the more traditional world of “real” art.

The best thing about the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial (its bi-annual survey of the art world) is not the art on display, but the hand-wringing. Every two years publications from ArtForum to the New York Times trot out the same cranky missives asking, “Will the Whitney get it right this time?” Can the curators possibly reflect the mercurial state of the art world, a world predicated on its proud inability to be defined, while also bringing to a wider audience art of lasting import? The inevitable answer delivered every two years is of course: you’d have to be delusional on par with Don Quixote to even try.

But then the world would be a much duller place without the joy of chasing windmills.

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