Friends

Come Out And Play

In 2006 Come Out & Play Festival turned New York City into a playground for a weekend, every year since then players have raced through the night in city-wide games of zombie tag. (Papier-mache) pigeons have been pummeled with wiffleball bats. Bicyclists armed with spray chalk and stencils have competed to claim and build bike lanes…that was all just the beginning of Come Out And Play.

Igfest

Igfest is a Bristol’s festival of ‘interesting games’ which takes place in September.  Launched in 2008, the Igfest programme a mix of street, pervasive and social games.  Igfest taps right into to Bristol’s highly visible independent culture and isn’t afraid to make a statement.  We love Igfest’s ambition to completely take over the city it inhabits, and we love even more the team who drive it.

Hide&Seek

Hide&Seek was launched in 2007 and was the first pervasive gaming event in the UK (probably). As well as the annual Weekender event which sees a flurry of summer activity up and down London’s South Bank, Hide&Seek also run Sandpit, a monthly game testing and networking event for the gaming community.

Ludocity

Ludocity is an online resource and evolving archive for game makers, players and enthusiasts.  Games can be uploaded and are released under a Creative Commons Licence, which gives everyone permission to run that game for free, wherever and whenever they like. You can find Doldrum games on there if you want to play them.

TED.com

TED is a nonprofit organisation aiming to promote ‘ideas worth spreading’.  Originally focussed on Technology, Entertainment, Design, it has widened its scope and comprises of a series of conference events as well as an incredible online resource of talks from the worlds most progressive minds.  On TED.com you can see a variety of influential speakers make their case to the world that we need to be making more room for play. Jesse Schell’s When games invade real life talks about how we are already using and responding to game structures in our modern world, while Seth Priebatsch’s The game layer on top of the world talks about how game dynamics are emerging to influence education and commerce. In both Schools kill creativity and Bring on the learning revolution, inspiring figure Sir Ken Robinson highlights the need for nurturing rather than undermining creativity in education.  He says that play and experimentation is discouraged as we get older as making mistakes and ‘being wrong’ is stigmatised in education and in our professional lives. In On creativity and play, Tim Brown talks about the value of play in creative thinking, and the need to overcome fear and embarrassment to achieve this. In Gaming can make a better world, Jane McGonigal makes her plea to use game structures to solve the world’s biggest problems.  She believes that the skills honed in games like World of Warcraft can be transferable to real-world situations, such as poverty and famine.

Bring Stuff

London based Bring Stuff organise meet-ups and social events with a Fancy Dress theme, just for fun and not for profit. Each party is based around you ‘bringing’ something to the event such as a Fancy Dress, root vegetables or even a hat. The ‘stuff’ you bring might encourage a conversation – like ‘What the hell is that you’re wearing?’ so in a nut shell: they pick a random venue, they pick a random theme, they might even prepare some games and you turn up and party with them!

BARG

BARG is a network based in Birmingham for people who want to play and create a wide range of playful things that can happen in public places, hidden places and/or across multiple digital platforms. BARG also run Bargmeets – informal gatherings for makers to test ideas and events open to a wider public who just want to play.

The Love of It

The Love of It is a source of good wholesome fun, they want you to share ideas, plan events & get involved with anything from den building; indoor picnics; rockpooling; treasure hunts; star gazing; monster making; board games; wild swimming; doodling; cheese rolling; kite flying; tree climbing; road trips; hide and seek, conker fights and anything else you can think of.