Last Friday (5th March), the Tate Britain held ‘Game Play‘ as part of their monthly Late at the Tate series. The night offered game playing (from games of Werewolf, through to large displays of the newly released Heavy Rain), talks, workshops and Blast Theory‘s location based game ‘Can You See Me Now?’. This was my main reason for going as I seemed to have missed previous opportunities to play this game and have enjoyed some of Blast Theory’s previous offerings.
‘Can You See Me Now?’ is played through virtual spaces as well as tracking real world spaces in and around where the player’s are located. The aim of the game is to spend as much time in the virtual space as possible, without the real-world runners catching you. The tate foyer was filled with about 12 Macs, with 2 sets of headphones attached as players could have another person listen in on their game. You are asked to type in your name, we made one up. Then you are asked to type the name of someone you haven’t seen for a while, again we made one up. Then we were in, our avatar was placed within the virtual world representing the buildings in and around the Tate Britain. I was controlling the character but negotiating with my friend as to where we should go, so we turned it into a co-op campaign with one avatar. Our avatar was first placed near a courtyard within the game so we spent the first few moments figuring out where we were and where the runners were in relation to us. This meant we were trying to stay behind walls or at least up against them before venturing out into the rest of the world. In doing so, we found a few glitches such as walls that we could accidentally move through, so that became another part of our mission, trying to find out what other areas were mysteriously available.
After realising that the runners were far away, we ventured out into the surrounding spaces around the Tate. It seemed as if it was possible to be in full view of the runners and still get passed them on a few occasions. All the while you are playing, information is being relayed about people’s whereabouts on the runners walkie talkies that you can listen to via the attached headphones. On the moment when we decided to stop and hide for a moment, listening to the action was an interesting way of finding out who had been caught and where they had been caught, but some messages were muffled and often hard to decipher. We managed to stay in the game for what felt like a long time, many players were caught within minutes, yet we were still navigating around the grounds, trying to match real world spaces with virtual ones, and were sometimes left wondering if the paths were that bounded in the real space. Many paths around the buildings seemed to have collision detection attached so you couldn’t always go where you think you should be able to go, but that was part of the learning process in being able to move around the gameworld.
After being in the game for a while we started to get restless, and made the decision to hunt down the runners and turn the game around. This took a little while as the avatars movement in the gameworld seems to be rather slow. I’m not sure if this is deliberate or some kind of lag. Either would make sense, as in the virtual world the avatar has no obstructions such as traffic or other people which the real world runners would encounter, therefore maybe the avatar movement is deliberately slowed down (or maybe it is just a technological constraint). We finally found 2 runners together and moved our avatar directly up to one. If we could have tapped them on the shoulder we would have done (our only option was to communicate this action through a chat screen). Nothing happened, so we moved up to the next runner, and at one point were situated between 2 runners. Still nothing happened. Then after about a minute delay we were finally caught. Our position was spoken to the rest of the playing community, we had been found. Then the runner had to say the name of the person we hadn’t seen for a while. Ours was ‘Yoshi Poopypants’, and in saying it, the runner muffled a giggle over the walkie talkie. It was a perfect ending to a mixture of real world and virtual world activities.
On a separate note, I managed to catch most of the talk on ‘Video Games: design, narrative, gameplay’ chaired by Ste Curran (creative director of Zoe Mode), with a panel including Charles Cecil (creator, writer and artist), Kieron Gillen (game critic and writer) and Dave Gibbons (co-creator of Watchmen). The talk was interesting, discussing topics such as the design of gameplay, the importance of narrative and engagement with characters in relation to gameplay and how different types of narrative and gameplay techniques were constructed. It was definitely driven towards a gameplaying audience, with references to games commonly encountered within gaming communities. Having spent the last few years surrounded by academic game research, it did feel like the age old narratology/ludology debate raising its head again, but was a worth-while event for those that engage with games and were interested in their production processes.
All in all it was a great evening. Games seem to be growing more within UK galleries. Seems the next V&A late night is themed around games and play too, hopefully I’ll have something to say about that at the end of the month. Watch this space.