Interactive City Games
The interactive city game may be an unknown concept when first reading it. In these projects, we created games that can be described as a mixture of a theatrical performance, a social game, a guided city walk, and a public performance.
We were assigned to create a city game in public spaces with the involvement (by becoming a player) of the people on the street, where participants could learn new things about certain topics while having fun, which they could later think about in respect to their own lives* (the same as in the case of a theatrical performance).
As part of this, we used digital and analog techniques as well to create the environment (set), organized a workshop and created an application.
Since I already had plenty of experience in planning events, creating exhibitions, making film and theatrical sets (and using these to tell stories) -although it was a new task regarding its theme- this is why I still considered it my own in the process of creation from the very first moment.
*Every person's life is full of problems, tasks to be solved; moreover, some of them are also constantly repeating in an individual's life. If one succeeds in stepping away from the problem, moving beyond it, namely looking at the situation from an external point of view, then the solution is also easier to see, because it is easier to have keen insight with a clear head. But unfortunately only those can contemplate something from an external point of view who do not (already or not yet) have a stake in the given situation and thus are not emotionally in a “pathologically” way involved.
There are countless ways to achieve this external perspective: there are those who go to a psychologist, those who discuss the situation with their friends and those who call on art to be their helper…
Since the beginning of time, art has always sought to understand eternal human problems, portrayed them, and looked for answers with their own means, be it a moment captured in a statue, a situation painted on canvas, an emotion flowing from a few verses, a story told in a novel, or even a sequence of events recorded in a film, and so on.
By seeing, hearing, touching and contemplating these creations -from an external point of view, without having a stake- we can marvel at their “solution.” And then we just have to use these solutions in our own lives, in the situation that the particular work of art symbolically represented.
With the creation of the city games, our goal was for players to discover and “practice” this problem-solving mechanism. We wanted the player, with our help, to find a solution to the problems in the simulated situation in the game and to achieve a kind of personality improvement by doing so. We hope that in the future, they will be able to use and “capitalize” on the recognized solution and acquired skill during the game in their everyday life in the situations which the story of our game symbolizes.
Projects
How to Disappear Completely
Responsibilities: Creator, Spatial Designer
Additional creators: Ambrus Ivanyos, Bálint Tóth, Mátyás Csiszár
Location: MeetLab, Budapest, Hungary
Year: 2017
About the Game: With this game, our goal was to create an event in which participants enter a world we have created, a fictional reality in which people can disappear.
We have used disappearance as a metaphor to show and make players aware that in today’s modern world we are constantly under surveillance and if, for example, we have a mobile phone or once create a social media profile or just step out onto the street (e.g. due to public cameras), from then on we become permanent “data” of different systems and databases. We have no chance of remaining invisible.
How to play: The project consisted of several phases.
In the first phase, we organized a workshop where we handed the participants a publication which made them aware of the subject of the game (namely the problem of being observed) through a fictional story and in which they were given practical tips for disappearing. Then, using this brochure and with our help, they were able to make the “props” they needed to disappear. For example, we taught them how to make a phone case based on the Faraday-cage theory that allows the phone to become immeasurable when placed in the case, or the players could make a “coat” for themselves that would allow them to disappear from the thermal cameras.
As the second phase of the game, players downloaded the app that was developed. Then, walking around the city, arriving in different parts of the city, the players could listen to different “episodes” of a fictional novel created after the workshop (which was about the story of the disappearance).
The Game was supported by IN SITU (a large-scale cooperation project led by Lieux publics, European and national center for artistic creation in public space based in Marseille, France.)
Intraverse
Position: Creator
Additional creators: Ambrus Ivanyos, Bálint Tóth, Mátyás Csiszár
Location: Marseilles, France & Budapest, Hungary
Year: 2016
About the Game: With our city game, Intraverse, we wanted to draw the attention of our audience to a very common problem that concerns quite a lot of people: The majority of people -due to the “programming” and being “set on an orbit” by parents, then school, later employment and society- live according to a routine. It is not easy to “escape” from this system of rules and expectations, yet there are those who succeed. How is this possible? How do they do it?
The answer to the question is that if we want a change in our lives, we need to step out of the comfort zone of our routine and do things differently than we have done so far. We need a new approach and a new solution toolkit! However, it is quite dizzying to look at it from a higher perspective and it is quite scary to do what you have to do from there!
But if we have the courage to do all this, we can deviate from the career-orbit we have been given and finally go our own way…
How to play: The game took place in two consecutive locations, a café and a fourth-floor apartment. Players pre-registered for the program arrived at a café in the 9th district of Budapest. There we told them our fictional story. The story was that there are satellites around the Earth and these satellites do the tasks assigned to them without thinking. Once set on an orbit, their route cannot change in theory, they run the same laps at regular intervals. According to our story, we got the news that a satellite had deviated from its orbit (“escaped”) and it would be up to the players during the performance to decipher how the satellite had managed to do all this.
Then, accompanied by one of the creators, we took the players one by one from the café to the second venue of the game, an apartment on the fourth floor (while further explaining the story to them as if it were actually real news).
Arriving at the apartment, the players -with a projection created by us that mimicked the movement of the planets to William Basinski's music: The Disintegration Loops- symbolically entered the universe, where they got more information.
Then finally a curtain opened, behind which a creator was waiting for the player and who, as a solution to the puzzle, offered them the opportunity to lean out of the fourth floor window and look at the world, life from above, and if the player had even more courage, they could also climb out of it (with climbing equipment) and then they will understand everything.
If the player took this courageous step, then they could understand that the escaped satellite was actually themselves, and by climbing out they symbolically moved out of their usual life, their usual life-circles (from routinely performing the tasks entrusted to them in their life). To change, to leave the well-established circles and habits, they needed only one thing, namely courage. In the game, they began to exercise this courage, climbing out the window from the fourth floor, and whoever does this brave act will have the secrets of the world open up to them in real life (just like before in the game world we created).
The lesson, then, is that just with enough courage, we can get a new perspective, reinterpret our own lives, and get out of the familiar and often meaningless and boring circles.
The Game was supported by IN SITU (a large-scale cooperation project led by Lieux publics, European and national center for artistic creation in public space based in Marseille, France.)
