Ok Guys,

Time for some more delicious Jam. This time we’ll be playtesting our new festival game ‘Dogs and Monsters’. This is a get-out-of-your-chair-and-run-about-a-bit type of game:

We’ll be testing your wild monster herding skills, so if you’ve ever fancied yourself a bona-fide Hero then now is the time to discover how utterly realistic an assessment of your abilities that truly is.

We’ll be developing this game as we play, so this is a chance to get your game design hats on if you fancy it.

Bring yourself, wear shoes you don’t mind running around in, and probably some booze won’t go amiss. Meet us outside Hyde Park Corner station at 3pm on Sunday July 31st, or give us a call on 07939 418 828 if you’re running late. We’ll be playing until about 6pm. If it’s raining or the world is being otherwise unpleasantly English at us, we’ll go for a drink.

You can register with Eventbrite right here:

Loads of love,

the playlab London crew. 

A week later and I am staring at piece of A3 paper bearing, in bold black ink, the legend ‘Dave the Robot is curious about his sexuality’ and wondering quite how it all managed to go so right for our first Delicious Games Jam.  
Last Sunday an utterly l33t group of bright young minds gathered in the Candid Cafe in Angel and proceeded to make a lot of noise talking and laughing about player actualisation, status conferral and bi-curious robots.

Assuming the challenge of building upon the +sum framework which now functions in full glorious SMS-O-Vision, we set about prototyping a new game in an afternoon.

You can grab a .pdf with the full details of the functionality of the +sum build we were using here and you can grab a .pdf with the full game design brief and summary here.

Ultimately, like particularly well yeasted dough, we rose  to that challenge. Producing a game which would utilise the +sum framework and serve to fulfill the remit of sneakily raising the Jen Ratio, a measure of the social well being of an environment designed by positive psychologist Dacher Keltner, of an area.

YOU CAN JOIN IN
Here’s something clever: We plan to realise this game design, culminating in a playtest a month or so from now. To get the full details of the current design, and to start having an influence over it’s progression, jump straight into the Google Doc we’ve got running - no sign in required. We’re currently in need of Mission Designers to fill out our games mission structure. To grok the full context of that phrase, jump in here.
 
Love,
the playlab London team.

It’s gloriously simple: 

Over at playlab London HQ, we’ve developed a framework called +sum.

We’ve been using it to play social games, it lets us deliver missions to people, score people on completing those missions, and track those scores. It lets users send messages to each other, and it lets us send messages as tweets, texts or just html. It works on mobile phones and on computers.

We want to talk with you talented lot about the most awesome ways to use this system. We’ve got loads of our own ideas, but want to get you involved in developing. 

Bring some ideas, a laptop if you can (but no worries either way) and yourself. Should be a laugh, right?

it’s at Candid Cafe, 3 Torrens Street, City of London EC1V 1NQ, United Kingdom on Sunday 10th, from 2pm til 5pm.

You can register with Eventbrite right here: 

Loads of love,

the playlab London team.