Pop-Up Arcade: Postmortems on Indie Arcades and Events

hello welcome welcome to our three micro sessions about in the arcades and events my name is Yann I have sir Ida and Marie the right is gonna kick off by giving a short history in or overview of playful culture and events Marie will talk about her activities in the wild rumpus and I'm gonna round it off with some of my experience in building arcades and going to these events so yeah thanks you know yeah my name is Loretta booter I'm I have my own company called Zoe and I am co-founder of playful arts festival in the Netherlands and I'm a worldwide co-director of the global Game Jam one of the things that I've been doing in the past few years is organizing events to bring people together to connect them

and give them a sense of community for different kind of purposes for example I set up in 2010 I set up in the Netherlands indigo Showcase which is a showcase for Game Developers Dutch game developers to show their games to each other but also to do a different audience audience that normally never go to game events and she'll show them what kind of games are made in the Netherlands and we did that by using these arcade cabinets that given more of an exhibit field and messy different kinds of PCs and stuff like that that you normally would usually saw but with game exhibits so we try to use these and you can actually see them as well and at GDC or at Gamescom this this week at the holland pavilion and booth number b0 with 30 another event i started in last

year was to play for arts festival which is a festival where we try to connect people from different kinds of audiences together and have them they'd get together like so join us commerce together with the spectacle games bringing it so did so and head-to-head with your friends collaborates play sneak team-up so we we tried to get people together and play play with each other so they could mix and mingle and experience new things like you can see here that you have hit me which is more physical game and then other games like mega girl or a hawk RAM we also brought the play for Arts Festival to an Art Fair in the Netherlands in Rotterdam where you try to give new audiences new experiences like this game and put them in an Art Fair which is a different place than what games would normally be experienced in the Netherlands for at me at least

and then in last year I organized stay in the park in the Netherlands and was actually meant to take place in the park but it was pouring down so it decided to do it inside and get people together and play more folk games and games that you used to do on a playground and you can see how all this makes people smile in this setting and get them a little bit close together than what they normally would do and you can see here a little bit of lemon hosting going on in the middle of the Dutch gaming garden so Eric Zimmerman said in introduction to game design the 21st century will be the century of play game designers will be the architects the storytellers and the party hosts of this playful new world so how is this done I think play is a couple of things are part of play and playful culture and according to me which is there is a

certain sense of participation people have to participate to make things happen there's a sort of performance going on with an inspect 80 ship which helps this performance and then encounter an encounter can be getting together but also experience in encounter new games and be curious about it so this happens around the world and in different kinds of places through game makers people that make games events that happen worldwide public space in public space or in certain space and collectives that make stuff like the things for example games and games can be folk games like this or local multiplayer games which you can see here are performative games like hit me from Cairo album her miracle betta is a game designer and he was asked what he's doing and he said I focus a lot on making games that bring people together so it is this so he's interested in

social behavior and interactions between different people and a whole bunch of people and events and collectives do this and in the world and it started well it didn't start but you can see here an overview of a couple of events that were in collectives that were starting this like okay Romi in 2006 and then it all well these are kind of events and collectors that during this throughout the world and what's interesting about this is that they're all inspired by each other so when I asked Ana meaningless why did you start doing this and they were answering with things like Coco Borromean Bay because we're happening and we wanted to have something like this as well and this can be in the UK but also in Argentina and Sweden and in Australia so baby causes is mentioned a lot and baby causes is underground collective in New York and they had a mission of bringing things to a larger audience as you can see here either through do-it-yourself arcades

or getting them together and showcase these arcades and get people to play which normally wouldn't maybe not do but they were just pulled into the whole playing experience sometimes literally by having this thing surrounding them Douglas Wilson creator of of you and Sebastian Yahoo says that there is a lot of ground to be explored between the intersection between frames and more experience based creative traditions and you can see what he did for example with you and Sebastian used as we are now Europe I was looking to see what kind of stuff is happening in Europe and there's a whole bunch of there out there and like the indie games arcade at Eurogamer brings games to and indie games to er an audience triple-a audience normally game city in the UK for example who tries to experiment with new kinds of events like

this for example amazing in Berlin where they try to have in Indy connect where they put things up like this and try to have graffiti on the wall but also this is a little bit an example of the exhibition and I brought it also to Croatia for example beach game jams what rumpus and Marie is gonna talk about and the wood festival in Copenhagen is happening and then where these kind of people are you see the joy in their faces and it's a new festive what's gonna take place next year again and then then it's not only game events but also in a theatre stuff like this is happening like what Kony is doing and they try to have have people experience

new adventures in the theatre and outside the theatre and use these theater aspects of it so there's a lot of stuff happening and out there and we try to engage chat topic and me try to engage new all these curators and collectives in in conversation with each other so we have the new game salon which is a hangout and biweekly hangout which he started recently and if you want to know more of these things that are happening everywhere I set up a tumblr where I collect all these videos for playful culture which you can see have a look here so this was my talk for now thank you so much they asked us to take the questions at the end outside because we're short on time hi everybody my name is Maria Zoi

just through I mentioned I work as or I run help run their wild rumpus i self-titled queen roughhouser and i guess sort of i refer to myself as a cream browser because the work that we do or the work that i do running it is sort of very white and buried so there's a lot of tasks involved the world rumpus is within itself I guess through I had arcade and indie games club nights and I really hate referring to it as a club night because there's something sort of been inherently sort of nineties and Kitsch about that but I can't really think of a better way to I guess there's a phrase events which bring together sort of indie games and alcohol and late-night events and so we've run sort of seven events to date and we predominantly run these in London but we've also run events as far afield as San Francisco in partnership with Sur with Venus patrol and one life left and we've run events as well on a boat and so Jen were this sort of then totally this sort of stuff that we

curate at these events so the selection of games that we present is stuff that we curate so it tends to be we started off with the very strict rule is saying bye it's gonna be low-key what local local multiplayer games only and then we accidentally broke that rule by showcasing games such as under super hexagon which were sort of okay will actually know it's competitive single-player as well and then at our GDC event and sort of two years ago we then hosted or presented Proteus which is the farthest away that you could probably get from local multiplayer and sort of competitive single-player games so when it comes to talking about the games in the events the games that we show at our events it's kind of I guess with the logic of we kind of know it when we see it but but yes so we've also been branching out sort of in the past years so this past year at GDC we also ran and the wild run pursuit of rumpus royale which was an indie games farewell tournament and we've also worked alongside Venus Patrol and Cato Takahashi's company you've Euler to create the game ten you won you which we presented at a tall event or a

party last year so who are the wild rumpus so it's not just myself I work alongside this ragtag bunch of people who are dick hog and Ricky haggart's who work - they work creating the games Hohokam and Frobisher says and George Buckingham who you can probably not believe was there at first retrospectively photoshopped into that picture afterwards it was probably best known for creating the game punch the custard and so why do we do the events that we do and I think for me it's this I look around it's sort of the events and things that were happening within London at a time when we started world rumpus and there were a lot of events which were for sort of indie developers to showcase their work to other indie developers and there was also a lot of events which was sort of showcasing indie games within sort of a larger game expose and sort of establish spaces and I don't want to use the word gamer but as it's only a seven minute talk I've got to sort of paraphrase so I'm gonna use that tone but neither of these spaces were actually places that I felt

welcome or I felt that I was really sort of supposed to be in but as someone who wasn't really a game developer or someone who wasn't really that involved with putting that many sort of Triple A games that we're sort of people where do people like me go who are sort of creatively curious about these sort of games - to run these events and exactly as though we just sort of mentioned in that talk that I feel like a cliche that we we were inspired by looking at these photographs of events that were happening elsewhere so the events that gamble were putting all cookironi were putting on and the camera events which you can see here and the events that baby councils were running in New York and I looked at these spaces and I looked at these events and the pupil that were at them and I could I could see myself in those places and it felt like a space where I would be well could in the sort of event that I was passionate about recreating and I'm running this sort of event so we sort of took inspiration from those and started setting a foreign events and and it's kind of interesting listening to sort of Kelly while I'm talking this morning about and the reason why they don't look

at or when questioned why they don't bring why they bring the indie mega booster PACs and they don't look at saying sort of a separate showcase is specifically for those games because they thought that they'll be putting a filter on to the audience that you'd be bringing in and I guess it was a point that I'd all argue is that it's completely correct that you would be creating a filter but by running those events at PAX as well there's still already a filter in place and it's not a filter that someone like myself sort of passed this through quite comfortably but but also these events like and the stuff that baby castles were doing and that Kokoro me were doing as well but they weren't just necessarily about sort of creating these sort of neutral spaces there were spaces which were born out of the creativity and passion of the games that they were showcasing so for me when I look at a game like Johann Sebastian joust which I if I have to hold at one game as being the real sort of inspiration for running the events that we do it is this one and it's a game that just for me does not equal being showcased necessarily and in a convention center like you can played

there but for me playing Johann Sebastian joust is about being in the hull of an X cold war fishing ship in the middle of night was sort of this audience of people passionately around the people playing sort of banging for blood they're watching the players engage with that those games so it's about creating spaces which aren't just sort of neutral spaces for people that are sort of outside of were a sort of established games literate audience but it's about creating spaces which are born and sort of sympathetic so they sort of gain some work that they're showcasing and so I've just put up here a few sort of the details of the events that we've run to date so our first event was back in 2011 and that was an event that we went for attendance for now it was free and I looked at our budget the other day and he actually made me laugh because it was about five lines long and get it came to about 400 euros or something for the amount that we spent on it and the attendance for that was three hundred so it was great that we managed to keep cost down by borrowing a lot of equipment which does make a lot of extra work for yourself but there are ways of doing these events

and creating and setting these things up and running them it's sort of low low cost and none of these costs that are up on the screen as well either take into account the time that we work or we that we do to run these events that we're doing all of this is a labor of love and we don't pay our soul to run these but you can then see sort of that we progressed up to sort of GDC which is a bit of an anomaly because we've kind of got a captive audience out at GDC when we run the parties because there's already a sort of really big enthusiastic indie games audience there and but then coming to sort of the most recent event that we did in London which was as I say was on a on a boat and that was on the first of an in the UK where we charged entry for because as this audience grows and as we manage to reach these bigger creative audiences it's sent outside there's sort of things literate sort of audience that of course the costs and we need we need a bigger boat we need a bigger venue we need bigger spaces and because of that that costs money and we want to put on these bigger exhibitions and larger showcases but to do that it costs more money and

so we had to put a ticket price on the event and it was great that our attendance was sort of double what it was for the first event but what we did find retrospective it was sort of being at that event is that you could see by the audience who had attended that it wasn't quite the same balance that we'd had for the first event instead that we were kind of missing the people that we'd seen at our first event which was for free which we were kind of missing the people that weren't perhaps sort of already in their indie games or sort of games literate space so I think it's something that we respected but I want to look back at what ways we can work to potentially still make sure that we're building these events up and were able to grow with the demand but also making sure that we remain strong for neutral spaces that that do welcome people from outside of this space to come and realise that okay so that they don't you you don't feel that you necessarily like games or you don't classify yourself as a gamer but but there are things here that you can get passionate about and we need to create events and this amazing sense of build this sense of cultural community around these and things and one of my favorite quotes that we had for events was from the Guardian which

was this one which I've highlighted in blue at the bottom which I'll leave on which was that our events are a glorious mashup of music play and alcohol seriously if you've never caught one of these things come along and bring lots of people who don't usually play games because their lives are about to change and that's what we want to do it's like we want to want to introduce more people to this stuff from run more interesting events so if you want to find out more you can visit our the wild rumpus topcoat UK or you can find me on Twitter it's Tigers hungry thank you [Applause] hi I'll try to make this real quick I think I have seven minutes my computer starts

so hi my name is Jana I made a little weird presentation it's an experiment please bear with me welcome please please hold your flat I'm gonna be saying we a lot probably it's because I have a company that's called glitch nap I we're starting up a collective in antwerp called the house of indi probably I'm affiliated with ITU Copenhagen where I'm doing where I where I have started a student organization that's doing events and with Cirque opening in collective let me tell you the story of the last year of my life

because that's kind of really related to all of this it all started when we made this game called laser nights which was a four-player looking about to play a game we made because we didn't want to write an AI or to level design we were lazy so it ended up like this we're four people because obviously you can't play four players on a keyboard because of physical space and hardware limitations it ended up for people crouching in front of a computer having a blast kicking the floor you know jumping in the air but yeah that's not really something you can sell but the interesting thing that happened here this is it tilted thing this is annoying I'm just gonna use the Tishman with me so really quickly we realized that this creates a space around your game like a sort of almost physical area that you're now playing in with people but it's really confining to like stand bent over and look at a laptop so what do we what we did was we put the game in

an old arcade machine you know like one of those old fridges and we were able to when we set it up in a public space attract a lot of people because of the familiar shape of a fridge that plays video games and then we were invited to the North game indie night as a nominee on the one condition unofficially the one condition that we would actually bring the arcade machine which was a problem because we didn't actually own that one we borrowed it from someone so we decided to build our own which led to this with no money and no carpentry skills so we ended up buying two IKEA coffee tables the cheapest one speaking yet and putting them together putting a screen in there and popping out four controllers which resulted in this is my favorite picture this guy is obviously having a blast at playing laser nights we ended up actually winning that award that which I think no small parts thank to bringing this arcade because we just dama dominated a space every game had its own booth they all looked identical ours was really special because we built this physical thing and it kind of went on from there the problem with this one

was the IKEA wood is actually cardboard so the wheels we put on there kept on breaking so we decided we need a new one and let's make mobility our priority so we can take it everywhere so we made the baby Cade which is looks kind of like this again there's a young person having a blast yeah that's it we we couldn't get a shot a shopping cart so we ended up just buying cheapest vintage baby stroller we could get this has been showcased several places and we're hoping to bring it to parks and just drive it around downtown with both our indie games and your indie games and whatever a bit later I went to global Game Jam and Antwerp and I decided which is my hometown although I live in Copenhagen I decided to bring part of this culture that I'm engaged with back home so again I had no money so I bought the cheapest vintage coffee table I could find I put a screen in it and I brought it and played some of the games that I play so often in Copenhagen that ended up I ended up meeting exactly the right person who wanted to help me with this took it forward and we ended up

making it into the press X which is a platform where we curate indie games and bring them to events we've exhibited Proteus in super hexagon tengami and other games at places that have never seen those types of games before which is really awesome and it's this was made in January we finished it in February March and it's been to like ten different events and it's going to be hopefully more and more this is a beautiful it turning through this beautiful thing we'd like we put like gold gold plate on there that says press X and it has like gold hooks for your xbox controllers really nice and then this one actually I got invited to to showcase a game at wild rumpus and I arrived a day early and that's a bit of all right conference and I arrived a day early and I decided well I don't really want to see in London I'll just build in arcades so I got somebody I spent the whole day making phone across again I had no money so I I got somebody to lug these pallets through downtown London with me on foot like a kilometer or two and then ended up at the venue and just cut a hole in the top

put a screen in there and again I made this thing with very little effort that just completely dominated the space at the bit of all right conference and a wild rumpus so to sum up what I'm trying to say is build arcades it works out it's great it's great fun and it's really rewarding use whatever you can find bring them wherever you go and organize meetings for them basically if you build them if you build it they will come so I wish I could tell you that I have some master plan where a year ago I decided to become a game installation artist I wish I could tell you it was super easy getting these projects funded and in finding materials etc etc I wish I could tell you there's never been any hammering or gluing or sawing mistakes I can't but I can guarantee that these machines are a really good way to get your game to actually be played by people you otherwise have a difficult time reaching because they don't necessarily understand computers but they understand the shape of whatever it is you have there or they understand that this is something interesting that

they should pay attention to it can also get you invited to a lot of cool parties like GDC Europe in our case it won us our first award I got here to come to at GDC Europe and sort of host a panel I really recommend it the thing we started an answer I put a screen in a coffee table and since then we've curated two entire exhibitions and we've brought it to ten other events so to round us all off I have no idea why a long time Wyatt why I think this matters from a sort of higher point of view these devices are the only gateway or every device is a gateway to the digital world inside if you want any game to be played by humans you have to make an interface to the physical world which means you're giving it a physical shape you don't do this consciously when you make a computer game because the computer is your shape but you totally have the power to put it in any

other shape and every shape is different using shapes that we were familiar with has really interesting consequences the three creates palettes I put on top of each other were so sturdy people were standing on them and dancing and sitting and it was so makeshift I was just gonna trash it I wasn't gonna bring him back home I handed out markers and duct tape for people to tag it and make it you know this sort of all you know here today gone tomorrow thing the press X on the other hand became his beautiful ornaments like we ended up lacking it so it's shiny and and it's beautiful and people just want to go in there and be enthralled and whatever magical beautiful indie game we put on there so and to connect it to other things events and showcases is where these installations come to fruition the important of Laporte ins of local multiplayer games has been argued quite a lot in last year's you know the sports friends Kickstarter and stuff like that these events they can provide the critical mass that those games need to make sense both for players and

spectators games like that often don't make any sense when you just play them like a four player game with only three people and there's no spectators that that's not the same and to me there are two games what movie nights are two movies or concerts are two music it's a place where you come and you enjoy the games that are being curated or that you brought yourself with your friends then also at these events interesting things happen where these concerts or movie nights overlap this is chip soul playing at the wild rumpus party in front of super hexagon which is a super interesting combination of two forms of media same thing happened to the game I made go nuts and DJs wearing robot masks while we're trying to play it on his body and that's all I had to say I hope you are inspired to start doing the same thing I have so I can bring my arcades

to your parties thanks a lot for listening thanks for coming this has been a great turn of great opportunity these are all the people I would like to thank you mention etc Thank You Murray and and see you later questions we will meet us outside one there's one last thing I almost forgot so when I was got invited to come to GDC I thought it would be so cool if we could bring or we thought it would be so cool if we could bring in our kids but what's possible so I booked my Air Berlin fare and they said you can bring one luggage oh I don't need a luggage I just put some t-shirts in my hand luggage but then I decided why not build an arcade inside a suitcase so we came up with the lockitron which you can see right here and I'm gonna be playing on it until they kick us out of this room but more interestingly it'll be in the expo hall next to sauces amazing oxygen arcade which actually has a place in x-ball until tomorrow afternoon so

please stop by complaint talk to me or find me on the Internet that's where I live so thank you [Applause]