Streets + Play = Fun

"Streets + Play = Fun" is a workshop proposal and abstract by Subalekha Udayasankar and LeAnne Wagner, graduate researchers in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons The New School for Design. The document argues that play has become associated with sedentary, indoor activity, and it asks whether video games have ended the era of outdoor play and whether emerging mobile and location-based technologies can restore it. Its central proposal is the "Big Game," defined as any game played using the city and streets as a game board.

The authors observe that Big Games have largely remained confined to organized art projects and scheduled events, despite predictions in 2004 that they would soon self-organize into spontaneous street games. They frame the lack of progress as a possible result of insufficient research in the genre. To address this gap, they outline a hands-on workshop intended to introduce participants to Big Game examples, have them classify in-game interactions across four categories (people, objects, city and streets, and technology), survey available open-source tools, and paper-prototype a playable Big Game concept with its technical requirements scoped out.

The toolkit discussed spans mobile and non-digital resources. Mobile options include SMS bulk messaging tools, RSS and Twitter feeds, MMS with geotagged Flickr images, GPS capabilities on the iPhone and Nokia's Nokoscope, and the Google Maps API. Non-digital resources include paper maps and urban resources such as people, subway stations, fire hydrants, telephone booths, and grocery stores. The document also provides background on the authors' work, including PETLab, the Wakkata initiative, the Budgetball project with area/code, and the Re:Activism game played at Come Out & Play in New York City in 2008, along with their conference presentations in 2008.