Thom’s Top Ten Play Experiences of 2013

A year ago, Douglas Wilson, designer of Johann Sebastian Joust, published his look back at 2012. This is close to how I look at games and so I give you: my top ten play experiences of 2013. Now, I call them “play experiences” instead of games for two reasons. First, some of them are not really games, or even single instances of play, but they’re still playful. Second, I call the journal I keep on this blog my “Play Journal” and I think that this recap should mirror that. Speaking of the journal; I’m going to steal a bunch of stuff I’ve already written in there for this list. You are going to be OK with this.

Before I go on to the actual meat of the list, I want to thank everyone who has played with me this past year. A clear pattern in the experiences listed below is that none of it was achieved by staring at a screen all by my lonesome. Some things (like The Stanley Parable and Gone Home) came pretty close, but ultimately had to give way for more intense, heart-warming, social, spiritual, communal or silly stuff. These sorts of things demand other people willing to open up and be playful in an inviting way, at times challenging and pushing you to do better, at other times making an effort and realizing the gravity of the play at hand. Thank you, everyone.

Hvid Død (September 6)
Short larp for twelve(ish) people. No talking allowed. Played in minimalist setting. Everyone wears black. Loud music plays. Everyone dies. It’s beautiful.

Photo: Peter Munthe Kaas

2013 was the year I started larping for real. It’s amazing to me that this did not happen sooner since I’ve been playing RPGs, hung out with larpers and been invited, and pretty close to actually going, to countless games. Other larps will be mentioned below, but Hvid Død was something above and beyond anything I can hope to experience any time soon.

As has been the case with many of my best roleplaying experiences, this game allowed for a collective and temporary falling in love on a group level. A love marked by a feeling of absolute acceptance between the players. Hvid Død is a very physically active game and as I often do with these things (dance, play, moshpits) I went all in. It paid off, big time. There really is no way to have a good experience with this sort of scenario without allowing yourself to be swept away, as well as making sure to do some of that sweeping yourself. I was later asked how much of this scenario is just group hallucination á la The Emperor’s New Clothes, and I guess there’s some of that going on, but if that’s the question you ask during play, this game will suck real bad. This may sound like an attitude more fitting for a christian telling people to pray their problems away, but I think that this scenario absolutely requires an open and honest play attitude to work. First of all, it’s all about body play so there’s no hiding behind words in the way other larps can end up only being about hypothetical and intellectual relationships between fictional characters. This emphasis on body forces the character interactions to also be very personal and physical player interactions. If you, as a player, give and accept what is given at that point, your play is going to be all the better for it.

Hvid Død has provided me with the basics for approaching all larps from a different angle going forward. I’m happy I got to play in it and I hope you take the chance to play it if the opportunity presents itself. This goes for all larpers, even if you’re initially made uncomfortable by the idea of a larp involving physical contact (god knows I would have been had I read a bit more about it beforehand). And hey, make sure to trust the other players and give them reasons to trust you. We’re only in it for the play.

Photo: Peter Munthe Kaas

NGC afterparty (May 23)
A party I organized at Moriskan in Malmö. Kick-ass music. Lotsa dancing and playing. Cool projections on stage. Amazing people.

Photo: Tommy Rousse

I had the great fortune/misfortune to be responsible for organizing (the cool) part of the Nordic Game Conference afterparty and even though I had irregular heartbeats for two days after the event, I’m very glad I did it.

This party was all I had hoped Spelkultur i Skånes Spelrum:Digital night club/game nights would have been. There were retro games, Jousting, kick-ass music, local multiplayer games and a ton of wild dancing.

I jousted with a  whole pack of chatty Brits trying to throw me off by talking — a lot. It worked.
I screamed into a microphone as way of introducing performers.
I struggled to get games running properly on the backdrop screen.

All in all, I had a pretty amazing time. Two moments stand out as top moments of the night:

1. Playing/dancing Go Nuts during the Nordloef/Salkinitzor/Linde gig.
Apart from the game itself, which is actually a pretty simple and solid concept, Go Nuts! also has some seriously trippy graphics. Just check out this screenshot of a three-player game:

The amazingly strange look of this game added a lot to the insane chiptunes performance on stage. After playing it competitively for a while, me and my play partner started using our colorful cubes to make improvised video art. It worked surprisingly well; we used the dash function to accentuate the beats and worked ourselves into the game’s swarm mode (which looks pretty much like in the picture above) to take up a lot of space on screen. This was one of the play highlights of the whole event, for me. It was like we were jamming along with the musicians and the rest of the audience. I think that’s usually called dancing, isn’t it?

2. Going nuts at the Chipzel gig.
I’m a huge fan of Super Hexagon. This is no secret. In welcoming Chipzel on stage, I even said that it was, by far, the GOTY of 2012. An unsurprising part of Chipzel’s performance was her playing the soundtrack of Super Hexagon. Here, I just could not help myself; I had to play. So, there I was, dancing like a madman (one of the skills I’ve put a lot of build points into) while playing the hardest level of Super Hexagon and listening to Chipzel perform the soundtrack live. For me, it was not far from this image, and I’m aware that that might make me look like a complete nerd. Fine. I’m a complete nerd. Also, despite jumping around, I still made it 12 seconds into the level. Neeeeerd.

Till the State Do You Part (March 22)
Short larp about speed-dating in a dystopian future Sweden. A Sweden where your worth as a citizen is arrived at in curious ways.

I’ve written at some length about this larp in a previous Play Journal entry, so I’ll keep it shorter here. I think that some of the reason I have for putting this game on my list for 2013 is how surprised I was at how well some of the stuff worked. I was part of genuinely touching and heartfelt moments and some of the people I played with really made an honest effort. In a larp, you’ve come a long way if you only have that.

w00t CPH (May 25)
Copenhagen public play festival. Ran for two days, right after Nordic Game Conference. I was there the first day only.

Ever since I went to my first Hide & Seek Weekender, I’ve wanted to attend other events like it. w00t was Copenhagen’s first public play festival and it turned out great. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend one of the days, but that turned out to be plenty. I wrote three different posts about all the stuff I played there, so I’ll point out the two games that still stand out for me:

1. The Ground Is Lava
Remember this game from when you were a kid? You’re not allowed to touch the ground because it’s super toxic or lava or just plain dangerous for whatever reason (as if you need one). When we played this as kids, we did it indoors and used furniture to move around. At w00t, we played it outdoors and used waste from some sort of construction site to step or climb on: pieces of metal, planks (complete with rusty nails and all), pallets etc.

This game had us in a continual and concentrated state of play for a good hour or so and it just felt really silly and really good.

2. Weeping Angels
Street game, in the dark, with flashlights, lotsa runnin and screaming and hiding and sneaking, teamwork – what’s not to like? Great play area, great players. Read more in the third post from w00t.

Limbo (April 16)
Abstract and elegant larp about the space between life and death. Played it on a genuine vintage tram riding through a foggy Oslo. 

Limbo is a very elegant and hackable game. It can be, and has in fact been, adapted to many different contexts and venues. The larp was originally written as a chamber larp, but it has also been played as a larp/dance mashup and in the week leading up to this year’s Knutepunkt it was played as a tram larp.

There’s a lot to say about this game, but for the sake of brevity I’ll summarize what I’ve already written.

The pre-game is great because it gives you the opportunity to choose how close to yourself you want to play. It also demands that you examine our own views on death and reflect on where they come from. The setup, through the use of unfulfilled wishes, provided me and my character with something to play towards. It also used colored pipe-cleaners to signal common experiences between the characters. Not much else was needed to get people talking and having a clear drive behind their play.

This scenario is very much about that unknown nowhere between life and death and riding in an old tram through a strange city covered in fog helped to drive this home. At times, it all felt very, very surreal and these were the moment when the game really worked for me.

What is really clever about Limbo is how players are encouraged and allowed to play towards completely different goals without necessarily breaking the game or the experience of for each other. I played my character for tragedy, but there was no problem with people having characters embrace the situation and, in some cases, finding it amusing or soothing. Limbo was simply a place where all of these attitudes were to be expected.

In the end, this game didn’t leave me with an emotional puzzle to be struggled with for days or weeks. Rather, it was really easy to enjoy while playing and I appreciate how well it navigated its own meta-levels of play.

Hemligheten (June 6 – 7)
Interactive theater play about the persecution of immigrants in Sweden. Most scenes were set on the streets of Malmö. It ran over two days.

This is one, I haven’t written about at all in the Play Journal. I was planning on making it a separate post and, as is so often the case with those particular plans, that didn’t happen.

This play (I don’t know what else to call it) took place on the streets of Malmö and had groups of players (once again, that’s the best way to describe the audience of this play) run around town trying to locate and help two children who were in Sweden “illegally”, i.e. without papers. In Sweden, immigration is a hot topic and has been for some time. The theme of this play followed years of scandals and abuse coming from and perpetrated by the state as well as citizens of Sweden. We (V and me) managed to get into the run that started on Sweden’s national day and ended on our oldest kid’s second birthday. These two dates became significant in their own ways as the story progressed. National day in Sweden is not a widely celebrated event and Swedish nationalism takes on nasty forms when allowed to go unchecked. Partaking in a story with this theme while seeing people waving Swedish flags added to the disgust we felt at the mistreatment of the children in it. The play ended with a surreal birthday party for the absent boy and this coincided with our own kid’s birthday, twisting the knife of feels a couple of extra times.

Hemligheten was well-executed, well-measured in terms of interaction and felt relevant. Also, I got to use my roleplaying and gamer skills in making sure our group kept moving forward (while trying not to dominate it, as that was the story’s job). Using these same things, I tried to help the cast by acting on their cues (like actually running down the street, urging everyone else to follow, when we were supposedly being chased by one of the main villains).

Big up to Teater Insite for putting this thing together.

Playing with Lil’ M
Not that complicated, really.

OK, so this one’s cheating a bit, but playing with my kid is a whole fairybag of fun. Hide and seek, peekabo, playing with words and songs, playing with toys and just generally being silly is great, great stuff and it makes for wonderful play. Being a big part of someone else’s play development is priceless.

Improvised ritual at Knutepunkt (April 16)
Improvised movement and sounds performed in groups inside an old mausoleum in Oslo proved more powerful and draining than expected.

The Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum, in only a small part of its glory.

Apparently rituals are a big thing in Norway (at least in the larp community) and this, of course, means that we had to have one before Knutepunkt. A real one. An actual, serious ritual in an actual, serious place. The whole thing was built around improvised sound and movement with the sound being a sort of chant jam and the movement being an easy version of contact impro dance. The details are boring, but the result was kinda cool.

The mausoleum turned out to be one of the strangest places I have ever visited. A lot of that feeling is, of course, related to the context of the visit, but I can imagine that the scary, strangely erotic, somewhat depressing mausoleum is all of those things regardless of the reason for your visit.

All in all, the ritual turned out to be quite a draining experience, both physically and mentally. After the initial rocky start, the four small groups we found ourselves in started interacting and playing off of each other. The end result was an experience, which for me bordered on the sacrilegious and divine at the same time.

Leaving the mausoleum, walking through the cold rain, I felt both strengthened and very fragile. I think that the exhaustion of work  both before and during the Larp Exchange Academy, of which I had been part, and play had caught up to me. Add to this a pinch of old memories from my time as a christian and you’ve got yourself a cocktail filled to the brim with staring-into-thin-air-not-knowing-what-to-make-of-things. I really made a conscious effort to get carried away, but I didn’t quite expect it to work as well as it did. I guess I need to stop being so surprised these things actually work.

Malmö Play Club Deluxe Summer Sessions
Public play sessions in Malmö’s finest park. The first serious steps towards building a stable play community in Malmö. Featured everything from kids’ games and reality games to jousting and New Gamesy games.

A team in Rock, Paper, Scissors tag deciding what sign to throw.

I’ve written a lot in the Play Journal about Malmö Play Club and that has not been without good reason. In the Play Club, we have created a tool and opportunity for building a local play community. I hope we are able to continue and develop this in 2014.

The Deluxe sessions were especially great because they saw our numbers bump up from our usual maximum of 10-15 people to around 40. The variety of games that we were able to try out because of this was really inspiring and, finally, the play talks that were given in connection to some of the sessions were really interesting and thought-provoking.

Tiny Games
Simple and brilliant play tool from the superpowered Hide&Seek people. Best game app of the year. Almost none of the play is screen-centered.

Me, trying to get a slice of cucumber from my forehead to my mouth as fast as possible. Because an app told me to… and because it sounded like a good idea.

Tiny Games was the best thing to come out for iOS in 2013. I’ve played with it at home, at events, at the office, during walks. The one I would point to as my best Tiny Game happened with my colleague Chris while we were waiting to be interviewed on live radio about Malmö Playdays. We were in the empty staff cafeteria and we played a color finding game, ran our asses off and laughed more than you’re probably allowed to at a radio station.

There’s really something to having an app that lets you fire up a game instantly, no pretensions, no hassle, no problems. All you need is a playful attitude and a mind set on fun and you’re ready to go.

That last part goes for most kinds of play, BTW.

Play Journal: December 16 – 31

First things first: MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD! I usually don’t warn people, but you know… I know how to be nice on the Internet.  A rare, but valuable skill. The spoilers are for Season 2, Episode 1 of The Walking Dead from Telltale Games. It’s at the end of the post. Second things second: my top ten play experiences list is still upcoming. I wanted to be all done with 2013 before looking back on it.

Samurai Gunn – Tried two quick games. Got my ass handed to me by V. I was better with the magic fire thingy, but she always got the drop on me. I want to try it with four players. That’s all for now.

Gaby Gaby Gaby – best score: 29. Don’t know what made me think of and play this. I’m not disrespecting, I just genuinely don’t know what’s going on in my head and I want you to know this. 

Super Hexagon – As always, there’s some Hexagon being played. Nowadays, I’m back at the hardest level, trying to beat my high score. I came very close before the year was over.

Malmö Play Club: The last  Play Club session before the winter break saw more players than ever before attend an indoors event. We weren’t prepared, but thanks to our having built up a way of playing and running games together it wasn’t really a problem. I got the chance to use the line: “Welcome to Malmö Play Club. If it’s your first night at Play Club… you have to play”. As you can guess, I felt rather clever. In hindsight, I feel stupid for not having thought of it earlier. Writing this, I’m not sure I haven’t actually thought about it before. “Know thyself”, said Socrates (and a bunch of other people). “OK… Ehrm. How does ‘thy’ do that, exactly?” would be my response. Anyway, below are the games I played.
Ninja, Tomato (a welcome addition to our often prop-less play), Turtle Wushu, J.S. Joust, Group Sync (This is one of those games I struggle with because the only way to play the game is to break the rules and go against what it supposedly is about. Once someone does this, the rest soon follow and I sometimes feel like we jump too far ahead in the game instead of letting it develop. I guess it’s a good gauge on who’s the most impatient or uncomfortable).

Gislaved, the place I’ve gone to play games every year right after christmas for ten years.

CrossCon: This may have been the very last CrossCon. Ever. That’s a very melancholic thing to write, but it was even worse being there. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun and it’s always nice to run into all the old characters. I just feel… old. We started this con 10 years ago. At the time, we were 15-18 years old. Now, we’re all grown up, I rarely talk to or see many of the people organizing the con, though some of them are very near and dear to me. To really celebrate, everyone attending was treated to a full course dinner and I took the opportunity to say a few words about what CrossCon has meant to me. I hope some of it got through. 
In terms of games, I tried not signing up for everything, to leave room for talking and simply hanging out. This worked out well. Nowadays, I always seem to have a purpose when I go to cons, but just hanging out with your friends not really doing anything for an hour or two is sometimes just as fun as playing games. In other words: It’s always the people, never the games. 
Saboteur (for once, I made a perfect play in a social bluffing game, and it paid off big. This game is all about finding the exact right moment to strike and betray the others and, boy was it satisfying to get to perform that backstab!),
J.S. Joust (lots of kids in the two Joust games I hosted at the con. I’m not sure, but I think that this was part of the reason these the games most accompanied by crying I’ve ever run. Mostly, it was no big deals and the crying passed as quickly as it arrived. I did, however, manage to twist my shoulder into the face of a fellow player (don’t worry, he was as big as I am), giving him a nosebleed. He took it well, though and seemed to have enjoyed the game.),
Trail of Cthulhu (first time as a non-GM player and it was enjoyable, though our group was a bit on the large end for my tastes (6 players + GM). I really enjoy the clever ways ToC gets around some stuff which tends to annoy me about CoC. We played in the Bookhounds of London setting and I was a hobo, which worked out surprisingly well),
Twilight Struggle (the last game of the con, I lost big to the Soviets pretty early on. In my defense, we played while tending the kitchen/snack bar; it took us two hours to get through the first two rounds. We started at half past midnight and were done at four a.m.),
Shot Shot Shoot (first time I actually got someone to play this with me for more than a couple of games. It really is a beauty. When in doubt, do what this game does and create two (or so) opposing strategies for getting the win. When playing ShotShotShoot, you’re constantly struggling not to use one strategy too much, while gauging what your opponent is up to and adjusting. The game starts and once the first shot is fired, everything else just flows from that shot),
Tag (hosting Joust, I managed to acquire a fan club of kids who constantly asked when the next game would be. They dragged me into a game of tag using strange rules involving a paper plane. It seemed that the one hit by the plane was tagged and became ‘it’, but the kids also competed to pick up the plane when it missed its target, thus tagging themselves. Being ‘it’ is a big part of the fun in Tag, so this makes complete sense, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it at the time).

The CrossCon crew, making speeches at the big dinner. Some of the real good guys are in this pictures.

The Walking Dead – Finally, TWD is back in the only form I can stand it: a videogame from Telltale Games. I’m not going to spoil it too much, but playing Clementine turned out to work better than I had feared, though they had to use a time jump to avoid having her be all too small and helpless. Instead, she was about as helpless as most people. 
Two things:
1. The stitching scene really hurt. I didn’t think I would, but I did cringe again and again as I had her thrust the needle into and through her own flesh. This was good , fulfilling pain. This is how you do payoffs, not through stupid points or achievements.  
2. Letting Clementine be quiet a lot and having adults abuse their position of power in their interactions with her is very powerful. She just sits there and takes it while these grown-ups just won’t let up. I sound like a sadist, but it’s not her suffering I enjoy, it’s how fucking nasty the other characters look and feel when I let them.

Play Journal: October 14 – 27

The Stanley Parable (Mod, Demo and HD Remix)
Mod (as part of a workshop) – the class guided Stanley to the ending where the other narrator stops the action and tells us to turn off the game.
Demo – Without a doubt the best demo I’ve ever played. I pushed 8. A lot.
Full game – Spent 3 hours straight playing this. It is a very tight design while still managing to be silly and strange and that’s an achievement in and of itself. The focus + silliness combo works all the way down even to the achievements (have you tried to get the room 430 one? It’s wonderful) and the fact that there are achievements at all in this game.
As a player, you can rest assured that most, if not all, possibilities are covered and have been prepared for you. Discovering this is a big part of the enjoyment. Every time I tried to break the game or go against it, I just enjoyed it more. I guess you can’t break a broken game anyway, though.

Fun side note: While being interviewed about Malmö Playdays, I got the inevitable question of what my favorite game is. I should have seen this coming, but was unable to produce a good answer, so my colleague snatched Johann Sebastian Joust before I had time to claim it. I ended up going with The Stanley Parable and I feel alright about that.
Let’s be clear: I did not say “Super Hexagon”. That’s says something for The Stanley Parable.

Dinner Date – Played while waiting for The Stanley Parable to download and install. Seems funny in a way, to play a game about waiting for someone to show up as a way to spend time waiting for a game (that will, as it happens, refuse to deliver as a game) to install. The game tried to tell me that I was to control the main character’s subconscious, but it really did feel like I controlled a bit more than that when I made him crazily flap his arms around by looking at the clock, relaxing and looking at the kitchen counter. I like it and I get it. Clever.

Naya’s Quest – Mind sufficiently fucked, thank you. I’ve never seen isometrics being used like this (up is down or up or sideways???!!?!) in a game before. Combine that with eerie music and a void serving as background and you’ve got something worth spending some time with. I will probably never not try any Terry Cavanagh game.

The Wolf Among Us – Really nails the noir feel. Also, “Glass him”, in the bar scene with the Woodsman, apparently means shove a glass in his face, not make a toast. Aaaawwwkward! (yup, I restarted that whole scene because of it)

Cake Monsters – Kill Screen playlist game. Clever, but not engaging to me. I wish I could care more about all these puzzle games, but I just can’t. Maybe I don’t have the patience, maybe I’m just a little slooooooooooooow.

Super Hexagon – Set new personal records on all levels:
Hexagon – 135:09
Hexagoner – 100:59
Hexagonest – 75:29
Hyper Hexagon – 92:40
Hyper Hexagoner – 129:53
Hyper Hexagonest – 71:22

Malmö play club session:
Chip chipoi!: A game of “not laughing” that actually allows some laughing. Players takes turns sending “chip!” (by saying it) to their left or right. The “chip!” keeps going until someone says “chipoi!” at which point it switches and goes back.
The players are not allowed to show their teeth during the game and this adds a nice twist to the no-laughing genre of games by actually allowing players to laugh, as long as they don’t show their teeth. This, of course, makes them look hilarious and only makes other players laugh harder.
Finally, “chip” and “chipoi” should be used as the silly words they are in order to make other players laugh themselves out of the game. This is done by making funny voices as you say them or modifying the words by, for example, making “chipoi” sound more like “chiiiipoooooiiii”.  A new personal favorite.
Inte nudda mark + throw tag – don’t touch the floor + one person (it) throws chair cushions as a way of tagging other people.
Sausages (aka Fläsk) – I still suck at this game. I still like it a lot.
Tell a story one word at a time – just what it says. Good for relaxing and getting a feel for the group.
Don’t finish that word! – Go around the group, each player adding a letter without finishing a word. If you finish a word, you lose a point/the player before you gets a point/whatever. If someone thinks you’re bluffing, i.e. building a word that cannot ever be finished, they’re free to call your bluff.
I want to try the dyslexia version, where misspellings are aloweed as long as they can make a word in the end.

GlowTag and QuickDraw – Showed this to Gabriel who was in town for Malmö Playdays. Didn’t get very far into them, but at least I figured out how to get the Wild West version of QuickDraw working.

Tiny Games
Hide and seek finally released their Tiny Games app! I’m an idiot for missing out on the Kickstarting etc. but it’s here now and I’ve got all packs + the sesame street version + all packs of the Sesame Street version and I still want moar.
Do yourself a favor and download this thing if you have and iThing. The basic Home pack of games is free, so you’ll at least be able to try it out.
The app’s biggest drawback is the lack of a way to find out what you played recently. Unless you memorize all games, it’s going to be hard to teach them to others. I guess this is part of the deliberate design, but for my purposes, I would like to be able to find stuff inside the app.

Anyway, here are some games I played (due to aforementioned reasons, the names may be a bit off):

Cucumber Race – Race to get a slice of cucumber from your forehead into your mouth, only using your facial muscles. I started out not moving my head at all. That turned out to be way too hard, so we stated that some head/neck movement was allowed and that took the total time down to between 0.5 – 1 minute. As fun to watch as it is to play.
Don’t Wake the Baby – I chickened out after we had like five go’s each. I knew I would chicken out first. AND I AM NOT ASHAMED, DAMMIT!
Small Talk – not optimal for two players. I will try it with more sometime.
Fluffier than a Teacup – Strange game of arbitrary associations. I like it.
Colour Match – Played it at the radio station cafeteria with my colleauge, right before heading in to be interviewed about Malmö Playdays.
Heist, Heist, Baby – Played with the same colleague on our way from the radio interview. I had the best con man and safe cracker, my colleague had the best driver and muscle.
Three Things – Don’t even remember which one this is. But I played it, because I tweeted about it.

Malmö Playdays
To no one’s surprise, Malmö Playdays ended up being about a lot of stuff for me, with play just barely being one of them. I’m sad I didn’t try out any of the site-specific games developed by interactions design students as they looked and seemed amazing.
I did participate in a game of Ninja and in some Johann Sebastian Joust games. Here, the last J.S. Joust game stands out as it was the last game of the day to be played and it was played in a dark room just before the library closed. I got to jump in, say thanks, find a Chipzel tune to play the game to and win the game in a cool way in sudden death.
I also sat down with an oculus rift on my head, but the computer wasn’t really up for the challenge that SoundSelf presented. That was a shame.

Vesper.5 – Well, you know. Getting there.

Stuff I’ve played with my kid:
Hide & Seek, Pippi Longstocking (complete with wig-wearing and all), Sleeping Bear + lots of free play (digging in sandboxes, throwing balls around, making noises etc.)

Play Journal: w00t vol. 1 – Childsplay

As if the Nordic Game Conference + Nordic Game Party + Arabic Game Jam opening night weren’t enough, I also attended the Copenhagen Play Festival – w00t (that’s the actual name of the thing, not just me going “w00t“). I only attended the first day of this amazing event (thanks for the invitation, Amani!), but that gave me plenty of wonderful play experiences to think and write about. There were so many of them, in fact, that I split this up into two (EDIT: three) posts. In this, the first one, I write about the short play session I hosted, a session of traditional Danish games I played in and one other kids game.

 – MALMÖ PLAY CLUB SESSION (hosted by me) –

Sausages/Pølse (x2) – A game I picked up from Hide & Seek’s Sandpit booklet. Whatever question anyone asks you, you’re only allowed to answer: “Sausages”. If you laugh, you’re out. I played it twice, once in English and once in Danish. The Danish game was interesting because it had kids in it and anything gets more unpredictable when kids are part of the mix. Also, the Danish word for sausage, “pølse”, is a lot more fun to say than its English counterpart. I’m shit at this game and always get kicked out right away, but I enjoy asking bizarre questions and seeing how people handle them.

Monster chase game – This is a pretty basic game of tag, with the twist that whenever the person who’s it tags someone, the tagged person also becomes it. The ones who are it in this game are to behave as monsters; screaming, shouting, waving arms around etc. and chase people around until everyone’s a monster. It’s so basic that it’s hard to miss with this one, but, for me, the monster part makes it more engaging than a regular game of tag.

Pig game – The Pig Game is something I picked up at this year’s Knutepunkt and I wrote about it in the journal entry from that weekend. Once again, when it comes to games where you’re not supposed to laugh, I’m not very good at not laughing. However, it was interesting to see the dynamics of the play group since it consisted mostly of parent-child couples with the parents and children targeting each other.

Kids playing at w00t – photo by Tommy Rousse

– TRADITIONAL DANISH GAMES –

After her talk, Mille Matjeka organized a play session wherein she focused on traditional Danish games. Some of them were games which used to be played by people on farms etc. The underlying theme were games with a more or less democratic structure; games where a winner and a loser weren’t necessary for players to enjoy themselves. In all of the competitiveness, this was a nice change of pace.

Flirting/Sound-matching game – Everyone stands in a circle and joins hands. The players then look around the circle and try to make eye contact with someone as well as get them to copy a facial expression (often a wink of varying degrees of silliness) they’re making. Once they’re in sync, they hurry to switch places with each other shouting “Kissepuss!”. We also played some variations on this wherein we replaced the winks with sounds or associative wordplay.

Her kommer vi! – Two groups make up animals to mime in front of the each other. When they do, the ones being mimed at (to? for?) shout out guesses of what animal it is. If they’re correct, the mimes run back to their base. The ones who are caught join the chasers and the chasers become mimes. And so on.
We were told not to run as to not hurt ourselves, but most people ended up doing it anyway. I would have liked it if we would have been able to play on grass where we wouldn’t have had to worry about getting hurt. I’ll try this in a park sometime.

Zombie Game – Two players lie on the ground while everyone else joins hands and walk in a circle around them (a lot of joining hands in this play session, BTW. Not that I dislike it, though). The players forming the circle makes the church bell striking twelve times and the players in the centre wake up as undead. From here, the game is similar to the monster chase game I mentioned earlier. The main difference is that the undead need to help each other in making new undead by joining hands around a tagged player and repeating a chant.
It’s always a blast getting to act like a zombie, especially with kids around.

Pictured: not a game I’ve written about in this post – photo by Tommy Rousse

– OTHER STUFF –

The Bull at the Red Sea – 1-3 players are bulls, held prisoners by the other players. These other players hold a rope and stand in a circle. The bulls try to catch the people holding the rope, but these people are allowed to let go of it at any time. However, if the rope ever touches the ground, the bulls are free to chase anyone until all bulls are replaced (or whatever).
This was a really good kids game. The got into it like crazy and I suspect this contributed to the one drawback of this game: people getting hurt. No one got injured, but the were a couple of bruises — I fell over in a most graceful manner, for example. One kid in particular kept going all out as a bull and getting catapulted backwards and into the ground, head first, as the rope snapped back when it was released by the people trying to avoid being tagged. Poor kid. Saw him later in the day, though, and he seemed happy as ever.