Kevin Slavin- Playing the City

I've just watched Kevin Slavins' lecture for the RSA called playing the city.

He talks about new ways that the physical and virtual world interact when we have location aware technology,

like with one of his games, people are physicaly running away from a virtual enemy, which appears on a map on their phones, it's interesting that players look at a corner ehrn the enemy is showen on their map as coming round it,

and he mentions that games are often about territory, thinking about it other themes for games are combat, social interaction (sims) all more developed ways of practicing our primeval human skills, as we would have played as children from the beginnings.


He talks about how games went through a brief spell from the late 80s where people played on their own, things like lemmings and worms come to mind,(bearing in mind that people often would sit with another person watching or contrubutin0 but now technology has brought people into games again in the form of online multiplayers, and apps.

I find this interesting, as I have often been frustrated and confused about the appeal of spending massive amounts of time playing single player shooters as apposed to socialising, but am pleasantly surprised that people now prefer to use the social aspects of games and claim that that's the real fun, that makes more sense to me.


He also talks about how when designing a game now, he sets up the premise, like providing a map and saying that you can claim different bits of the map, and trade with neighbors, he found that from introducing it in America, people have traveled and claimed parts all over the world, and it has escalated without him doing anything about it.

This is inereting because the it is viral and becomes a self sufficient system, which is what i think is interesting about programing, and seems to be the basis for artificial inteligence.

He set up spore and I can see what he is interested in. He seems to be behaving like a scientist but researching evolution and self sufficient systems, possibly the evolution of intelligence and things becoming essentially brains, but using games, personal technology and people as his research. Reeeeeeealy interesting!!!