Emergent Game – where art meets tech

You might be familiar with the Emergent Game, run by Nikki Pugh this summer as part of an arts festival in Birmingham. I was brought in in the early stages for some old fashioned brain storming about what might be possible using social technologies and I blogged about my initial chat with Nikki in February.

As it happened I didn’t have time to fully engage with the Emergent Game when it took place but I watched from a distance with interest. The basic principle was that people played through soft toys they bought in charity shops using Twitter as the core communication service with others added on as needed. Some took photos from their phones, some started blogs but everything was done from the point of view of the toy, or Luden in the terminology of the game. Nikki and her team then set missions which responded to how the game was evolving, which took place in the real world streets of Birmingham.

Within the limited resources and timescale the game was pretty much a success and Nikki is keen to develop it further. She’s taking it to Japan soon, which should be pretty insane given the cultural differences in mobile phone usage, but the really exciting development is an invited to apply to the Banff New Media Institute in Canada to take part in a residency during November. The only stumbling block is funding.

She needs at least £1500 to cover basic costs, asked me for ideas outside the usual arts funding sources and, after a nice chat on Sunday and a recommendation that she blog about her plans, I started thinking about it.

So far Nikki’s been approaching this as an artist, which is what she is, but I think she’s actually doing some fascinating R&D in mobile platforms and how people can and will engage with them. The stuff she’s talking about hooks in perfectly with research and theories about social media, the sort of things that power the “digital revolution” or whatever it’s being called these days. This has relevance to the digital economy which Birmingham is so keen to encourage as well as being of interest to businesses that are looking to move into mobile distribution for their content. Part of the changes to the Birmingham Post and Mail is the development of a mobile site which (in my view) needs to be much more than a simple rejigging of their web site. It would ideally be truly mobile, reacting to where people are and involving them on that level. This is the sort of thing Nikki is investigating with her game.

One of the things Nikki’s planning to develop at Banff is notions of Bridge Objects, “intermediaries between technologies typically found on most mobile phones and more complex functionality provided by web-based applications.” The idea is these objects act as “2-way conduits for the exchange of different media in real-time (i.e. immediate) and in real-space (i.e. related to a location in a physical landscape).” This has been developed by advertisers to a certain degree where people can download information (wallpapers, for example) via bluetooth from advertising boards but the 2-way system is a lot more radical when you plug in geographical data. The application of this sort of thing, both commercially and socially, is rather mindboggling. (Quotes extracted from the draft proposal she sent me.)

I like Nikki. I consider her a friend and want to support what she’s doing, so I have a bias here. But I also think she’s got the right sort of brain to be exploring this stuff and that this is exactly the sort of thing our digital development agencies in the West Midlands should be supporting. I’ve given her contacts at Screen West Midlands (who now cover digital as well as film/TV) and Digital Birmingham and have offered advice on how to move her pitching from Art to Tech but I wouldn’t want to see this opportunity be missed by the region.

Oh, and she’s also a bit of a geek being quite happy to hack WordPress templates and do a bit of coding, a rare trait amongst contemporary artists!

If you can help either directly or just with some advice, please read her blog post and drop her a line. Or drop me a line and I’ll introduce you.