American Libraries

Hello, everybody. I'm going to talk today a little about the title of the presentation, which is Big Fun, Big Learning. I'm going to talk about ways to transform the world through play and we're going to steer clear of video games to different types of games. But first, a little bit more about me because I'm talking. As they said, I ran the Come Out & Play Festival in New York City last year and founded it with a couple friends of mine. This was part of my thesis at NYU, which was that a lot of people were interested different types of games and we get a technology companies and a lot of artist and these sorts of things. And there's a lot of people out there who want to play them but not a lot of people know about it. Or they read about it on blogs or they hear comments about it, but don't get the chance to play them. So the festival was designed to really give people a chance to come out and play for a weekend. We had about twenty-five games that ran across New York City and did our best to turn it into a playground. I think we were pretty successful.

During the day I work at a company called GameLab, where we make casual games. And these are not console games; they're more like small public games. So we had a big one a couple years ago called Diner Dash. I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with Diner Dash. (Clapping) In this game you play Flo, who is a waitress and you have to serve all the people who come into the diner that gets progressively crazier and crazier. And I recommend you guys all go out and play that and any of our other games as well.

So at GameLab I'm a game designer, which means I'm somewhat of between a cross between Tom Hanks in Big—a giant manchild, really, playing with toys and games all day, and our office looks a lot like a toyshop—to a monkey playing poker. So we were talking earlier about how you do game design and is there a best practices for it? And in some ways there is and other ways it's like you're shooting in the dark often times. And it can be really fun but it's often frustrating and everything you think is going to work, it turns out it doesn't. Suddenly a monkey could play your game or it's far too complicated for even you understand the rules you come up with. So it's an interesting challenge.

What we're going to talk about today is big games. And so just a little intro—we all know video games are great. I'm sure you all have played video games and people love them. And we all know running around is really great because you get people out on the street, running around. Just seeing how excited people have been over the Wii the last year is fascinating. Every time I talk to someone they're like, "Oh, it's so great, you get people up and moving." And there's this real fascination with that. So I feel the time is right for big games because we get people up and moving and running. And believe it or not, looking at a subway map can be pretty great as well.

These three guys (indicating to screen) have been up all night playing an all-night scavenger hunt, like a Midnight Madness game, I don't know if all of you are familiar with those. They usually take the form of a scavenger hunt that goes from about 11:00 p.m. to wherever people finish, probably around 7:00 a.m. or something like that. It sounds like mild torture and it sometimes can be, especially if it's raining, like last year when I played. But it's also a ton of fun because you get to re-explore the city and this whole city turns into this game world and you look at it all in a different way.

So everyone's always looking for a definition of what big games are. There are all sorts of different ways that people think about them. And I'm going to go through a couple of those. I think the most crucial aspect of them is they're really big. Usually you when you play video games, you're looking down into them, you're staring at your T.V. or P.C. or even playing a board game. There's a feeling of you're bigger than the game. You're moving things down on a board, and there's sort of an interface with it. And for me the most interesting thing about big games is they expand to the size of cities or a neighborhood or theoretically the entire Internet. And they break, I think what Johan called The Magic Circle. And I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term, but this idea that in games is that when you're playing games you're sort of in a magic circle—this safe space where things that happen within it are a part of a game and it's very clear what's part of the game and what isn't.

When you're playing football, as long as you're on the field, you can be tackled, you can throw the ball, and that sort of thing. But as soon as you leave the field, it's clear that you're no longer playing football. And for me the interesting thing about big games is there's still rules, it's still clear you're playing the games but it's integrated with the rest of the world in a fascinating way, which makes people look at the world in a entirely different way. So at one point you're playing a game where you're supposed to be a spy and you're walking around New York City, it layers this whole other narrative on top of the city where you're kind of looking at everyone a little more paranoid, you think everyone's out to get you.

There's a game called Assassins, which is a traditional game, played on college campuses where you get water guns, you have a target, and you have to go squirt them with your water gun. And when you kill them, you get their target. So the goal is just to be the last person left in the game. And anyone who has ever played it will know this game terrifies you the entire time you play it. So you start playing it and it may last a month. The last time I played, I was killed outside of a cafeteria and it was disappointing, but not after I dispatched a couple other people.

But as much as they are big and I think this is where the impetus for big games comes is that game designers like me look at a grid like that. Every time you go into Google maps, you're sort of salivating, like, "Oh, my God, the city is a game board." You can make people run across the entire city, it's fantastic. But you have to remember that these games need to be local as well. They're about the space that they're in and they actually involve people. And very few people can run that far of a distance. So keep in mind that these are about people, they're about pinpricking the daily world. So you have to look at different ways to engage people's local environments. Often times where you see a lot of the stuff written about big games is on blogs.

Often times there's a fair amount of technology involved and this is what interests a lot of people about big games. And rightfully so, because technology is what's allowed for this resurgence of this outdoor play. Things like cell phones, digital cameras, and the growing presence of GPS devices and Bluetooth devices—this has all allowed for big games to be made. Essentially what technology does is give you a way to track these players. Because once people are out of your sight, you have no idea what they're doing. And inevitably they're doing something you probably don't want them to be doing, in terms of the game because they want to win and they'll do whatever it takes to win. So if you tell someone, "Go to 42nd Street and come back and then tell me you were there," they're going to go around the corner, wait a couple minutes, then come back and say, "I've been to 42nd Street." So what technology does is allow you to actually put a Bluetooth beacon in one of these things at 42nd Street and then you go, "Take this cell phone, go over there, stand next to it, it will register, and then I will know you were actually there." It's allowed for a lot more interesting play. There's still a lot of problems with it. Cell phones—if anyone has ever done anything with cell phones or the development of cell phones—you know that they're an awful platform to work for because every cell phone has a different operating system and they all use different technology and you can't count on anything working, other than you can generally make phone calls with them. So for all the great things that technology allows for, it's also quite difficult to work with.

Which brings me to the second thing: That games are also traditional. For me, this is the more interesting thing. Initially it started out with this fascination with technology, but then this whole idea of what can you do with just chalk and paper, and marking the city or a state and creating a game environment for people became quite fascinating. And some of my most favorite games that I've seen people make are more traditional like this, they use accessible means. Things like Assassins, which really only require you to buy a 99-cent water gun and keep track of it have very cleverly integrated ways of keeping track of the state of the game, something that cell phones are trying to do, but something like Assassins solved that problem a while ago. They're inevitably silly.

This is a game called Sonic Body Pong that came out last year. And in this game, you put two players against one another and you put these big earphones on. You're playing Pong against another player. But you can only hear the ball, you couldn't see it, so you're kind of moving back and forth. It sounds impossible and it was not impossible. After a while you got the hang of it, it was actually quite fun and you got to wear a hat, which was pretty quite exciting as well. So I think the element of that silliness is actually kind of important. You might call it silly, you might call it spectacle. Some big games often involve some element of spectacle that really transforms the world for people. So in this case, you have to wear this gigantic Pong-pal on your head and it feels more like a Pong-pal. And people watching it can, of course, understand because as interesting as big games are for the players, they're quite fascinating for the people that are watching. There's fair amount of people that are just seeing go it on and you see someone run by in a gigantic Pong hat and it's like, "Wow. What's that?" And it engages them as well, which is kind of great because we've all watched someone play video games and with the rare exception of very talented players, it's pretty boring to watch. But watching people play big games or sports is kind of exciting because there's a certain amount of spectacle in them. I think they also encourage a lot of interesting social behavior and learning when you play. I know you guys have heard all sorts of other people like Jim Gee speak yesterday about learning, so I won't get too into that, other than to say that it definitely has occurred. I've watched many, many people play chess games.

So this is a game we did a couple weekends ago on Governor's Island called Counter Squirt. It was a cross between Assassins and the popular video called Counter-Strike, I don't know if anyone's ever played or heard of Counter-Strike, but it's a squad-based game where you play in teams—it's a video game—and you have a microphone and you tell people, "I'm going to go over here and get this guy." So we wanted to emulate that and have people running around doing it in teams all around Governor's Island, which is really beautiful, by the way; I had never been there. You always discover something new. I think the fascinating thing about this game was this guy in yellow here, the nice thirty-year-old guy—he's not the one teaching right now, he's actually the one learning.

When we played this game these two twelve-year-old kids were the best players in the game. They were amazing at tactics and strategy and everything. The game was designed to make you go capture all these different targets. For example, I was the scientist and I hid in a certain area, they would come grab me, and take me back to the headquarters and score points for bringing me back. We got everyone to work in teams to guide people back. And these kids were amazing. They were like, "We're going to go around this alley way, we're going to duck down here, and then you crawl under this hedge." And they would inevitably get their person back every time. And a bunch of adults played with us and they would go, "Okay, we're going to march right across this big open field." (Laughter) "All right. Well, you know you're the boss I'm just a scientist." And they ended up getting ambushed about a quarter of the way back by these kids. There are all sorts of interesting learning social effects going on, and often in surprising ways. These kids have logged hours of Counter-Strike, so I think they knew what they were doing.

So a little bit about the roots of big games, where they come from, and I touched upon that a little bit already. A lot of them are inspired by folk games. These are things that are sort of passed into the realm of childhood play. You look at most big games and you can almost always identify that it's a variation of tag, hide and seek, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, those are sort of four big ones. And then there's some other variations upon that. But most things have those roots in those things. They use those as departure points, which is great because those games you're playing as kids are the streamlined, awesome version of these games. And it's my job to make them slightly more complicated or more obtuse, and they think I made something new.

They also have a lot of sports, which is, I think, a personal mission of mine is to make people think of games and sports in the same breath. Right now you talk to a lot of people in the video game industry, sports are this whole other thing. But I think, in a way, it's the most interesting form of game because they've crossed over into poplar consciousness in some way. And I think they also form big games in a way because if you look at this is a picture here of West 4th Street in New York City, and these guys play basketball and the game there is sort of being played on a court for these players here. It's kind of about how many points you score but in actuality it's actually as much about those people that are lined the fence over there. And all these guys just want to look good for all those people. You watch them play and it's fascinating. There's a weird interaction with the round and it seems like this is typical basketball but again, it's sort of breaking that boundary of that magic circle and adding an element of spectacle to it, especially because it's out in public—a game like this is out in public. And plus, running around in public goes with sports.

There are lots of alternative reality games and these are something people would classify as big games, some people would not. Some people would think of them more as persistent games. So alternative reality games are mostly played on Internet. They're a large Internet-based scavenger hunt. This is a game called I Love Bees that was designed by 42 Entertainment, I think Jane McGonigal was the lead designer on this game. And there was a promotion for Halo 2 to get people more aware of Halo 2. I wasn't aware that it needed more promotion. And I think that's why it's sold so much, because of I Love Bees. Anyway, it's a really interesting game and with these games there are usually clues embedded in Web sites, there's some sort of story around them, and people have to solve them. They're played largely in communities on the Internet, so people will form together on a bulletin board. If they saw a clue, they'll post information about it. They don't solve anything together, it's more about individual play. But as Jane wrote interesting article about it—another game that we’ll talk about in a little bit —it's about the pipeline in a way, the amazing power of a large group of people to crunch through information. They did some conceptual art as well. A lot of things you see in big games actually comes from artists. There's a couple different groups working around big games, usually people who work at cell phone companies, like Nokia or Samsung. And then rat students and game designers and conceptual artists are like, "Oh, this is my chance to make this large interactive piece." Then there's a little social experiment involved.

This is a picture from a pillow fight in Toronto. Sometimes the idea seems to be just like, "What would happen if we gave people a bunch of people pillows in a square in Toronto?" And this is what happens. Sometimes these games are very attractive to people to the participatory media crowd, flash mobs, and that sort of thing. And it's about getting out and offering your experience, which is really exciting. You see that a lot now with all of these people using blogs and YouTube and MySpace. There's this real desire to feel like you're in control of your experience, that you're the one finding what's happening for you. And since big games allow you to do that, it's like what you can do on a Saturday night where you didn't watch a movie, you actually did something. Which I think is really exciting for a lot of people.

So now the canon: We will talk a little bit about specific games that are out there and this is a canon as of three years ago. So the quintessential big game is Pac Manhattan. And essentially this game was created by a couple of students at ITP in a class involved in games no less. Here strap a gigantic cheese wheel around yourself and you run around Washington Square Park like Pacman. And it sounds ridiculous until you think about and you're like, "Oh, that area around Washington Square kind of looks like a Pacman grid." And so they're like, "Let's play Pacman outside." So basically what you do is as you run down the streets, you get points for a gobbled up little box or whatever. And meanwhile while you're playing it, Blinkey and the rest of the ghosts all chase you around the streets. So again, you can see this is basically hide and seek played slightly differently. And the brilliance of this game was when everyone talks about Pac Manhattan, especially when it was on the Internet. It was like, "Oh, these guys use GPS and all these other things to make this game," which the actually didn't. It was dead simple. What they did was they just took cell phones, they went out, and they marked each corner on there. And each corner had a letter saying this was A1, A2, A3 and a guy playing Pacman would get us there and would run. And he'd say, "I'm at A2." And he'd get to A3 and they would just update this little program that gobbled up all the dots in between. So it was relatively simple to implement, pretty simple to play. And they had a ton of fun doing it.

I think the most interesting thing about this game was the way the public engaged of it. It got a lot of buzz when it came out just because it's very clever and people get it: "Oh, Pacman. Yeah, all right." And my favorite video is one off their Web site, which I encourage you to check out: Pacmanhattan.com. And there's this guy selling incense and Pacman runs by then Blinkey runs by. And he said, "Pacman went that way you got to go get him." And so it's like this nice thing where the public's engaging with the games and the world and it makes you see the whole thing differently. Because once you do, you can't walk around Washington Square without thinking, "If I just go into the top, where the ghosts are going to come from."

This game is Mogi Mogi, was actually designed by a French company that was actually released in Japan, oddly enough. And this game was a cell phone-based game, it's sort a collection game. So you have the software on your phone and when you went around different places, it was able to track where you were. I think they used cell phone triangulation. And then you collect different stuff. So if you actually visited different places, you obtain different items, interact with different players. So it took the entire city and made it into this roaming area, almost like a gigantic version of Animal Crossing. I don't know if anybody's is familiar with that game. It's this video game where you just kind wander around and pick fruit and fish. It's actually really fun. It's more fun than it sounds like it is. But Mogi Mogi was quite interesting. It had some great things about and it also had some weird things. One of the things they had to be careful of is when you're making these sorts of games and you're telling everyone where everyone else, things to keep in mind that you're kind of building stalker ware in a way. So you need to be careful about what active information you're giving to what players and that sort of thing.

This is a game called Big Urban Game, BUG for short. This is created by Frank Lantz, Nick Fortungo, and Katie Salen for the Design Institute in Minneapolis. I think the idea behind this was they wanted to make this big game that was going to involve the entire city of Minneapolis. So they had these gigantic balloons, which they had to guide around the city and make them look like game pieces. And people across the city would call and say which route the different pieces should take. There was a red one, a blue one, and a yellow one. And you join team initially and you say, "I'm on the blue team and I think the blue team should go this route." And they took all of the votes and figures out where it should go. This game, I think, is the most successful for this incredible spectacle. You see that and just go, "Oh, how cool is that?" It's like a big Sorry! piece going down the street. It also introduced the idea of inflatable pieces to big games. A lot of games that followed after, people said, "We have to have big inflatable pieces." We're just now getting out of that. Everyone who called was like, "Oh, we want to film something or take pictures of it. Is there going to be anything big and inflatable?" Not this year. Next year.

So this is a sort of seminal alternate reality the game. This was done for the promotion to the film Artificial Intelligence, or AI and it was created by Microsoft and so this is sort of a seminal alternate reality game, The Bees. It was created by a group for Microsoft and the pictures for the game was in one of the trailers on the T.V. and on the posters. And this woman over here, Jean Sayla, is listed there and her credit is something along the lines of she's the synthetic intelligence therapist or something like that. And you see this on the poster and go, "What's that?" If you Googled her name, it took you to a Web site for something like fifty or sixty years in the future, which then led you to this gigantic game world that Microsoft laid out across all these different Web sites. They created fake universities and fake companies to do different things. And they had clues buried in the source code of different pages. And it was the first one they were doing.

I think one of the most interesting things about it was when they introduced it. They thought produced enough content for six months of play or so. And they classified puzzles into easy to solve, hard to solve, near impossible, or will-never-be-solved-unless-we-tell-them-how-to-solve-them. They thought people would play in small groups, go to their friends, and share information about it. But what happened was within two or three days of the game starting, the Internet allowed for all these different people to start playing on bulletin boards and they burned through six months of content in three days. They solved every one of the puzzles, even the ones that were impossible to solve. It involved looking through source code and finding hexadecimal values, which they plug into something else. They basically created this really interesting narrative world that got people extremely engaged and doing very different things on the Internet and created an incredible sense of community for everyone who was playing.

Now a couple games—some of these came out last year—these really popular ones from the festival last year. Space Invaders—this is another one of those things like Pac Manhattan where it's essentially like another video game or game that someone's familiar with, but very large. So in this game they projected Space Invaders on the side of a building in Manhattan. Then they had to use a motion-tracking camera to track their movements and you had to go like that (indicating) to shoot the space aliens as they came down the building. So it created this weird dance performance as people played. And it's very simple; it's just Space Invaders. They just found the source code for Space Invaders on the Internet, modified it a little bit, and got a gigantic projector for it. But it engaged people in this incredible way. And I think they had the thing where you could do the motion tracking but if they had just had a controller and had people play on the side the building, it would have been just as fun for everybody because there's something about this public performance of playing the game and having it be ten stories tall, which is really exciting to people. It's very novel.

This is a game called Journey Into the Night. I think this is my favorite game at Come Out & Play last year, largely because it was so simple and it was one of those things where as a game designer, you're always making games that you're making more and more complicated and you think, "Well, gosh, this is going to be awesome. We're going to have these rules, then we're going to add some more rules and have some strategy on top of it and some technology." These guys did away with all of that and they did this game—essentially just Zombie Tag, which I don't know if any of you remember from when you were little. The goal is everyone starts out and everyone's free and there are one or two people who are "it," and if they tag you, then you're "it" as well. So by the end of the game everyone's chasing two or three people, and eventually one person.

So what they did is there were just like, "We're going to take a basic strategy, we're going to give people maps of New York City and we'll give them a bunch of different locations they have to go to." And they picked out very interesting, rich places in the city. They had everyone go to Koreatown and to go into this weird karaoke bar. And they had people go downtown to this weird arcade place, the Lower East Side and Battery Park. So they had these people running across of entire city and everyone had to wear different bands. So when you first started out, you wear an orange band. Then if you get caught, you become a chaser and you put on the yellow one and you start chasing other people. So immediately some people take off across the city and they're running about three hours, which is amazing that you can get a bunch of New Yorkers to do anything for that long, especially something that involves running. And it had this really transformative effect. I think my favorite thing someone said about it was Alex Fleetwood, who had come in from London was like, "I've been New York for about three days and it's really interesting that I felt like a tourist. Then I played this game and it was like being in a John Carpenter movie. All of a sudden, there were zombies after me.” Someone said they got people to lie down on the floor of the New York subway car, which is disturbing to say the least. I really hope he washed his hands. But that sort of thing is what's so exciting about it. It takes the space you're used to and gives it this interesting new structure and all of a sudden it's totally engaging in a different way. And you've got people running like mad.

One of the things I always find fascinating about the games is every time I play them and I'm fascinated by them. If anyone that has made one wants to test them, I'll be like, "Oh yeah, that was great, I'll play it." There was this weird hurdle like, "I don't want to run, I just don't want to look like a fool running down the streets of New York City or Chicago." And the minute the game starts and as soon as you see the other person run because they're getting ahead of you, all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh, no you're not." Next thing you know, you're jumping over garbage cans. And by the end of the game you don't care the all, you totally lose all your inhibitions. And the fact that you're wearing a gigantic Pong hat is totally fine.

This is a game called You Are Not Here. This one of those games that shades more into a conceptual art piece than the game. In some ways it's frustrating for me, as a game designer, because I always want really clear goals. I also want to be able to win the game and you hear a lot about artists getting involved saying, "Oh, people shouldn't have to win." It's so frustrating. I understand the sentiment. But I think this game is actually quite fascinating. The game was really a political statement. They took a map of New York City and a map of Baghdad and they put them on the same piece of paper. They put New York on one side and Baghdad on the other side. Then they put different spots around New York City. And they give everyone these maps, so you just pick them up. And then you would go outside and hold it up to the sun. And you would look at the side with New York on it and see where Baghdad was on the other side. And you would have to go around to different places in the city. They would kind of guide you around. You were supposed to find places in Baghdad and you had to do that by going to places in New York. It was a nice transposition of two different spaces onto one. And remarkably it was so simple that anyone could have done it, if they just thought to Xerox something on two sides of pieces of paper.

It was very effective in getting people to walk around and see the space in different ways. It also got people to learn about two different places. When they got to different places, particularly the Baghdad Zoo, you had to go to Bryant Park. And when you got there, there was a number you had to call. And they would give you information about what was happening in the Baghdad Zoo, some sort of historical information without having to go anywhere it sort of gave you this walking tour of the city.

This is a game called Pay Phone Warriors. It was one of my games, so I had to put it in. And it is interesting. This game was very much about re-appropriating piece of forgotten on technology around New York City. Every city is still littered with pay phones. And everyone's like, "You know payphones don't work." But actually, almost all of them do, as I found out because I went around and mapped out over thirty or forty of them. And what we did is we just went around to each pay phone and got the numbers off of them, put them in a database, and then we gave people this map of a certain area and a bunch of quarters. We gave them $3 in quarters and said, "What you have to do is capture all these pay phones by going there and making a call into our system to identify where you were based on that." So that, of course, led to running, which was good. And people dashed across the street, which was maybe not so good. No one has been hurt playing yet. It was very exciting. It got people to engage with the city in a really new way. It got them to use something they haven't used in years.

This guy is actually capturing a phone right there by calling in. And you kind of get from the passersby: What's going on with him? It encourages very odd behavior. You could guard the phone as long as long as you were touching it. You could camp out there so other people couldn't touch it. You were grouped in a team, so you coordinated your team across a whole large area of the city. As soon as you lost touch with them, some people would call on cell phones, some people would meet up: "Okay, I'm going to circle around here, I'm going to circle around here, and we'll meet here and discuss what we've done, and we will go back out and do it again." This one was a fairly intense game that we really tried to get people to run a lot. We did that and they got very sweaty, which I was very excited about. That's sort of a brief overview of some of the different types of the games that were out there. We forgot to say what this game is. This is Capture the Flag. This is nothing but Capture the Flag.

In preparation for coming out here I thought, "Okay, I've made a bunch of games lately so I have an idea of what's going on here." But I haven't been in a library in a little bit, so I'm going to go take a little trip to the library to see if I can do some research because for me, making big games is all about you going to that place and seeing what's there. What are the resources there? How does this place speak to you? What things can you tap into in this place? I'm in New York, I thought, "I'll go to the New York Public Library." It's now open six days a week. I marched right up to the stairs and saw lines—that's good. I don't know what lines are going to be used for but it looks good. It's good content for something. I got up there, the doors were closed, which would explain this. But before I left, I got there the one day of the week it was not open to go. “I'll just use the Internet.” I looked at this and I was like, "God, there is all that great content there and they're talking about victory." I know I'm on the right path because I'm a game designer and it's about winning. I'm going to make another trip. So I made a trip to a couple different libraries around Brooklyn, where I live, and started to categorize all the different assets I thought libraries have, in terms of what they can offer people who want make games, one is their publications.

You look at a library system—this is just the library of Manhattan again—I'm like, "Ooh, game board. I can get people to go to every one of those spaces if I just play my cards right," which is neat to get people to explore different neighborhoods in the city just by locating something in a particular place and then make them do something when they got there. That includes everything from driving to the big Brooklyn Public Library, to smaller branch libraries, and you see all sorts of different possibilities. There are areas out in front of the libraries, how they're interacting with the community. Obviously libraries have incredible collections of stuff. So I was looking on the New York Public Library's Web site and there's this amazing collection of their photos. I thought, "This has got to be good for something. I know I can make a great historical game using these, all this memorabilia. So how am I going to do that?" You've got math, science, and languages—that's good. And Russian. Things in other languages, all of which feel like great pieces of something coming together.

Libraries have an amazing space. I thought, "I could go here, but I can go here. Okay, there's the fiction section. So that would be a good room to have to capture that." There's territory built into libraries. You can imagine if someone was playing a game in the library, like, "I want to capture the fiction room; I'm going to get the reference room." What would be in those rooms that you can latch onto to get kids to think, "Oh, how am I going to get them to move around from place to place?" You've got these long aisles of stuff and people. And they're really great because you give kids a chance to operate in a space—how do you tap into that? How do you play on this field of independence? Like, I can wander around this library and spy on them or be spied upon, which also leaves this idea that there's all this content already built into libraries: It's got lines out front, a lot libraries have these great symbols that you can build games around. This looks to me like a game board. Here are all these pieces. What can you do with that to make kids think about those pieces? Is it finding out information about them? Is it having little pieces they are taking care of and moving around?

This is the Park Slope Public Library and it's dark and kind of sinister and it looks like it could be a great place for some sort of spy game. It has great stairwells where you can do stuff, or you can hide things for people. As a big games designer, I'm always thinking, "Where can I hide stuff where people won't find them?" If you're hiding things, you don't want the general public finding it because they'll think, "This is trash." Or some of those Bluetooth beacons you saw before—people get really nervous they look like bombs. So if you're going to hide things, hide paper.

It also has persistence. You've got a library card and you've got an identity here. And persistence is one of those amazing things in games, which you get someone to do something for so long if you're just given the persistence—level up every twenty minutes or so. When they level up, give them a new spell or a new item. I don't know how many of you guys ever played roleplaying games, RPGs, but they're so hard to turn off for that very reason. I recently played this one called Jewel Quest. It's just a jewel, but I can play for hours. I know it's bad for me.

But along these lines, we made a game recently for the Game Developers' Conference out in San Francisco called Gangs of GDC. And this was a little fighting game. You called in on your phone and press one, two, or three to play the full fighting game on the screen. And it was simple and people liked that. But what people love was every five to ten to fifteen fights, you would level up. You would go from being a bruiser to a brawler to eventually you go all the way to being Cyrus that was the king of the gangs and the warriors. That entailed you making about 300 phone calls and we thought, "No one is ever going to get this. There's this conference going on, maybe we'll get a few people to play fifty." We had about ten players reach 300. They just sat and played there on their cell phones because if you give them a little piece of candy every little while and they'll just churn through it. So libraries have got this already. You already know who they are, you keep track of them, they come back and level up.

Lots of unique identifiers. As a big game designer, you're always looking for like, "How do I know someone was somewhere when they said they were?" And these books have codes on them so you know that if they pick it up and scan it, you know that's where they stayed. They brought to me what they said they would bring to me. Those are great things. Perfect game designs. And data bases. There are librarians, or as I like to call them, referees. One of the things about big games that I was talking about earlier was, "How do you judge the game and keep track of who's doing what especially when they're out of your sight?" And that's why people are wearing all these gigantic GPS backpacks that play these games, which it's ridiculous. But the easiest way to do it is just have a referee. Have someone be there, like if you come and give something to and they say, "Okay, here's your next challenge." So you can imagine a library if they were running a big game in the library, trying to use that space in a different way. You've got people there where players or kids could interact in a way. They help judge the game. They can say, "You bring me this piece, I'll scan it and tell you what you get and I'll give you your next challenge." That's like solving 90% of the problems with big games right there, having someone that will referee them.

You've got a bunch of tools in libraries: you got photo copiers, you got computers, you got WiFi. All these are great things that help you see where people are, allow kids to do new things, like start to putting together things, solve puzzles, track where they are. There's places for display. You can display the game state. Again, another part to think about games is once people are spread around, it's really hard for them to know who's winning; and people always want to know who's winning. It's really awful to get back at the end of a game and feel like you did really well but you lost. But if you know you're losing, it's okay. So there's all these ways around it where you can display the state of the game to people. If it's a game that's been going on for a while, you can have bulletin boards that you update, showing people who's doing what, what moves have they made. It also gives the players a way to get involved with the creative use of tools, like a way to display some of the work they may have done for the game. And there's refreshments in libraries. I don't think they're going to be good for some people who are running but an apple is always good.

Out of that, I want to come up with five quick ideas of what games can be made in a library. None of these are fully flushed out; they're just like sketches essentially. So the first one would be you're a secret agent, this is a scavenger hunt game. Those are the most obvious ones. The library's got all this great material spread around. I can make people go to secret meeting spots. So they're playing teams and they say, "You go here, this is your territory." Maybe it's one of those referees in the stairwell and you have to go ask them a question and then they'll tell you to go do something else, which is a really exciting thing. Or a kid playing a game is to walk up to someone and feel like they're in the know, like that person over there is not just standing there, they're actually playing the game. It makes people overcome interesting social hurdles. Obviously because you don't want to be bothering people in the library, this would be a game about avoiding detection. You don't necessarily want kids running around everywhere and knocking stuff over. So what you do is you build into the rules that what they're supposed to do is not get caught. All those referees may be looking out for you. If they see you running, they'll know you're a secret agent and they'll capture you and you're out of the game, you lose points. So you build into it ways to be mindful the space.

This was something I learned from a friend of mine who wrote a bunch of LARPS, which are live-action roleplaying games. And he did a bunch at Grand Central, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a vampire LARP, everyone was pretending to be vampires. It's a little goofy, but he said, "The way you do it is no one else knows you're vampires so you have to act like normal people.” So they had this very affected, "Well, I'm not a vampire." But the end result is you don't bother anyone else and it gives you this nice level of paranoia in the game as well. Otherwise people show up in fangs and you're kicked out of the museum, practical reasons as well. So in here this would be a game about collecting codes.

The scavenger hunt is about you've got all this great stuff. The da Vinci Code was so rich, going around, looking at all these old sources of material. This would be something along those lines. You would have these different books that would say, "Go find this thing in the Bible and find out what the first word on the third page is, and that's going to refer to something else." And then you create this nice little mystery that gets teased out over a couple different steps. And again, this idea of persistence, if this is a game where you could do in the afternoon or longer period of time, have leveling up in it. If you're tracking the players after they solve a couple clues, be like, "All right, you're now level two secret agent." And that gives people a frame of reference for how they're playing, how they're doing.

This game is called Then and Now. This is a citywide game. So this was taken from digital collection as I was saying earlier, saying, "Here's a photo, go get a photo of what it looks like now." It's really simple, it's how to use the information that a library might have to get them, especially if it's information about the local community to get them to go walk around and see different things. The game shouldn't necessarily be about library, but maybe being outside in the real world, this is one of the things I found. These are just old red maps from New York City and you can imagine really quickly putting a board game together around this. But it's using actual historical materials, which give people a different way of looking at it. If you give in any sort of the historical context, it totally changes the way people interact with that game but then it will also change the way they act with the Lower East Side. And this it would be really simple to do this game and just borrow the rules from Monopoly or some other game like Life, where you're just moving around this board and buying spaces and whoever controls the most wins. Granted, the end result of that game is that everyone playing would want to be a slumlord.

You can do an alternative reality game relatively easily where you just look through a bunch of content, you get a bunch of research. You can embed clues in some of the materials that are out there and create a long narrative. We had one about abolition. And you've got great this great historical material, which provides you with 80% of the content you're actually looking for. And people will actually read through all that content to find the clue. And all you have to do embed that one clue among all this other content. So you get a lot for free. You've got Spanish books, Russian books, you could play a code-breaking game. And this could be a game where you have kids play in teams. So on each team there would be a couple different players. You give them a bunch of different things in different languages that they will have to go find out and decipher. And it's something very simple like that—whoever deciphers the most in a certain amount of time wins. And that includes sign language as well. And also any other material that you can decipher and make the clues.

And then lastly—again using all those unique identifiers that are out there to generate codes. This is one of those persistent games where you're not really doing much, like every time you check out a book, the code from that book creates a little creature and this would be a web-based game. So this would require a lot more development. But then the players all just have a little inventory of creatures they are attending, which they hide and collect. So every time they get a new book out, they get a new creature and that sort of thing is actually surprisingly addictive to people as well—collecting things that they can then attend to. So it's like how do you take that persistent identity you already have in the library and change it in a way that makes it slightly more game-like?

So just some general thoughts on the process, like how I look at these games and things I've found to be successful and how big games and how you can use them in a library setting to get people engaged in the space in a new way. It's not necessarily about checking out books and getting materials, but it is about reinventing that public space of the library as a new play space or public arena where people can reside in. A lot of that is just like looking around the world like, "What kind of activities do I normally do? What does this remind me of? Does that stairwell look like it should be a meeting spot? Should I hide a clue there?" Then looking at the normal activities that people do and saying, "How can I give that a goal?" This is my favorite design exercise—and I find it always leads to some really interesting things—is to think about what are the little things I can do every day border on neurosis but kind of like games. For example, on the subway I guess what stop people are going to get off at. So I think, "That guy is going to get off at 9th Street." And if he doesn't, I lose points and if he does, I gain points. And granted, I have a whole level of neuroses beyond that. Things like that are really interesting games like, how do you make activities out of everyday things? It can be simple ways to track moves, whether it's giving people pieces of paper, you don't need a lot of technology to do it. It could be chalk, it could be paper, it could be things like water guns, obviously not in libraries probably.

And then lastly, once you've got an idea for a game, one you come up with it and start thinking about it, the most important thing is as soon as you have that concept to try it out. Get two or three people together and play that game. Tell them what the rules are, write it down, and then play the game and inevitably it will not work. They never do the first time. I'm saying that from experience: It might never work the first time. And then you go, "Okay, but I see what happened here I'll change a little bit and we'll play it again."