Now Play This festival has packed its digital bags and will be coming to your home for a free weekend of play, creativity and experimentation for all ages to enjoy.
Taking place at the same time as the postponed physical festival, the virtual festival embraces the same spirit of experimentation, uniting a creative community of makers to explore playful and participatory ways to bring people together through games and play. Join us for live playful events including streamed talks, creative workshops, performances and interactive tours of popular game worlds.
11.00 - 12.30
Live from Animal Crossing by House House in conversation with The White Pube
14.00 - 16.00
Make, Re-make, Exchange Workshop by Leap Then Look
Join artists Bill Leslie and Lucy Cran (Leap Then Look) to create sculpture, performance and film in an art making game with other families in lockdown over the internet. Families will work together to make art in their homes, exploring objects and materials, exchanging ideas, re-making artworks, creating simple choreographies, playing together to create new experiences of art during isolation.
17.00 - 19.00
Half Life Virtual Field Trip by Robert Yang
Bring your packed lunch and join game designer and artist Robert Yang as he leads a group on a live virtual field trip through Half Life 1 with the help of multiplayer mod ‘Sven Co-op’. Streamed event.
11.00 - 13.00
Video Chat Games Adapted From Improv Comedy by Melissa McGlensey and Doug Wilson
In this online workshop, comedian Melissa McGlensey and game maker Douglas Wilson teach a variety of simple social games for play on video chat. The games have been specially adapted from commonly loved games and warmup exercises from improv comedy. Throughout the workshop, Melissa and Doug will synthesize broader takeaways on playful performance, game design, and adapting games to new contexts.
14.00 - 16.00
Pawns by Alistair Aitcheson
A chess variant played on a giant board with 87 pawns and one king on each side. Created to capture the feeling of futility against overbearing systems, the board is too big for any individual action to have consequence. That is, if the game is played in good faith. Streamed performance.
18.00 - 19.00
Play DUSTNET with the Devs by Neilson Koerner-Safrata
DUSTNET is a multiplayer video game installation that explores the death and afterlife of the virtual spaces we play in. The audience navigates a deconstructed version of the Counter-Strike (2000) map de_dust2 through computer, virtual reality, and augmented reality platforms. Streamed event.
20.00 - 21.30
Photography Tour of No Man’s Sky by Gareth Damian Martin
Join game designer and artist Gareth Damian Martin in No Man’s Sky and see this procedurally generated universe through a different lens in this live photography tour. Streamed event.
On Friday 03 April the Now Play This ‘Play at Home’ official selection will be launched, a collection of recommended games, films and works that were due to feature as part of the 2020 IRL (in real life) festival, but are now offered for you to enjoy in your own time. Each work reflects this year’s festival theme of ‘breaking point’ which celebrates playful creators who break, subvert or remix the rules of the games they make and play.
AI DUNGEON 2 – NICK WALTON, ALAN WALTON, ZACH WALTON, BEN MURDOCH, CAYLA MURDOCH
http://aidungeon.io
AI Dungeon is a first of its kind AI Generated text adventure powered by OpenAI's GPT2. Unlike every other game in existence you can type any action and the AI will generate the result of your action and continue the story.
ELECTRONIC SWEET-N-FUN FORTUNE TELLER – RACHEL SIMONE WEIL
https://partytimehexcellent.itch.io/electronic-sweet-n-fun-fortune-teller
Electronic Sweet-N-Fun Fortune Teller is an original love compatibility and horoscope game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The game, written in 6502 assembly language, is situated in an alternate video game history in which 8-bit console games were marketed to girls.
LICHENIA – MOLLEINDUSTRIA
https://molleindustria.org/lichenia/
Reclaim the ruins of a fallen city and create a sustainable human habitat. There are no goals and no endings in Lichenia. Learn about its cryptic ecology. Grow a city like a garden.
NOVA ALEA – MOLLEINDUSTRIA
https://molleindustria.org/nova-alea/
For its dwellers, Nova Alea was a mixture of shelters, connections, memories, longings. For its masters, the city was a matrix of financial abstractions.
OOLITH – BRIONY O CLARKE
http://www.brionyoclarke.com/
A permutation of the board game Oooble, Oolith is an alchemical bot which combines things, feelings, actions and ideas to generate new conceptual objects. Oolith is a mediumistic vehicle for summoning endless play things from the beating heart of the imaginal world.
RED DESERT RENDER – IAN MACLARTY
https://ianmaclarty.itch.io/red-desert-render
This two-player cooperative videogame was inspired by the creator's out-of-bounds adventures in Red Dead Dedemption 2 and seeks to evoke similar feelings of discovery and transgression. Let your curiosity guide you through a vast and varied landscape filled with unexpected interactions that expose new ways of seeing this virtual world.
SIGIL – KIRSTY KEATCH & JOEL BEARDSHAW
https://instagram.com/a/r/?effect_id=518276582442469
Sigil is a brand new commission for Now Play This 2020. The work explores the potential of Instagram and face filters as platforms for games and new approachable augmented reality playful experiences. Players catch floating Now Play This sigils with their heads to decorate different facial features. Each sigil has its own unique behaviour which responds to the player's expressions and head movements. Sigil can be played on your mobile phone by downloading Instagram and following the link above to access the filter.
SQUARETOWN – VIVIANE SCHWARZ AND KEVAN DAVIS
Squaretown is a roll-and-move game played across a patchwork of boards designed by virtual Now Play This visitors. Download a collection of buildings and spaces you like the look of, and connect them together to form a playable town, with players dashing from square to square collecting tokens and completing tasks. If you want to add your own plot to the Squaretown archive, download one of the blank boards, doodle whatever infrastructure you think the town needs, and submit it to our gallery. Play and make you own game here
THE CALL TRILOGY – IP YUK-YIU
https://www.ipyukyiu.com/
Ip Yuk-Yiu's CALL Trilogy is an experimental machinima series that hacks and reworks materials from the video game franchise Call of Duty, unearthing hidden ghosts and poetics while creating evocative parallels through a kind of uncanny observation and navigation in the found virtual landscapes. For the festival weekend Yuk has made all three of these films available to view online for free.
THE INDIFFERENT WONDER OF AN EDIBLE PLACE – STUDIO OLEOMINGUS
https://studio-oleomingus.itch.io/the-indifferent-wonder-of-an-edible-place
The indifferent wonder of an edible place is an examination of the violence of erasure. Created in response to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, it attempts to ponder the violent cost and the profound grief of having to survive at the edge of despotism, when places of entangled heritage are being willfully effaced.
TRIFORCE: THE TOPOLOGIES OF ZELDA – PATRICK LEMIEUX AND STEPHANIE BOLUK
https://alt254.itch.io/triforce
In The Legend of Zelda, there are several strange spaces hidden within Hyrule that defy the logic of the Cartesian grid: the Lost Woods, the Lost Hills, and the Lost Roads. When navigating these 2D mazes, Link finds himself endlessly looping, temporarily suspended by a classic game mechanic. But when visualized in 3D, these labyrinths look different. Triforce is a short puzzle game featuring a non-Euclidean Hyrule full of donuts, Möbius strips, and Klein bottles alongside a text-based adventure exploring personal histories of playing the original game.
