:: Come Out & Play 2010 ::

The Come Out and Play Festival is a street games fesitval dedicated to exploring new styles of games and play.

Come Out & Play 2008 in New York

The Comfort of Strangers
Create your team out of the anonymous crowd; every chance encounter could be your last, or an opportunity to live and survive - find comfort in strangers.

Game 1
Start Time: Friday 11:00 PM
Location: Arlene's Grocery at 95 Stanton St (between Orchard and Ludlow)

Game 2
Start Time: Saturday 2:30 PM
Starting Location: Parsons, lobby at 66 5th Ave (between 13th St and 12th St)

# of players: 30
Duration: 1 hour
URL: http://swarmtoolkit.net
Designers: Simon Evans & Simon Johnson from games company simon

You walk through the busy square, headphones hidden beneath your hood. A voice whispers in your ear, "there's another Lover nearby...;" you steal a look around trying not to be too obvious and you hear the voice again: "...your life is now at level 6..." You must be a lover and you need find that other person in the crowd, team up. You set off, weaving through the crowd, trying to blend in.

"There's a Dancer nearby..." you stop to read a sign and look around "...your life is now at 5..." Damn! Gotta stay away from the Dancers; If they find you before you find another Lover you could be in trouble; if your life drops to zero you are out of the game. But how do you discover the other players hidden in the crowd and, when you do, how to you know who they are? You could ask them "are you a Lover or a Dancer?..."

The Comfort of Strangers is a street game that uses ipaq PDAs, mscape software and adhoc wifi networks to create a series of social encounters driven by risk and common interest. Players use anonymity and group formation to live and survive urban experience. They find comfort in strangers.

The game is supported by the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol and uses the mscape location based media authoring software.

The Rules
Players are given an ipaq PDA and a pair of headphones. Each device runs a simple programme called an mscape www.mscapers.com that monitors the position of other players in the game. Each ipaq will be allocated to one of two teams; the Lovers or the Dancers. Every time a player encounters a member of their team, the player is informed by a voice whispering in their ear and their life goes up. Every time a player encounters a member of the other team the same voice informs them and they lose a life point. If life points drop to zero the programme stops running and the player is out of the game. When only one team remains alive, the game ends with the surviving team members winning.

Bios: Simon Evans
Artist, Designer. Runs his own digital design studio evans-studio.net specialising in collaborative systems. He creates mobile, game based art, with work exhibited at FACT in Liverpool and the ICA London. Simon's studio is based in rural Gloucestershire and much of his current work is around adventure gaming. Look out for Moose Hunt at igfest.

Bios: Simon Johnson
Artist, Developer, Game designer. Has spent the last 2 years touring internationally with locative games. This year he set up iglab ,the interesting games lab, as a place to build a community around locative, street and pervasive games. Also this year he will be directing igfest, the south west of England's first street and pervasive games festival.

Game 1

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Game 2

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