Newsletter! Get your newsletter! Hot off the digital presses! Read all about This is a Door here!
blog
This Is A Door ’13 part 1
First two This Is A Door cabs off the ranks both are running next Thursday (the 31st of Oct) as part of Luna Park’s Halloween festival, LUNA DARK, a haunted all-ages playground for Halloween.
THE CURSE
Oct 31
Pop Up Playground
Cheat fate, outwit scary clowns, or be forever… Cursed!
A puzzle/chase game by Pop Up Playground.
30 minutes to play, sessions every ten minutes.
Check out The Curse trailer here.
Location: Luna Park, St Kilda
Time: 7pm – 11pm
Tickets: $20
Tickets available on the night from the Luna Park box office
URBAN CODEMAKERS – WE WANT YOU
Oct 31 – Dec 1
Urban Codemakers
K-Saint
We want you!
Three guilds from Ludea have come to colonise and transform St Kilda, formerly Fareham, originally Euroe-Yroke. You must join a guild and decide. Will you revert, renew or remake the streets?
The search begins on Halloween.
Location (event 1): Luna Park, St Kilda
Time: 7pm – 11pm
Game: City of St Kilda, Nov 1st – 30th
Location (event 2, 1 Dec): Theatreworks St Kilda
Tickets: Free to Play
Website: ksaint.net
THIS IS A DOOR 2013 PROGRAM REVEALED!
Ok, apologies for the caps in the title of this post, but we’re all so gosh darned excited that if it didn’t wobble the whole office, we’d be jumping up and down. (Note to self, upgrade to a better office.)
But, BUT, the program for This Is A Door has just been announced! We have a month long festival of games, play and participatory performance presented by Melbourne’s new games designers and playful companies.
All kinds of fun that combines play with other art forms: you’ll have secrets to keep, stories to discover, cities to save, monsters to escape from, parties to throw and a wild time to be had by all.
When was the last time you got to be a kid again?
Check out all the full details here.
September Playtest
Today was our last playtest in this series and we had a blast! Before we even got onto testing the game we had prepared, we started by spontaneously inventing Bell Run using our pool noodles (nothing funner than a pool noodle!). We went on to modify Grandma’s Footsteps into Grandma’s Balls, then tried out a new game, The Heist… Lasers! in which players attempted to negotiate red wool lasers to steal the precious emerald and ruby smiley balls. After that, we had a snack break (it’s like recess only with more chocolate chip biscuits) then we tried out another new game for This Is A Door, called Haunted Hungry Yellow Circle. With it’s maze and ghosts and dots, it reminds us quite a lot of a computer game but we can’t quite work out which one. After that we tried out Gestaltstory, which made at least two of the player laugh until they actually cried and finished it up with another round of Impossible Book Club in which we discussed The Spindle That Never Pricked. Despite protests to the contrary, we’re still not going to be reading Mahatma Gandhi: Witch Hunter. Stay tuned for our next book!
This Is A Door on Daily Melbourne
Pop Up Playground: This Is A Door
Pop Up Playground had its first public gig in September 2011. Since then, the company has continued to grow with the new and creative games they have been making and bringing out the inner child in people and they are back this month with their event This Is A Door.
“This Is A Door is where we play a variety of 2 minute to 20 minute games for two hours. It is a festival of new games that we have created,” Artistic Director Robert Reid tells me. “The whole festival this year has been about trying to get other companies exposure so people know that this sort of stuff is happening.”
This Is A Door opened up with The Curse and was performed at Luna Park on Halloween night. Players scoured the park to find three fortune tellers to help break the curse put upon them whilst being cautious of three clowns lurking nearby. It was the first event I had participated in and I loved the excitement of being a child again and running around in a panic as the time counted down to when I would be cursed forever.
“I like that when we do games like The Curse, we create an environment where there is a story told but you determine the type of story you experience. The decisions that people make in the moment tell these great stories and you get people sacrificing themselves for each other or stabbing each other in the back.” Robert says.
If a day of games doesn’t tickle your fancy, there are lots of other things planned by the team at Pop Up Playground. “We’ve got a couple of playful street art projects going on with Guerrilla Poets Opening Doors and I See Magical Creatures where we take old children’s toys, bundle them up and then paint them with bright colours and glitter and then hide them throughout the city. There is also MechCombat, which is an experimental live gaming experience involving robots.” Robert tells me.
It’s no secret that the older we get, the more we forget about this sense of play and fun. We get concerned with “adult” life and problems that simply enjoying things can be difficult. “Play is good for us and it is useful to us. There are social benefits and learning how to be a person”, Robert explains. “There is a physical aspect to games but they also keep your brain active and force you to be innovative and think strategically.”
This immersive theatre/play experience is rapidly growing in Melbourne. More and more people don’t want to just “sit and watch” anymore so if you haven’t experiences this yet, then make sure to check out This Is A Door during the month of November.
Original review here: http://www.dailymelbourne.com/2013/11/pop-up-playground-this-is-a-door/
Coming up – Loads of games and a festival too!
Ooo!!! So all the cats are out of the bags and we can now share with you what we have coming up from now til the end of the year!
PLAYTESTS (Sept) We got some Playtests coming up for games for This Is A Door, come along to Richmond and help us try out some brand spankin’ new fun games. More details here.
WIKISNEAKS (Sept)Wikisneaks is a new game being presented for one night only as part of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival in Sept. Check out all the info here.
GENERATIONS (Oct) Generations looks at the decisions you make today and how they can affect your family for generations to come, presented at the Owl and Pussycat in Richmond over three nights. Information and booking deets can be found here.
THIS IS A DOOR (Nov) Our annual indoor festival of games and play, This is a Door, is back in November! We have loads of games and playful events happening, info on the playday weekend can be found here and we’ll release more details soon.
Phew!
Melbourne Fringe 2013
To prevent confusion, Pop Up Playground wishes to clarify that we are not involved with the 2013 Melbourne Fringe Festival. The “pop-up playgrounds” being set up in City Square and the City of Stonnington as part of the Digital Gardens project are the work of independent game developers and artists not affiliated with or employed by Pop Up Playground. We wish the designers and artists the best with the project, but regret the use of our name without permission or consultation.
Playtests for This Is A Door festival
New PlayTests for This Is A Door festival
Zombie Tag
We’re heading towards the second annual games festival This Is A Door (through November around St Kilda) and we have some brand spankin’ new games we need to try out, so we have two playtests coming up in the next few months:
Saturday 21st September
Saturday 28th September
10 am – 5pm
310-314 Church Street, Richmond
Come play!
email us at rabbithole@popupplayground.com.au to let us know you’re coming
Also, we’ll gladly receive any gold coin donations to help us pay for the space hire.
Grandma’s Ninjas
Focal Point video
As part of the State Library of Victoria’s Carnival of Curiosity in July, 2013, we presented The Focal Point, a story telling game for all ages in which players help trapped echoes of the library deliver lost messages between each other across the decades.
You can watch it here.
We’d like to thank the ever lovely Elliot Summers, who came along and filmed it for us.
How players influence our game design
This weekend is our new game, The Focal Point, for the State Library of Victoria, a story telling game for all ages in which players help trapped echoes of the library deliver lost messages between each other across the decades. When we were designing the characters one of our game runners, Madeline Anderson, who was also in The Whispering Society, came to us with a story that one of the players had told her. She was so moved by his story that she wanted to base her character on it. We asked Madeline to share the story with you…
–
At about 1am, after 4 hours of constant stories being told and players trying to prove their worth to join “The Whispering Society”, a man in his seventies stumbled upon Pop Up Playground’s game and decided to play. Part of the game involved players taking photos with their smart phones of spirits that were trapped in objects of habit etc. They would then approach the actor and tell the story the spirit. If they proved their worth to all of the actors, they could become a member of the society. This lovely gentleman approached me and said that he did not have a smart phone to capture the spirit, but whether or not he could he show it to me. He turned my attention to the beautiful gold embellishment on the balcony and pillars of the Queen’s Hall and told me the story of the weeping war widow:Read More