RPS Feature How place affects games and creators
This is the last of my 6 articles in the Psychogeography of Games series on RPS, drawn from a series of performance talks given at Videobrains in London. If you’d like to support my on-going games writing, and get a reward of a super cool zine of these collected writings plus images and extras, sign up on patreon.com/hannahnicklin. Thanks for reading. – Hannah
This is how it starts:
With the sea.
RPS Feature A walk about games about walks.
This is article 5 of 6, adapted from my Psychogeography of Games series for London’s Videobrains. If you enjoy this, please consider backing me on Patreon, where there’ll be a zine of these texts coming out in the New Year, plus an exciting new project announced soon(ish).
In the months running up to the walk, Ed has sent me the occasional email, each time with new ideas for route near where he lives (and grew up) in Cumbria. The night before, we spread an OS map out on the table and he points out wild swimming spots, walks he went on with his parents, places not explored yet. Jack, a black and white cat, sits on top and bats at Ed’s finger each time he places it down. In the end we decide on Borrow Beck, in Borrowdale. The walk doesn’t look far on the map.
RPS Feature How Place Affects Game Design
This is article 4 of 6, adapted from my Psychogeography of Games series for London’s Videobrains. If you enjoy these articles, please consider backing me on Patreon.
I’m soaked before I even get to George’s door. He lives in ‘Globe Town’ – a small part of North East London in the borough of Tower Hamlets. I call him from Globe Street and walk up and down, failing to find the landmarks that he can see in the regimented tower blocks. In the end he points out a woman with a Dunlop branded umbrella and via her I find my way to the buzzer.
The buttons are silver rounded pale yellow, brushed steel braille under my fingertips, I tap in the number of his flat, stop to take photos of the stairwell on my way up. Wrought iron, broken frosted glass, paint peeling.
George Buckenham is a Londoner. He grew up in the suburbs of SW London, a place called ‘New Malden’, and today (in a month’s worth of rain) we have agreed to walk across London, without once using a map, from where he lives now to where he grew up. 14 miles (22km).
RPS Feature On liminal spaces
This is the third of 6 talks I’m doing for Videobrains walking with game designers and thinking about how the landscape of their lives affects their game design. If you enjoy this series, please back me at patreon.com/hannahnicklin. This week, developer Kerry Turner, creator of indie gem Heartwood.
We’re going to Brighton, the long way round.
Around 12,000 years ago the ice left Yorkshire. As the glaciers passed by they scraped away earth and vegetation to reveal the limestone below, a flat bare surface. Limestone is slightly soluble and as rain hit it over and over and over joints and cracks in the limestone wore away into tiny streams, drainage to the earth below. The dialect word for those fissures is ‘grykes’, the paving-slab like regular stone they divide: ‘clints’. In modern terms it’s a limestone pavement. Malham Cove is one of these rare formations, not far from a ravine called Gordale Scar, a few miles or so out of Malham, North Yorkshire.
RPS Feature Walk And Talk
She is 25 years old. She stands in an airport in dusty cold air pushed through air conditioning units, a suitcase checked in half an hour before. 3 archive-style boxes, twice the size of a large shoebox, will follow.
It’s 1991 and she is 10. A legionnaire’s hat hides her head from the Adelaide sun. Blue and white checked dress, a windcheater with the school logo. She stands on a bench and instructs her playmates that Five Step Find-It is now called Six-Step Seek It, explains the improved rule-set.
RPS Feature How Place Affects Game Design
This article is a part of a series based on 6 months as resident speaker at VideoBrains called A Psychogeography of Games. Psychogeography is a big chewy word put together by drunk French dudes in 1955 to talk about how the landscape of our lives affects how we feel, think and act. Here, I’m particularly interested in how the geography of our lives affects how we make games – the psychogeography of our games. So, in 2015, I’m going on a series of walks with some of my favourite game designers, in places that have affected how they think about what they make, and turning these into talks and articles.
This first piece is about a walk with Jake Elliott (Kentucky Route Zero [official site]). Except that because I don’t fly, the first walk happened in two different continents – we walked on the same day, on different continents, to similar places.
