Category Archives: Games

Clean Up Wall Street

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CLEAN UP WALL STREET is a game-event inspired by the global financial crisis. The game explores the actions that led financial institutions to endanger the health of the global economy. Playfully assuming the roles of commodity traders and credit rating agents in the actual spaces of Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, players compete to trade and sell the most before the inflated system bursts and time runs out.

Working in teams, players collaboratively pursue wealth and prosperity. However, success in the game depends on face-to-face interactions with a cross-section of visitors to the Lower Manhattan Financial District. Performing an act of citizen journalism, players engage individuals to ask how the financial crisis (and recovery) may have impacted their lives. The stories are captured via a voicemail system and uploaded onto the game’s website along with additional gameplay imagery gathered by the players, forming a visual and audio mosaic of stories highlighting the financial, emotional, and mental consequences of an unstable and unregulated financial system.
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Elephant in the Relationship

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Elephant in the Relationship from Joshua McVeigh-Schultz on Vimeo.

Elephant in the Relationship was designed in collaboration with Andy Uehara, Michael Annetta, and Casey China. Exhibited at Game Show NYC.

Elephant in the Relationship is a game for 2 to 4 players in which players try to communicate deeply troubling relationship issues. Players take on the roles of two people in a personal relationship and turn the drama of a potentially risky (or intimate) interaction into spectacle for a group to enjoy. The game fuses Pictionary-style drawing and guessing mechanics with elements of doll-play and improvisational theater, asking players to place themselves into a difficult emotional scenario with their partner. The game includes a whiteboard arena, dry-erase markers, post-its, and colored playing pieces (designed to “stand-in” for the players). Using only these tools, a player tries to get their partner to guess the unspeakable relationship issue. By inserting players directly into the representational world of the drawing space, the game encourages empathy, divergent thinking, and novel communication strategies.

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Dendritix: Inter-dimensional Gnome Hunt

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Dendritix Rules

This locative game was designed in collaboration with Jeff Watson, Juli Griffo, and Ed Yee. It requires partners to collaborate via mobile phones as they navigated through physical and virtual worlds. One player navigates a text-based MUD modeled after the real-life rooms of the play space while the other navigates through physical space. The text-world-navigator can spot the interdimensional gnomes when they enter a room in the MUD and must quickly communicate the location to the physical-navigator without attracting the attention of the other players.

Narrative Overview:
Interdimensional Gnomes are on the loose! Ingest dendritix pills to travel in the gnomes’ dimension. Teams compete to find and capture the elusive gnomes. Gnomes can only be captured when you utter their true name. One team member searches for gnomes in a drug facilitated virtual world while the other sneaks about in the physical world carrying out naming-missions and trying not to lose their tail. Watch out for other teams who may thwart your attempts to win the game.