Postmortem: MixTape

Since the greenroom’s tragic closure in May of this year, Larkin’ About, the pervasive gaming company I work with has been without a home. We lost more than a base of operations, we also lost the support, mentorship, & support of the greenroom. Recently, however, we have been taken on by Contact as a new resident company, which we are delighted with, and on Saturday we held our first regular event in our new home.

Problems? Sure. There’s always loads we can learn from running events like this but we are pleased to say that the night was a success and we look forward to many more.

I’ll be posting at the Larkin’ About site with more information on the event itself, images, video etc during the coming few days. In the meantime, here’s a lovely write up at musingfrommanchester.com.

MixTape.

During the event, I ran my first new game since last year’s 7:Candles:Mcr. The game is called MixTape and I’ve very pretentiously described it as:

an infinitely recursive player collaboration

or

ten lies we told about love.

What I mean by the description is that each playthrough of MixTape generates content from the players that is then used as the basis for the next playthrough.

Context.

The piece is inspired by Hannah Nicklin & Jason Rohrer. In fact, the ‘infinitely recursive’ element is pulled directly from Rohrer’s description of his shooter Inside a Star-filled Sky. Rohrer makes beautiful digital games with big themes – love, collaboration, loneliness, death – and was the first designer that enabled me to understand that games have that capacity, as much if not more than more traditional forms of narrative and/or interactive media. Hannah Nicklin wrote a gorgeous soundwalk/unrehearsed performance called The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You, which I took part in and was incredibly moved by. Upon mediating on the work of both Rohrer & Nicklin, MixTape was conceived.

Mechanics.

There is a search & find element to Mixtape. I placed 9 analogue cassette tapes around the ground floor of Contact, in obvious and not so obvious places. But finding the cassettes was not the essential element of player interaction and I imagine in the future that I will replace this facet altogether.

Players start off in groups of 3, each with a cassette Walkman (provided) and a games sheet mocked up to look like a cassette inlay sleeve.

The players worked in a team, each responsible for finding and listening to 3 of the 9 cassettes. On each cassette was a song I had picked with a monolgue mixed over the top. At the end of each track, the players heard the song title, the artist and the running order of the song.

The objective was to write down the correct sequence, artist, and song title information on the cassette inlay. Players had to regroup and share information and experiences to do this. Finally, each player chose a ‘Track 10′, a song that they would put on their own mixtape. They then wrote a short explanation of what that song meant or triggered in them, or why it should be included.

That was the game on the night. But MixTape doesn’t end there.

I will use the chosen Track 10′s to record a new set of monologues, inspired by the players’ words and the mood of their chosen songs. These will then be recorded onto a new batch of cassettes and the process will start again. Hence, an infinitely recursive player collaboration. Each playthrough generating and inspiring new player content.

At least that’s the plan.

Narrative.

My experiences and understanding of mixtapes is that always making them for people I liked or loved. There was something very personal about painstakingly selecting a set of songs that you than gave to another person in a very exposing way. So rather than being about that other person, mixtapes always about yourself. They are the way in which you wish to be perceived and the words you wished you had spoken.

Speaking with Larkin’ Agent #3, people make mixtapes for different reasons too (long journeys, for instance) but MixTape is very much about being in and out of love. Therefore, the narratives or monologues I recorded were about different stages in different relationships, both autobiographical and completely fictional. It will be interesting to see how much of the thematic remains intact as players begin to shape the narrative for themselves.

What went right.

I was very nervous about the monologues, both in terms of my vocal delivery (I’m not a natural public speaker) and in terms of the frank nature of the content. I usually squirrel away my creative writing free from the potential criticisms of others. However, I was very pleasantly surprised that most of the feedback from the game consisted on praise for the writing.

Players really seemed to get into the idea MixTape as an ongoing process in which they are now part of, which I’m really pleased about as, for me, that is the entire purpose of the venture.

I also got the impression that players found it beautiful. Again, couldn’t ask for more in that respect.

Finally, the retro-technology worked. Thankfully.

What went wrong.

Two main things I picked up on. First, The levels weren’t quite right on the recordings. As I often spoke over music, the process of recording on computer, then to CD, then to tape, coupled with the fact that players were listening to these cassettes in a fairly busy bar, meant that some of my narration was hard to hear. Definitely room for improvement here.

Second, more people wanted to play MixTape than actually got to play it. I had three Walkmans and set groups off every half hour, figuring the game to take roughly 30 minutes. During this time, potential players had to wait for the Walkmans to come back and a lot of people simply didn’t get a chance to play. If I had, for instance, 9 Walkmans, I could have continuously rolled out players every 10 minutes. I will certainly do this in the future.

All in all, a successful and promising first outing for MixTape. I’m looking forward to running it again. And again. And again…