To launch our installation at Encounters Film Festival we will be playing a game that we have created (with thanks to Simons, Jon and clare) called 'Good Fellas and Pretty Women'.

After the success of Igfest we were keen to try our hands at creating a paper based game that would firstly, aid (assist/make easier) networking at the Festival and secondly tie in with our installation. Our initial 'theme' for Encounters was wishing, this lead on from the application we created that trawled blogs for instances of 'I Wish'. However, we found it hard to develop a game that tied in with wishing and would fit in with the festival program, one thing we have been wary of during development is that we are creating this for a predominantly film orientated audience who have gone to the festival for that reason.

After some intense head shaking we decided to change the theme to 'first meetings'. At an event such as Encounters there are people whose attendance have been strongly influenced by the desire to make connections. The Festivals title further supports this and as a result we moved away from wishing and started to harvest sentances that refered to this theme. In a previous blog post I waxed about the various uses of Twitter to create networked stories and micro blogs and I kept coming back to it, or at least the themes that surrounded it. I couldnt get away from the idea of communicating with snippets of information and how these snippets are (re)read and re-understood, just watching users enjoing our wishing application made me think about tellng stories in sentances - Micro-stories.

Our installation will show micro stories on the theme of 'First Met', we will harvest these in three ways, each shown as seperate from the others by colour, the threeinputs will be text message, paper entry and blog search. We will launch the installation as part of the Digital Focus Session on November 20th (Thurs) with a q and a session and a talk about the game and (hopefully) gain players through the session.


So, the game.

The title 'Good Fellas and Pretty Woman' alludes to its filmic theme. The game can be played with either 6 or 12 players, each is given a sticker with either a leading male or female from one of up to six films and a game card with three or six film stills. The object of the game is to find the appropriate Good Fella or Pretty Women partner and name all the films on the game card. Once both of these tasks are complete the partners take their completed game cards to the game adjudicators. Once it is confirmed that all answers are correct they have a picture taken of themselves recreating their film scene from the game card, using an inset from their film's still and their own bodies to recreate the larger picture.

Testing will commence this week.

Posted by HelenB