Game designer and Studio resident Simon Johnson took us on a swift journey through the potted history of his career. From bio-activated mazes to the world’s first game inside a quantum computer, here are five things I learned from Simon’s talk:

1. Cultural constructs and unwritten civic behaviours change from city to city. A city-based game must be designed with the user at the centre; a behaviour that would be socially acceptable and comfortable for a player in one city might be entirely inappropriate in another. A game designer must consider what their payers will be willing and/or allowed to do. Simon cited Come Out & Play Festival in New York as instrumental in taking play as a form, bringing it into the city and giving people permission to be playful.


    2. Simon founded Iglab in Bristol to bring together game designers and eager playtesters. The Iglab community adopted a process of rapid iteration, enabling early access to games through regular playtesting. Developing lots of games in quick succession required the community to discover many different spaces to play. Simon’s favourite game arena is a multi-storey car park; it has great acoustics and lots of hiding places!

    3. Observing individual and group behaviours during game play lead Simon to develop the Swarm Toolkit: researching social dynamics in real world spaces and learning about group parameters during play can enable a game designer to better predict the behaviour of the players. As well as considering the experience for the players, the designer must also consider the experience for non-players. How does a game spill out into the rest of the world gracefully?


    4. Building human and machine networks allows interesting explorations into layers of trust, Simon worked with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham to further this research. Simon developed the Tweeture, an endearing robot you can carry around, and took it to SXSW in Austin and tracked its whereabouts via GPS. Tweeture would give players points based on how well it was looked after and would tweet protests if it were ignored or ill-treated.


    5. All games are designed within a context or storyworld, but each individual player writes their own linear narrative. Simon recently founded Free Ice Cream and was commissioned by the Overseas Development Agency to design the ‘Playable Conference’ AKA The Global Festival of Ideas. The conference will take place in March 2017 at the UN HQ in Bonn. Conference delegates will select civic policies that are important to them; such as education or waste. The selected policies will thrive within the constructed city ecology, and those left unselected will fail. The conference delegates’ individual decisions will be collated to create the complete picture, but there will never be enough resource for all policies to succeed.

    If all this talk about games has got you itching to play one, you could try out Simon’s Bowie Hip Sync with some friends.