The Average Gamer

#Weekender Write-up

On Saturday I headed over to South Bank for the Hide and Seek Weekender. It was brilliant! I wasn’t there long but the atmosphere was outstanding and it was great to meet and have fun random new people.

I ended up only signing up for one game, Segue which was run by Enterplay. The other game that I thought looked interesting was Silent Relay, but that turned out to be only for 3 players per session and I missed out on the tickets by several hours :(

Pics are some of the games that were on while I was waiting around. Explorers looked sort of interesting in a blindess-awareness kind of way. Miss Geeky played it so drop her a line if you want to know more. The Agency was potentially interesting and touted as having spectator-involvement but even sitting right next to the group I couldn’t hear any discussions so I got a bit bored :( The outdoor pic is quite possibly of International Playtime; I’m not sure. I went outside to get a tan and there was a crowd of people running either left or right depending on the gibberish shouted by the officer. Looked like lots of fun from a very simple concept.

Segue was great. There we 28 of us, split into 4 groups. Every group was given 8 cards, each with 4 (maybe 8) bars of music printed on it. We were assigned a musician and a dancer and the object of the game was to get our dancer through 4 passport control checkpoints around the National Theatre and be the first team back at base. Here was the tricky bit.

The dancer had a set of moves corresponding to our musical cards. We show our card to the musician, he plays the piece and the dancer moves. Each passport control checkpoint was a box 2 feet square. We didn’t know what card did what move and in fact, we didn’t even know what the set of moves was. So, we set about it very methodically and showed the cards to our lovely accordian player one-by-one, taking notes as we did so. NERD ALERT!

On the other hand, we won so nyer! Nerdish habits come in useful after all. At the end we got to see all four musicians combining their phrases into a lovely 4-piece band with the dancers performing in unison. Nice reward and I have so much respect for the dancers being able to remember and assign such complex manoeuvres to the cards. By the looks of it, Enterplay will be running Segue again this weekend at the Latitude Festival.

All in all, it was a great experience in collaboration and a nice sunny day on Southbank. Combine the two and I think my faith in Londoners has been given a bit of a boost. Thanks, Hide and Seek and to our lovely “Cuba” dancer for being so nice about it when we accidentally sent her to a head-on collision with a rival dancer >.<