//2010 Festival: Big Games

Humans vs. Zombies is a 2010 IndieCade Finalist

Sign up is on Friday, Oct 8 at 5PM and gameplay will continue throughout the weekend, ending at the closing party on Sunday.
Humans vs. Zombies (HvZ) is a game of moderated tag commonly played on college campuses, highschools and neighborhoods. A group of human players attempt to survive a "zombie outbreak" by outsmarting a growing group of zombie players.

People should bring bandanas and socks guns to use in the game.

//Socks, Inc.

Socks, Inc. is a 2010 IndieCade Finalist

Available to play on Sunday Oct 10 at 3:30 in the IndieCade Village created by Gregg Fleishman
Socks, Inc. is a family friendly and casual alternate reality game that is played through sock puppets. Players complete real world missions with their avatars in order to progress through levels and the game's narratives

To sign up for Paparazzi visit this site
Available to play on Saturday Oct 9th at 2:00 in Media Park
In Paparazzi, players (in teams of 3-4) act out the age old battle between the camera-wielding paparazzi and the celebrities they stalk. As celebrities, players must be quick and clever in order to steer clear of shutterbugs. As paparazzi, they must be sneaky and organized. Will there be scandals? You bet. Will there be awkward photos of stunned-looking people, faces contorted, arms flailing wildly? Most certainly!

At the start, a few random players are assigned the role of celebrity, and the rest become the paparazzi. The celebrity's goal is simple: to make it to a variety of party spots appearing and disappearing throughout the city. However, their positions are being tracked by the paparazzi. The paparazzo's goal is get a good shot of a celebrity, using their digital camera or cameraphone. But a good photo can't be produced by aimlessly chasing after celebrities. The paparazzi must use their technological edge to setup ambushes: the seemingly innocent bystander blending in with the crowd; the cunning cameraman waiting just around the corner, ready to pounce. When a celebrity falls to a camera, the paparazzo wielding it takes the celebrity's place. The battle is neverending!
To play this game, you must bring your own cameraphone or digital camera.

About the creators at Atmosphere Industries

Atmosphere Industries is an art collective comprised of fairly nifty Canadians who create award-winning transmedia experiences that excite, educate and engage. Our projects tend to combine fun, community, technology, and a hearty helping of sprinkles. We've made all kinds of games for all kinds of occasions: from a Twitter/sticker-based game for an Australian web conference, to a theatrical gentrification simulation for Toronto street festivals, to a Bluetooth-distributed locative radio drama just for the hell of it. Find out more at atmosphereindustries.com.

Available to play on Saturday October 9 at 8:30 pm.
Sign up IS required! To sign up and find out where to meet for this game visit this site.
For more information, visit as if it were the last time's Facebook page.

You've seen the people freeze in train stations and the mass pillow fights. Well, this will be a more invisible experience...

If you register to take part in this event you'll be invited to download an MP3 and turn up at a secret location to listen to the soundtrack at a specified time.

When you put on the headphones you'll find yourself immersed in the cinema of everyday life. As the soundtrack swells people in the crowd around you will begin to re-enact the world you always see but often don't notice.

Sometimes you'll just be drifting and watching, but sometimes you'll be following instructions on the soundtrack and creating the scenes yourself. Don't worry, there will be nothing illegal or embarrassing, sometimes you might be re-enacting moments you've seen in films, sometimes you'll just be playing yourself.

This is no requiem, this a celebratory slow dance, a chance to savour the world you live in, and to see it with fresh eyes.

About the creator: Duncan Speakman is an artist based in the UK Bristol. Since 2008, Speakman has been an artist in residence at the Pervasive Media Studio located in Bristol.Originally trained as a sound engineer at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, his work now examines how we use sound to locate ourselves in personal and political environments. Seeking out the poetics of the everyday, he creates socially relevant experiences that engage audiences emotionally and physically in public spaces.

Many of the pieces Speakman creates, such as the sound walks and live performances, are experienced on headphones while walking through public spaces. Sometimes they are pre-recorded; at other times they may use satellite positioning, live performers and real-time sound processing. Other works include large-scale video projections, micro-documentaries and books.

Speakman is a senior lecturer in Media Practice at the University of the West of England and is currently developing site-responsive sound walks, street games and pervasive theatre works. He has been exhibited internationally at festivals including ISEA (Nagoya), Futuresonic (Manchester), RADAR (Mexico City), enter (Cambridge), TPAM (Tokyo), Liveworks (Sydney), Navigate Live (Gateshead) and InBetweenTime (Bristol).

In 2001 he was awarded the Clark Trust Bursary for digital arts and has received critical acclaim for his video blog 29fragiledays. In 2007 he was peer advisor on the Almost Perfect locative media residency at Banff New Media Institute and in 2009 he was awarded the Vauxhall Collective Theatre commission for his work creating the 'subtlemob' performance form.

Games of Nonchalance is a 2010 IndieCade Finalist

You can drop in and out of this game in the Indie Cade Village created by Gregg Fleishman from 1:30-5 on Saturday October 9th.
Inconspicuously and subtly the clues present themselves. A trail of crumbs. A peculiar scavenger hunt. An instant message offering a code. Unlocking a map. Leading to a key to a hidden lock box. Containing a rare coin. Which purchases some magic beans, which when watered grow into an interweaving story line, until you are immersed, finding yourself at the center of the action. "For those dark horses with the spirit to look up and see... a recondite family awaits".
For more information visit http://www.nonchalance.com/

//Unwritten Storybook

To sign up for Unwritten Storybook visit this site
Available to play on Sunday Oct 10 at 12:30 PM in Media Park
Once upon a time...in a land not so far away...lived a troll...scratch that...lived a wizard...hmmm...lived a giant?
Every good story is built upon a captivating beginning, middle and end and it's up to you to decide how yours will play out. You and your team will create an original storybook by living it one challenge at a time. Every story is filled with adventures - whether you choose to slay a dragon or kidnap the prince, the choice is yours.

Playing the heroes of this real-world adventure across Brooklyn, your interactions with other teams of characters will determine whether you live as allies or enemies. All stories culminate in a festive gathering where the characters assemble together to write the final chapter over a feast of food and cider.
In a game where make-believe has real-world consequences, choose wisely, for you never know whether you will be awarded another page for your story or be CURSED!

No sign up is required, however, for the Mobzombies iPhone app go to play.mobzombies.com
Play will take part throughout the 3 days in Culver City
Mobzombies is a truly mobile, location-based iPhone game that pits you against zombie hordes generated by human activity at real places. Unique movement controls allow players to use their bodies as joysticks, turning mundane physical things (barstools or people, for instance) into tricky obstacles obstructing the path towards zombie destruction.

Throughout the game Players search for special missions that earn them Commendation Badges, and rise through the ranks as they destroy more and more hordes. Players can compete in training missions to build up their chops if they are not nearby any hordes.

Mobzombies is a game about Zombies. It is also a game about engaging players' mobility and creating gameplay that makes sense in the context of the physical environment.

About the creator: Will Carter is the founder of Nodesnoop Labs, a design/development shop based in Los Angeles CA. Will mainly makes stuff for the iPhone, always with an eye towards injecting a bit of fun into normal real world activities. His work has been featured on THE INTERNET and elsewhere, including the Wired NextFest, Maker Faire, and O'Reilly Where 2.0. He grew up in Utah, where he became an avid bicyclist, and enjoys going up and over mountains.

To sign up for Humanoid Asteroid visit this site
Play the vector arcade classic come to life. Jump in your ship, man your lasers, and get ready to fend off waves of human asteroids in this dance/game mashup. How long can you survive?

About the Designers: Nick Fortugno, Sam Strick, Dave Warth
Nick Fortugno is a game designer and entrepreneur of digital and real-world games based in New York City, and a founder of Playmatics. Their most recent game is the Breaking Bad: The Interrogation interactive comic. Before Playmatics, Fortugno was the Director of Game Design at gameLab, where he was a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, and served as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and has participated in the construction of the school's game design curriculum. Nick is also a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in New York City and Amsterdam since 2006, and co-creator of the Big Urban Game for Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2003. Nick's most recent writing about games can be found in the anthology Well-Played 1.0: Video Game, Value, and Meaning, published by ETC-Press.

Sam Strick is an up and coming game designer, and co-founder of Laboratory, with a BA in Design and Technology from Parsons the New School of Design. He’s been employed by ‘The Man’ on various occasions (MGM, and more recently MTV), and worked at the 92nd Y’s satellite venue in Tribeca (NYC) as the curator and host of his own lecture series ‘State of Games’. Sam is admittedly obsessed with Japan, and has lived there on two occasions (which he holds very dear), and often speaks of himself in third person.

Dave Warth is in Hello Laser, which performs every Thursday at 9pm with the Boss. Outside of NYC, Laser has done the Charleston Comedy Festival, the New Orleans Improv Festival, the Philly Improv Festival, the Chicago Improv Festival, and the Hawaii Improv Festival. Hello Laser is really, really good, and Dave's really happy to be a part of it. Dave also sometimes does a solo show about Stalin called "I Will Crush You". Dave hearts Kelly.

Available to play on Sunday Oct 10 at 10 AM in Media Park
Remember playground 4 Square? Equal parts polite and cut-throat, simple and complex? We've scaled it up, waaaaay up! Come try a spiraled 9 Square, 16 Square with 2 balls, Giant-4-Square with paddles, maybe even 25 Square! This is Foursquare meets Jack and the Beanstalk! Come join us and test the limits of this timeless game. All ages welcome.

About the Designers: Design Studio for Social Intervention

Founded in January 2005, the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) is dedicated to changing how social change is imagined, developed and deployed here in the United States. DS4SI is a space for artists, activists, academics and other social interventionists to reframe, re-imagine, and reinvigorate the possibilities of social change. We borrow methodologies from design practices and implement them in unconventional and innovative ways. DS4SI brings together urban designers, cultural architects, community activists, game designers, performance artists, and youth organizers to translate design theory into public interventions through youth and community engagement.

Our work has been greatly inspired by game design, and we have used games as actual interventions, as metaphors to help organizers think about systems, and as a way to shift social activism into using more of a game design approach in terms of using spectacle, delight and the magic circle when they design campaigns, actions and interventions. Square Root was first played in Dudley Square, a busy bus station in Roxbury, MA. The founders and game designers at DS4SI are Kenneth Bailey and Lori Lobenstine.

Garnet Hertz's video game concept car combines a car-shaped arcade game cabinet with a real world electric vehicle to produce a video game system that actually drives. OutRun offers a unique mixed reality simulation as one physically drives through an 8-bit video game. The windshield of the system features custom software that transforms the real world into an 8-bit video game, enabling the user to have limitless gameplay opportunities while driving. Hertz has designed OutRun to de-simulate the driving component of a video game: where game simulations strive to be increasingly realistic (usually focused on graphics), this system pursues "real" driving through the game. Additionally, playing off the game-like experience one can have driving with an automobile navigation system, OutRun explores the consequences of using only a computer model of the world as a navigation tool for driving.

OutRun is on loan to IndieCade from Otis Art Institute and is part of the exhibition MAKE:CRAFT, taking place October 2 - December 4, 2010 at the Institute's Ben Maltz Gallery.

MAKE:CRAFT features a survey of artists who combine hand making and building techniques to create, engineer and hack unique, mostly functional devices, objects, machines and accessories; making either a social/political statement, creating new markets for individual styled products, or creating inventive ways to experience the tactile world, non-virtual, the “real.” Artists in the exhibition: Kim Abeles, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Frau Fiber, Garnet Hertz, Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, Seth Kinmont, Liza Lou, David Prince, Mark Newport, Alyce Santoro, Shada/Jahn (Steve Shada and Marisa Jahn), Eddo Stern.