Luke Walker|reklaw

My friends Kate, David, Alex and I (collectively known as Atmosphere Industries) have been working for the last number of months on our latest game, Gentrification: The Game, and it seems we have a hit on our hands! After a fun test-run in Toronto, we took the game to Come Out & Play in Brooklyn, where we took home two big awards: Best use of tech & Best in fest! We were subsequently invited to Hide and Seek in London, where Kate & David ran another very successful UK edition of the game.

This weekend, we’ll be bringing things back to Toronto. I’m a little late getting news up here, as we’re fully booked (we do have a handful of walk-up spots–if you’re really lucky, you might get one.) A bit of good press helped us out, from this great piece by Ryan Bigge in The Toronto Star a few weeks ago, to a Best Bet listing in EyeWeekly and a post on BlogTO (as well as event postings in Now Toronto, Metro’s print edition, and elsewhere), and a piece on ARGNet. Wow! We’re also hoping that there will be some post-game press… I’ll keep you “post”-ed on that (har har).

So hopefully we’ll see you on Sunday! And if you can’t make it out this time but are interested in participating in games and other events we come up with in the future, sign up for the Atmosphere Industries mailing list on our site!

July 23 edit: Added link to Atmosphere and BlogTO posts and mention of Metro.

At a bit late: sxsw was awesome. Jane McGonigal gave a great keynote about the future of happiness and her work in alternate reality games (see the graphic representation.) She mentioned four characteristics of happy-making experiences:

1. Having satisfying work to do
2. The experience of being good at something
3. Spending time with people you like
4. Being part of something bigger

She also mentioned that feedback (not report cards or occasional progess reviews, but feedback and encouragement consistently and continuously), instructions, and a mission help make games more engaging than the real world.The whole thing made me think about how amazingly simple it would be to make everything we do more engaging by taking ourselves a little less seriously and thinking more about how we can make people happy. Too often we (thinking specially of TIG and even more specifically about TIGed) get drawn into a pretty high degree of seriousness because of the environment in which we operate. When it comes to teachers and technology, there don’t to be a lot of happy-go-lucky conversations. The blogosphere, listservs, conferences… everywhere I look is full of conversations about cyberbullying, cheating, lack of access, lack of use, etc etc etc. And as much as we’d like to create paradigm shift, we’re drawn into these conversations and spend a lot of time focusing on all the reasons to not change at all.

So not only was this keynote really inspiring in and of itself, but the fact that it’s key messages are being replayed over and over again, in slightly different ways in all sorts of different venues is really making me think seriously about all of this. In a lot of ways, Jane’s messages are very similar to the things we talk about at WorldBlu Council Meetings, and most recently, Dave Eggers’ TED Talk (thanks to Alberto via Facebook). He started an amazing tutoring program that relies on principles very similar to Jane’s to give students opportunities to learn with a purpose, produce for an audience, and spend time in an environment they enjoy with one-on-one, consistent, continuous feedback. And guess what? It’s “addictive”… and fun. His pirate-supply-store-cum-tutoring-centre is now just one of many “fake” storefronts helping to open learning environments to the community.