Last summer we defined our quest to be the quest of helping discovery. Meaningless ad blurb in less than 64 characters found at our website: 'We bring discovery into your lives'. What kind of discovery is there to be done walking there on the streets with a mobile phone in your pocket?
Some people do it even without a phone. I was well inspired this little documentary about the London Perambulator, Mr Nick Papadimitriou. Essentially he's this bloke who walks around and turns everyday things into a sort of poetry. If you haven't watched the clip before, do yourself a favor and watch it.
So Mr Nick is described to be 'a mystic who hoovers out magic out of stone and brick'. Another fitting quote: 'He is an eccentric, there's no doubt about it'.
What impressed me personally was Mr Nick's way of immersing himself into the surroundings on his walks. Maybe experiencing things was like that when one is a child. Magical and mystical. Makes me think that as adults, our minds become very fixed and analytic to our own detriment. The magic is almost lost and it only remains in our dreams. Mr Nick seems to be in an altered state of consciousness on his little walks, hence he is an eccentric?
I believe that we all experience altered states of consciousness just like Mr Nick. Reading a book or playing a game transcends our everyday thoughts to somewhere magical. We're entertained and exhilarated. Why not try and find an altered state of mind on your walking trips?
I think our fixed attitudes about life and things, being adults and everything being such serious business, stifle us from seeing the magic that still exist there if we took the time to see it. There's a ton of sports tracking apps for mobile devices with various calorie counters and things that measure our performance. Our society has become obsessed with performance and I don't believe I'm wrong if I say that we have bought the idea of judging all our actions by performance. Even casual exercise needs to be justified and measured. Why?
For Hoodownr I wanted a diametrically opposite approach to all that performance measuring. Sure, the game mechanism monitors your steps and shows your progress and there are leaderboards to climb if you want to. But I sincerely hope that people would find the magic and wonder of their surroundings and the people there thru our game. This I feel is our biggest challenge with Hoodownr, to fuse a easy entry concept (taking over hoods) and a more deeper concept of psychogeography or deep topography or whatever you wish to call it.
After a lot of playtesting I believe we've got the right formula for just that. Still a lot of things to do and think about tho. It's very hard to explain the game experience to people that have never played it before. It's like explaining role-playing: you have to do it yourself to understand the fun.
In the next few weeks we'll be able to do a bit of testing again with the new build. I'm very keen to hear what our test subjects have to say. =)
More stuff happening soon, great things to look forward to so please keep on following the blog, I promise you won't turn into complete nut job perambulating aimlessly somewhere (fingers crossed).
Sami
Hastur
