SFZero
"Players around the world complete creative tasks in their cities."
January 2006 - Present
Over 5000 players from San Francisco to London to Baghdad have completed over ten thousand tasks, transforming their everyday environment into a playing field and making the world more interesting for the people around them.
SFZero has been praised by NPR, CNET, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal and more.
Flashback [game]
"Flashback is a game in which you complete real-world missions with the aim of de- and re-constructing American History and connecting with others to change the world. You begin at level 1 with 0 points. As you complete missions and advance in level you gain the skills and historical knowledge you'll need to develop strategies for overcoming persistent historical injustices and defeating your class enemies."

Flashback is funded by a grant from the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting. For more information, see the
American History and Civics Initiative press release.



flashback.paragoogle.com [demo site]
Helen Chanam
A sprawling urban epic. Told by doctored book, hidden floppy disk, sticker streetcorner narrative, instant message spambot, art gallery exhibition, multi-user text-based dungeon, craigslist personals, PGP encryption, spray-painted stencil, free voicemail service, personal terrorism.
Funded in part by the University of Chicago
Festival of the Arts.







CriticalCity [consulting]
CriticalCity is a mission-based game set Milan, designed to change the way people interact with cities. Inspired in part by SFZero, the
preview site launched to the public in October 2008 has attracted the attention of the
the press and a growing community of players. In February 2009, CriticalCity
won the Kublai Award. With the help of this grant, two of CriticalCity's founders were able to come to San Francisco to work on the future of their game with Playtime in April 2009.
We worked with Augusto and Matteo to articulate a compelling vision for CriticalCity, and to set appropriate goals for the progress of the game and its players. Using the preview site's strengths as a starting point, we helped them to draft an innovative game structure designed to increase player participation in CriticalCity, and to encourage players to be more actively involved in cities and neighborhoods throughout Italy.




We're looking forward to helping the CriticalCity team build the next phase of their already-impressive game. Until then, check out the fully-functional
CriticalCity game preview.
Ghosts of a Chance
[in production]
A game for the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Ghosts of a Chance
“Ghosts of a Chance” invites gamers to create objects and mail them to the museum for an "exhibition" curated by two game characters posing as employees. But the "game within the game" is also a challenge to uncover clues to the narrative that binds those objects, and to investigate the way objects embody histories.
Virtual Visits to Para-Chicago

We made this text-based multi-user space modeled on Chicago under
Helen Chanam's identity and got it accepted into
Rhizome, a virtual museum! For further description, see the text below:
"A game set in virtual Chicago. "The Loop" becomes an intertextual spatiality: nodes conflate city intersections and unfinished manuscripts. A narrative begins to unfold, assigning the user a role that he/she may decide to ignore. At the same time, a paradoxical metanarrative arises from the explicit absence of the protagonist and her implicit presence as the very interface itself: that which mediates subjectivity. This could be described as a confusion between text and context.
The protocols which govern and regulate my cartography-impulse extend beyond physical space. I allow myself to indulge in a protocol which renders all nodes equivalent.
Rhizome Terms: access, allegory, artificial life, body, Conceptual, contextual, death, desire, digital, disappearance, game, Generative, historical, HTML, immersion, interface, Internet, Java, Narrative, network, Perl, posthuman, public space, social space, software, space, Telematic, Text, Virtual reality"
"I remember the MUD landscape I designed, where it was always the winter of the broken twig, the summer of heated abjection; there was the cooling sea where Clara might go, smeared with shit, piss, and cum, mixing with the tepid waters; there was the neophyte Alan, hysterically picking up coins and menses in any combination, delving into tunnels, falling into the vaginal opening in the floor, labial opening in the wall, the clock bleeding second after second. Nothing happened that couldn't be corrected by prayer as Death and Tiffany fucked murderously, returning the unstable world to where it used to be. There were Man to be fought in this world where everyone is naked, crawling, where the Pub offered female and male cum, as well as piss to drink, where delirium is the order of the night. I could fight with Honey there, and violated I could die piecemeal. I never programmed the eating of corpses, but the possibility was there, running ragged through the body of the other in the midst of bodies. Everyone sexed everyone else, every hole offered itself, the mazes crashed against impossible topologies, and there were prisons from which it was impossible to escape, ever, before the shutdown-closure of the world. But most of all I remember wandering within all of this, things dripping, stumbling about at the debris of my own creation built upon the structure of a clean economy, clean game, with foreclosed though wounded bodies. Here one slid with every hole filled with fingers and other proturberances, with burbling or mewling mouths, with insatiable hungers for bodies among bodies. I remember returning in my dreams to dissolute programming, walking along the path strewn with feces, the two of us covered in menstrual blood, the blood-red sun crashed hard against horizon of the text. Build one yourself she said, motion begets motion."
(source: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/sondheim__internet_text/an.txt)
ACTIVATE MUD
Speaking Engagments and Conferences
Previously
Upcoming
[
contact us]
CV4U
Playtime is: Sean Mahan, Ian Kizu-Blair, Sam Lavigne


You can also download our CV:
playtime_cv.pdf
Contact
Antiboredom is no more. If you'd like to get in
touch with us, please visit
Sam and Ian at
Situate, or Sean at
Intended Effect. Thanks!
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