People separated by thousands of kilometers playing real (not online) games, which help them understand each other’s culture and surroundings better. This is the idea behind social gaming.

Amitesh Grover from Delhi, India and Alex Fleetwood in London organized a dual location sandpit. A group of artists and players gathered to engage in a set of social games and playful experiences in Delhi, and a group of players and artists gathered at the National Theater. Each group was ‘present’ at the other event through a variety of digital connections: through Skype, email, SMS, Facebook, Flickr etc. The reason why they are called ‘social games’ is because they embrace questions of mapping and territory, devise unlikely ways to communicate with corresponding teams in London, and invite consideration of the physical, digital, and social environment of each space.
One of the games was about drawing the map of Delhi in London. Teams in London were shown photographs of landmarks in Delhi and the Delhi group had to instruct the London team on placing them on the map.  The other challenge was to find common things amongst the two groups. The third involved Facebook and proverbs; people had to click photographs of body parts that illustrate the proverb to the best extent possible. This created an interesting montage of photographs on the players’ Facebook profiles. The fourth game was an outdoor game. Teams were walking around a particular path and had to complete tasks and communicate with the team in the other city.

The idea was to transform the properties of a cultural space through play and through a digital window onto another place, using the wifi and 3G networks within both spaces to forge multiple connections between the two locations. Ultimately, the goal of this experimentation is to invite theater artists to use game design to invent new kinds of digital collaboration, intimacy and connectedness.

They plan to have a bigger event where people from 12 countries are participating. It will be a game that will be played in cities at different local times. It will start in Asia at  noon and end in America when its  noon there. What do you think?

Written by Vallabh Rao