In about a week and a half, Come Out & Play 2007 will kick-off as part of PICNIC ‘07 in Amsterdam. Unfortunately I am not able to make the festival due to scheduling issues, but past collaborators David Jimison and Jeff Crouse have a game so Georgia Tech will be proudly represented. Hopefully my accepted entry Disavow! will find its way into to CO&P ‘08 this coming spring in NYC.

Out of curiosity I surveyed this year’s entries based on my sub-genres for appropriative games (list below), and was surprised at what I found. Given the perceived mobile sophistication of Europe compared to the US, I expected a large percentage of games to heavily leverage mobile and fall into the realm of pervasive prototyping/ubiquitous gaming. Now while a few of the games do leverage higher end mobile features (the Nokia N95 seems popular), just as many employed no computation at all. In fact, I would go as far as to wager that the big games will be the stars of the festival.

I’m hoping to get a few on site reports, and will post them if they come in.

Big Games

• Bocce Drift
• Censorsh**
• CounterSquirt
• Human Snake
• Manila
• People Watching
• Safari

Pervasive Games

• 3001
• CollecTic
• FUSE INVASION
• Lumenatio
• Navball
• OMMRPG
• Snap Shot City
• The Target

Ubiquitous Games

• Can You See Me Now?
• de Pong

Alternate Reality Games

• TAH II

It looks we have another mass-market ARG states side. Over the weekend, a JJ Abrams / Bad Robot branded trailer ran with the new Transformers movie. The cover name of the project is “Cloverfield,” but that is most certainly not the film’s name. The trailer follows a group of party-goers around New York (cinema verite-style) until a bunch of explosions start tearing apart the city. There is a growing vibe that this game is to promote a HP Lovecraft-based project.

So far we have a few sites (in-game & commentary):

• Ethan Haas Was Right
• Ethan Hass Was Wrong
• 1-18-08
• Ain’t It Cool News
• Joystiq
• Cinematical
• Ufiction Forums

Fun stuff so far. I hope Abrams takes this to the level of The Lost Expirience and we get some significant real-world cross-over. If you get through the material (find spoilers somewhere else lazy ones), you’ll learn that August 1st is a big day. Interesting.