May 10 & 11 5pm-9pm
Spring Show 2005
721 Broadway
at Waverly Place
4th Floor
South Elevators
New York, NY 10003
For additional
information email
itp.inquiries@nyu.edu
or call 212.998.1880
| Payphone Warriors | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Abe Burmeister Kenji Sawai HyungJung Kim Ron Shely |
|
| Instructor: | Lantz, Frank | |
| Class: | Big Games | |
| Keywords: | Games, Big Games, Urban Games, Phones | |
| Teams battle for turf by winning controlling of vital city payphones. | ||
| Payphone Warriors pits teams against each other in a strategic battle to control turf by capturing specific city payphones. Spread across the city, the game forces users to rediscover their environment, thinking strategically about how to best use resources. Players capture a payphone by making a call to the Ref, who identifies the player’s position using the phone number. The team controls the phone until another team can capture the phone by making a call. For each minute the team controls the phone, they score a point. The team with the most points at the end of the game wins. | ||
| Background: | Payphone Warriors revitalizes the existing and often neglected city payphone. As cities evolve, important pieces of infrastructure from trolley tracks to piers, fall to the wayside, yet remain fixtures within the landscape. City dwellers often find new uses for these pieces of infrastructure. New York piers have lately become art galleries and playgrounds. The spread of mobile phones have left a huge network of devices with little use in many cities. In Payphone Warriors, we tap into this infrastructure to give shape to a new type of experience. The artist, Amit Pitaru has referred to such devices as \"fermented technologies\"—technology grown ripe for new uses.
Payphone Warriors invites players to explore the city and rediscover elements of the environment they may have forgotten about. Turning the entire city into a playground, players engage with the urban environment in new ways. Using the theme of gangs battling for turf, guarding their vital communication device, the payphone, Payphone Warriors layers a patina of paranoia and excitement across the everyday interaction with the city. Strategizing how to capture phones and spend their limited number of quarters, teams develop plans for stalking players, guarding phones and running wild to as many phones as possible. Players move through the real-world interacting with players and non-players alike as the game progresses. We would like to run games of Payphone Warriors during the conference. The game scales in both time and space to meet the demands of different urban environments. In New York City, with a dense city grid, the game plays as fast-paced action game. However, it can also be played over several days in looser urban areas, giving teams more time to strategize and methodically capture territory. | |
| Audience: | Players of any age enjoy the game. Sending you out into the street, racing and stalking other players, Payphone Warriors transforms the city into a playground. | |
| User Scenario: | We will run several games of Payphone Warriors each night during the ITP show. We will post a a descriptive poster and solicit players to sign up for games on the hour. We will take the players (between 10-15 people) down to the street and play in the blocks around ITP. Each game will run for about 15 minutes. | |
| Technical System Description: | Players capture territory by using a payphone to call the game Ref. We use the caller ID to track the position of the phone bank. The Ref enters the capture in the scoresheet. For each minute the team controls the phone, the team scores a point. The team with most points at the end of the game wins.
For the show we would love to have use of an area where we can use a computer (a desktop or we can provide a laptop) and a big whiteboard to keep track of the score of the game. We will also need to be able to use cellphones (we provide) to track incoming calls from payphones. Ideally, we would use a projector to project on the whiteboard the scoresheet and map. But if we can\'t use a projector, we will simply draw out the scoresheet on the whiteboard. | |