Russel Davies on playfulness...

As part of the Playful talk at the end of the London Games Festival Russell Davies talked about the importance in games of pretending, and how pretending is a vital part of adulthood. After all, he said, isn’t having a Breitling watch all about the fantasy of being a pilot, and isn’t Jason Bourne’s popularity down to being a secret agent who spends most of his time commuting? Life needs novelty and hidden qualities, Davies said, noting the restrictions of a ‘total vision’ like Volkswagen’s piano stairs to be all they are on a single glance.



He also contended that today’s vision of augmented reality games in which you must peer into the screen all the time, have got it wrong. "They should be part of the world, not intrude on it," he said. Davies’ solution was his lighthearted but promising proposal of the SAT, or Situated Audio Platform, a geolocation game-cum-application for iPhone in which audio is stamped on to places. Near that place and the iPhone beeps until you point it at the spot and the audio plays. Naturally, games could easily follow, as his video demo showed, liberally splashed with laser and explosion sound effects as his fictional user tried to find an attacker before time ran out. Pretending, then, very much situated in the real world.