The workshops where pitched at a good level, not starting right at the bottom and assuming a basic understanding of electronics (an understanding I didn’t have). But I didn’t mind as this made the workshops more sociable as others who did understand helped us laymans muddle through together. I merrily ended the day knowing how to power and programme enough lights and buzzers to earn instant gratification and get thinking on how to implement this into something fun.

It was interesting to hear the more experienced hackers present their work at the end of the day, and that even at this level a lot of people felt compelled to apologise and confess that they hadn’t written all the code themselves or had copied circuits from others, as if it was somehow cheating to not be able to claim ownership to every step of the process.

I know I was suffering the same needless sense of guilt in the workshops and it was reassuring to hear those more experienced feel it too. It reminded me that most people aren’t experts, we all need to start somwhere and we’re all learning as we go along, sharing our ideas and projects so we can take and re-appropriate these to make them our own. Because I don’t want to be an expert….actually that’s a lie I secretly wish by some magical fluke I’d turned out to be a programming and electronics genius, but that’s impossible and besides the point…Because you don’t ‘need’ to be an expert to play, and now I can.

Combined cooing over Steph Thirion’s games mod workshop and layer tennis over the past few weeks got me thinking about a project I’m looking into running that sits halfway between the two.

Currently lacking in a catchy title, the basic gist is a chain processed game/interactive art. Starting with an original (but basic) games code in Processing- this would then be passed along a chain of X people who would each make X number of changes to the code before passing it onto the next person and so on until it gets to the end and we’re left with some weird mutilated but (potentially) beautiful evolution of interactive art/ game.

Of course there are a lot of variables/ issues I need to work through before moving ahead (such as what happens if the code breaks, how many people to pass it through, what constitutes a change etc…) , and it was great to be able to talk through the idea and issues with some of the guys form FizzPOP on Weds eve who pointed out two main things,

1) Why just send the code through a linear chain, and instead allow it to branch out (e.g. one person passes on the code to two people and so on)- this way if the code breaks it doesn’t matter too much as it will naturally continue along another branch- (such a simple and good idea that I’m hitting myself for not thinking of it)

2) The original code Thirion used for his workshop was  ‘over engineered’ to provide it with the hooks that allowed non coders to adapt and change the game: e.g. you didn’t need to write the code to create multiple balls as it was always there waiting to be adapted’. This point was quite a hard one for me, as it left me with two options,

a) If the code is over engineered, then by doing so I’m potentially enforcing limits on the designs evolution – and also limiting the projects scope.

b) but if I don’t, then how accessible would the code be to those with little to no coding experience (and yes I do want to include these people within the chain).

hmmm well a little pondering on the way home allowed me to justify route a- because in creating any game a designer already enforces the limits of what a player can do- and this could also apply if I considered the processes of adapting the code as a game within itself. But also by spreading out when people with and without coding experience interact with the code then someone with experience might actually add new hooks/ code that we hadn’t even been considered at the beginning and those with no experience can move forward and evolve the code using these.

Does all this make sense? Well it does in my head, which for the time being is what matters. But I’m hoping to do some testing of this over the coming weeks with help from the people at FizzPOP (fingers crossed). But if you have any thoughts, interest then please drop me a line- and if you are s**t hot with Processing and might be able to help code the starting ‘game’ then I’d be super interested in hearing from you.