The Tanks at Tate Modern, Wayfinding & Signage

There's a reason murder mystery dinners are more fun when they're the real deal than when you take them out of a box. Why would you ever want to play (or create) a real-time game? Because. You have to keep track and not fall behind. You have to be available on someone else’s schedule. On the surface, this seems incredibly limiting. Whatever it is, it’s in someone else’s control. It may be a continuous one-time experience or an episodic one. In real-time gaming, on the other hand, you have to be there, ready to play, at the time the game is available. All of these games are on-demand, since you decide when to take them off the shelf or switch on the Playstation or abandon the game for dinner. Similarly, in a video game, you are controlled by the time of the game-the time you have until your energy bar goes to zero or all the aliens are killed.īut all of these examples represent time inside the game. You can’t jump from owning Baltic Avenue to winning Monopoly to debt you progress through the game as it unfolds. Of course, most on-demand games are sequential-you move your pawn, I move my rook-and the sequences form an internal real-time aspect to the game.

On-demand games start and end when you choose. What do I mean by on-demand and real-time? Real-time gaming is controlled by an external clock. And I mean experiment, because I don’t have a bias, or even truly, a hypothesis, as to which component will be better, more popular, more compelling. What's more important: convenience or realism? I’m working on a game design project now that involves an interesting experiment: a blend of real-time and on-demand gaming.

The Tanks at Tate Modern, Wayfinding & Signage