Emergent Game (www.emergentgame.org.uk) is the envelope for a mixed reality game being developed through a series of collaborations (with those aware they are influencing the project) and interactions (with those not directly aware they are influencing the project).

Taking as its starting point the definition of emergent game-play as the “creative use of a game in ways unexpected by the game designer's original intent” and then asking “but what if the design of the game itself was emergent?”, Emergent Game explores our interactions with digital technologies, physical objects, geographical locations and the other players who are also moving across the boundaries between these.

The first phase of Emergent Game starts off rooted in the digital: a vanguard of anonymous players is using Twitter as a vehicle to introduce - and document the development of - the avatars that represent them within The Game. Twitter was selected for this purpose in response to a growing evangelism coming from a prolific group of bloggers based in Birmingham. They're advocating its use amongst wider groups of people; now we're instigating its appropriation for a use that extends the typical updates of where people are and what they are doing.

In parallel with this, we are organising a series of workshops with college students aimed at finding out what digital technologies they use on a regular basis, and in what ways they use them. Together we will explore how mobile phones, digital cameras and internet applications can be combined to facilitate different modes of game-play.

The avatars being used in The Game are customised soft toys from charity shops. For the second phase of game-play these will be taken out into the streets as players attempt challenges and missions that will have coalesced out of the workshops. Success within The Game will almost certainly be dependent on a cross-section of skills ranging from the ability to create, maintain and shift alliances within the online community, through to the creative use of real, digital and imagined resources.

As The Game picks up pace we are already finding our preconceptions about space are being challenged. Pulled in different directions between funders who see Emergent Game as a “city-wide game for Birmingham” and by our awareness that identity and location are both transmutable within the game's boundaries, where do we find the intersection that allows The Game to be played out anywhere by anyone? Is it possible to have an all-inclusive game, or do the peculiarities of place (even when mediated through technology) necessitate location-specific clusters?

www.emergentgame.org.uk