Temporal Expansion in Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines

The spread of mobile phones and mobile computers is transforming our lives, steadily leading us towards a world of “ubiquitous computing” in which computation and digital media are embedded into the world around us, potentially becoming available anywhere and anytime. Mobility and ubiquity have the potential to transform theatre, creating new forms of performance and spectating which combine “real” and “virtual” worlds, that respond to participants’ locations, or that are finely interwoven with the patterns of their daily lives. In doing so, these kinds of mobile and ubiquitous performances structure our experience of time in ways distinctive to this new genre. A detailed analysis of the use of time in Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines (2006), demonstrates how pervasive games may coordinate between multiple temporal structures not only to affect the spectator’s role within the work and experience of it but also to empower them to shape this encounter according to the variable contexts determined by their day-to-day lives.

Day of the Figurines

That something distinctive is occurring in terms of the temporal organization of entertainment is particularly noticeable in multi-platform works, which span different types of ICT applications and therefore encourage different forms of temporal organization and social co-operation. One of such works is Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines, a massively multiplayer board-game for up to a thousand participants that players can interact with remotely via SMS through their mobile phones from anywhere in the world. The world premiere took place in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer, as part of Trampoline, from September 28 to October 21, 2006. On this occasion, the game was run for twenty-four days for 141 players. The game was then played from December 6–30, 2006 in Singapore at the National Museum where it was again run for 146 players. In 2007, while on tour in the UK, it received an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica.

Day of the Figurines was developed by Blast Theory, a company which, since the late 1990s, has developed influential mixed-media performances and installations, in collaboration with Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Laboratory as part of a larger research project, IPerG, funded by the European Commission’s IST program.

IPerG’s principal research objective is the investigation of pervasive games. These extend conventional computer games in one or more of three dimensions. Spatially they usually operate through location-based experiences that respond to players’ positions and movements, which may be designed to fit a specific site. Socially, they build on the primarily social use of personal devices, especially mobile phones, and the establishment of new relationships between players and non-players, principally spectators in public settings. Temporally, they operate by finely interweaving game experiences with the patterns of daily life, once again building on the characteristics of devices such as mobile phones, which enable us to communicate with others at many times and in many places. Previous works by Blast Theory, all developed in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Laboratory, have explored the themes of spatial expansion. Thus Can You See Me Now? (2003–5), winner of the Golden Nica (2003) at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, utilized the Global Positioning System (GPS) to track performers’ movements through an actual city and then map these onto the movements of their avatar through a corresponding virtual model of this city as part of a game of chase with online players. Other works have explored social expansions, including Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), which engaged with the boundaries between the fictional world of a game and the physical reality of a city, implicating bystanders on the city streets into its narratives. In contrast, Day of the Figurines set out to explore the theme of the temporal expansion of pervasive games.

Like other works developed collaboratively between Blast Theory and the Nottingham Laboratory, Day of the Figurines presents spectators with unusual interfaces. Here, conventions established by previous location-based games are subverted in that a physical space is constructed as a display, an output device in human...