2024: What We've Been Up To and Upcoming Taster Nights

Hello! Nathan here, hoping that your 2024 has kicked off nicely and you’re still making time for some fun for the rest of the summer. It’s been a fantastic year for us, so I wanted to share with you some of the things Boho has been up to in 2023, and some of what we’ve got planned for 2024.

But first, I would love to invite you our Taster Nights coming up next month, where we’ll showcase some recent projects among some conversations about systems and games. Come play some games and have a chat! Both events are free and you’re most welcome to pass this invitation along, just make sure you register at the links:

Sydney: Tuesday, 12th March 7pm at Annandale Neighbourhood Centre

https://events.humanitix.com/boho-interactive-taster-night-sydney

Canberra: Thursday, 21st March 7pm at Ainslie Gorman Arts Centre

https://events.humanitix.com/boho-interactive-taster-night-canberra

So what have been been doing? Well, early in 2023 we created The Best Kelp Secrets for the Future States Tasmania team of CSIRO. It’s a game about the future of the east coast of Tasmania, and the tipping points that towns along the coast must navigate over the coming decades. It features community decision-making, changing demographics, and heroic lobsters protecting kelp forests from sea urchins. Dr Jess Melbourne-Thomas and Dr Delphi Ward have been running the game with a broad range of groups in Tassie, and the game was featured on the Gamifying Government panel at PAX Aus in Melbourne in August—which you can read all about over on the CSIRO website.

We spent the bulk of this year collaborating with our friends at Population Health Exchange (PHXchange) from ANU’s Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health. Together we embarked on a project to develop a game about the relationship between researchers and research-users (policy makers, communities, etc). The result was Found in Translation, a game where two teams must run a restaurant in pretty dire conditions but work together to reshape the model of collaboration (and prevent the restaurant from being turned into a hot-dog shack). We were inspired by our friends at Coney and their practice of playful activism—in Found in Translation, players literally change and rewrite the rules of the game to fix a broken system, with a goal of bringing that attitude to the systems they live and work within.

Alongside the game, PHXchange (led by Dr. Erin Walsh) have devised a beautifully playful set of research mechanisms to learn how the game is impacting people. It’s been a lovely way to help shape the game’s development and our own making practice, while contributing to an environment of learning through play. Our favourite mechanism is the anonymised posture tracking, which turns everyone into colourful stick figures.

Boho and the PHXchange research team setting up Found in Translation, processed in OpenPose

We prototyped Found in Translation at the Uncharted Territory festival in July, and since then we’ve run it for a few events and conferences. It’s been very well received not just by researchers and policy makers, but by groups that need to collaborate towards common goals.

And right now we’re wrapping up work on a new game for CSIRO’s Future States team, this time about the South-West Slopes region of NSW. We’ve traded lobsters for sheep, kelp for box gums, and we’re having a wonderful time working with Dr. Katrina Szetey fleshing out future scenarios for the area.

As always, if you’d like to chat about any of these games, or working together on something, or just want say hi, we’d love to hear from you! Shoot us an email, or reach us on Facebook or Instagram. Don’t forget to register for our Taster Nights, above.

Best wishes for 2024!

Games Nights and New Workshops: An Update on Boho in 2022

Hi there! Nathan here with a quick update on what we’ve been up to lately, and what we’ve got on the horizon.

Last month we ran a couple of events in Canberra and Sydney, showcasing games from recent projects and showing off the wonderful design work by Julia Johnson. Thanks to everyone who made it out, and thanks to Events ACT for helping make the Canberra event possible.

One of the projects we were showing off was Canberra 2060, which was commissioned by Canberra Theatre Centre in late 2020. In this game, players worked together to safeguard the city of Canberra (and their own suburbs) against hazards of the 21st Century, by building different types of resilience for the city.

Pic by Anna Mayberry

We also ran a couple of games from Get the Kids and Run, our collaboration with Earth Observatory Singapore and the Singapore Science Centre. We played Busy Mayors, where incumbent mayoral teams have to balance election campaigning against the threat of a typhoon, and Volcano Town, which explores how cities come to be in areas prone to disaster.

Pic by Anna Mayberry, with Julia Johnson defending her mayoral decisions

We got to try out a couple of games we made with the School of Cybernetics, including CAPTCHA Game, where players are young artificial intelligences learning what constitutes a fire hydrant, and The Wild Temptations of Olympic Village, where players navigate the ethics of biometric data to guide the Olympic water polo team to gold.

Pic by Anna Mayberry

And lastly, we got to share a game from A Week in the Bush, our collaboration with The Lowitja Institute creating games about ethical research practice in Indigenous communities. In the game New in Town, players were tasked with investigating a failed health research project in a remote community, and finding out what people really needed.

Pic by Anna Mayberry

We were also lucky to be joined in Canberra by Dr Ben Swift, who led a fascinating chat about feedback loops and structures of power.

Pic by Anna Mayberry

Outside of those events, we’ve been developing new workshops, suitable for teambuilding or as a primer for systems thinking and disaster preparedness.

We’ve given Best Festival Ever an update, with new bands, a couple new challenges and a fresh coat of paint. Last week we ran it for the Masters cohort at ANU’s School of Cybernetics, which was an absolute pleasure.

On top of that, we have a brand-new workshop called Save Grandma, drawing on our collaboration with Earth Observatory Singapore. This workshop explores disaster preparedness, resilience and decision making in times of crisis.

Pic by Anna Mayberry

We’re available to run these workshops and more between now and the end of June. If you’d like to book a session, or have a conversation about collaborating on something new, get in touch!

Destiny's Child and Remote Games

“an actor in a complex system controls almost nothing, but influences almost everything”

– Scott Page

Hi! Nathan here. I hope wherever you’re reading this from you’re doing well, and taking care of yourself.

The week before everything collapsed and we all went home for a few months Nikki, Muttley and I spent a day with the 3AI Institute at ANU. We ran a couple of sessions of Best Festival Ever, where one of the groups managed to get a crowdfunded music festival running, only to resort to a scorched earth policy the moment things took a turn for the worse. It was wonderful chatting to the staff and students about the process of making Best Festival Ever, and how the game is impacted by different playstyles.

The last few months has been an interesting time to think about remote interaction – how games can be delivered digitally but still create a meaningful, live experience. Over the last few years we’ve toyed with games that can be self-facilitated, and remote games present an opportunity to pursue that. When a game is run by someone who downloaded it ten minutes beforehand it has to be clear and very difficult to break – we can’t rely on our charm and improvisation skills to smooth out the wrinkles.

So we’ve been playing a bunch of games, and messing around with things like Twine, and David’s been making some lovely little games with Coney in the UK – check them out over here.

We’ve also been talking to some groups about some new commissions– games looking at systems like health research, and the ways that cities can recover from shocks. There’s going to be some big conversations over the next little while and we’re eager to engage.

If you’ve got an idea for a project you’d like to work with us on, or some interesting remote games you think we should play, drop us a line!

Building a new work for Safework NSW's Consultation@Work Conference

At the end of October, for Safework NSW’s Consultation@Work Conference, we presented a consultation best practice workshop. Participants included workers and health safety representatives from around the state, and we were assisted by Health and Safety Inspectors who guided conversations with their expert knowledge.

The workshop was developed over several meetings with inspectors and Safework NSW staff. In these meetings we linked systems science to issues of workplace health and safety, and built a narrative featuring a workplace incident and characters occupying different roles in a factory. We wanted to present decisions that were hard to make, and scenarios that would provoke discussion.

Throughout the workshop, participants took part in several games responding to the events in the narrative – prioritising workplace values, managing a safe factory floor, and responding to a crisis. The narrative and games served as a reference point for conversations with the inspectors, where participants could respond to the narrative, discuss their own experiences, and develop strategies for better consultation practice in their own workplace.

We took elements of previous games, including Best Festival Ever and Run A Bank, and tried to pack a narrative and repeated games into a tight 60 minutes. Another challenge was building the workshop for over 100 people across 18 tables, but with the tables working towards a common goal. We designated the tables as Workers, Managers, and Health Safety Reps, and led them through some games that were just for the table, and other games where collaboration and consultation with other tables was crucial for success. The tables also provided an opportunity for people to role-play to a particular perspective.

It was interesting seeing people take on roles in a workplace they don’t usually occupy. One table was characterised as managers and clearly justified their priorities early on, before reflecting after the game that were they to play again they would reverse them completely. We noticed the ultimate goal stay the same between tables – the goal of safety in the workplace – but the strategies to get there were different, and those strategies were all based on different perspectives. The inspectors did a wonderful job of unpacking these experiences in the context of safety regulation and workplace culture.

Working with Safework NSW was an exciting opportunity to adapt our games and skills to a new setting, and work directly with experts in a field with which we don’t have much experience. Like many of our processes, this development was all about listening and finding games to communicate stories from a group of experts. On the day the participants played hard, only suffered a few minor disasters, and had animated discussions rich in experience and passion. Plus Nathan got to meet Adam Spencer.

Boho on Thursday Island

In October Nathan, Rachel and I flew to Cairns, and then to Horn Island, and then took one of the most beautiful ferry rides I have ever taken across from Horn Island to Thursday Island. The island is stunning, the water is a beautiful crystal clear blue and it’s quite strange to see somewhere that looks so much like a resort and yet also feels incredibly remote. I was reminded of my trips to Cobar or Tennant Creek – but surrounded by ocean instead of land.

We were heading the furthest north in Australia we’d ever been to deliver a bespoke workshop day for the Torres Strait Islander Researcher’s Community of Practice. We'd tailored the workshop for the group, and combined it with an evening games workshop in their community space. Boho was invited to deliver the workshop as part of a larger study by the group into experimental learning styles and Boho provided the 'games' arm of that research – giving provocation to how games and interactive play might open opportunities for conversation, and discussion around the systems experienced in the Torres Strait.

We stayed the night at The Grand Hotel next to the ferry terminal, had dinner in the Malu Paru restaurant (which was incredible – even for the vegos amongst us) and watched this sunset.

The next morning we set up in the dining room and began the workshops. It’s never an easy thing to arrive on an island where there has already been so much unwanted activity and involvement from colonizers, but I suspect it is a much harder thing to welcome an unknown group to the island – and to have them share some of their work with locals at your request.

On this part Boho have to thank the group for their welcome, their openness with us and their tough love towards us also. It spoke fathoms of their experience, the issues and undercurrents that they negotiate, and their hope and ambition for the future. We sincerely hope they are funded again – not for ourselves – (although we would be honored to work with them again) but for the continuance of the project.

The workshop looked more into the process that we use to develop Boho shows, and the systems mapping process we employ to make the games that we do, and the stories we chose to tell about each system. We try to use this process to help us become aware of some of the systems at play within a wider complex system, and some of the complex problems or conflicts – as well as synchronicities – that might come out of them. These then inform the direction of our work and the focus of our games – in the hope that they begin to illuminate some of the complexities – without imposing judgments upon them.

The groups in the workshop came up with two small systems to play with and interrogate. A fictional fish and chip shop on TI, and a park area. Together we went through the process of identifying the boundaries (physical and temporal), flows (of information and products), user groups and their values . Then together we talked through what a game of that system might be able to explore, that is difficult to understand through explanation alone.

We then played through another systems game called Run A Bank, had a wonderful lunch where we sat and enjoyed the stunning view – yet again – and then began taking the group through mapping their organization.

After this was complete we did a very quick pack up and raced across the street to set up the community center to present some of our games for the locals.

We played Busy Mayors - a game where the group support the mayor of a town as they try to decide what to do as a typhoon heads towards their town. This was a great ice breaker and lots of fun to watch everyone get involved. After Busy Mayors, Rachel and I played through the Programming Game from BFE and a funny little card game called Sneaky Volcano. I was in charge of Sneaky Volcano and while I believe I was playing a strange new version of it (apparently I made up some new rules that I was unaware of) those that I played it with seemed to have fun, including some of the shyer teenagers who had turned up.

The night seemed a success and we were relieved and pleased to have been of credit to the group. We hope to be able to go back and work with them again.

If all of that was not enough, the next morning before our ferry Vinnita Mosby generously packed us all into her car and took us on a short tour of the island. Up to Green Hill Fort for some incredible views and a short history lesson, past the school where so many children from islands further out board during the week and past so many fancy cars from the mainland are left to rust on the side of the roads because it’s too expensive to get the parts and there is no-one up there who can fix them. It’s an amazing and strange place to have visited and we are grateful for the opportunity.

- Nikki