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

Guest scientists announced for Best Festival Ever at Seymour Centre

After each presentation of Best Festival Ever, the audience join us for a glass of wine and a conversation with an expert who helps explain how some of the systems science and resilience concepts from the show are used in real-life contexts.We are excited to announce the guest scientists for our Seymour Centre season from Wed 31 May - Sat 3 June. Tickets available here.Wednesday 31 May - Dr Michael HarréAmong the seemingly disparate issues that concern many of us are how our retirement years will be affected by the prevailing financial markets and other economic conditions, and the implications of climate change for the long-term prospects of human life on this planet. Dr Michael Harré's research into complex adaptive systems has applications in both of these areas, among many others. He studies how systems as diverse as financial markets and environmental ecosystems evolve and are affected by variations in human behaviour, with the aim of allowing us to better manage these systems and to thrive as a society in the complex environments in which we live."We are not well equipped, cognitively speaking, to deal with the complexity of the systems that have come to dominate our world: financial and economic systems, climatic systems and even our social interactions and how information is spread. Everything depends on everything else, often leading to the impression that chaos and disorder dominate, and that trying to understand such systems is a lost cause. But if we scratch the surface, there are often some basic underlying principles. Understanding these is the biggest challenge we face today, and this is what my work aims to do.”Thursday 1 June - Dr Joseph LizierDr. Joseph Lizier is an ARC DECRA fellow, and Senior Lecturer in Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and IT. Dr. Lizier studies how biological and bio-inspired systems process information."We examine complex systems - systems made up of a large number of small entities, whose local interactions produce emergent behaviour at the system level. Classic examples are the emergence of consciousness from billions of interactions between neurons, or shock-wave traffic jams emerging from the interaction of many cars."Friday 2 June - Dr Mahendra PiraveenanFrom human relationships to the body's neural networks to the internet, almost everything in the world can be conceptualised as a network, says Dr Mahendra Piraveenan. He studies how complex networks operate, and how this knowledge can be applied to such diverse challenges as arresting contagious disease outbreaks and designing better software."There are many structural and functional commonalities between various types of networks - from the social to the biological to the technical - and we can use our understanding of these to design better networks in each domain.”Saturday 3 June (matinee) - Dr Ramil NigmatullinDr Ramil Nigmatullin uses computational and analytic techniques to study complex systems near criticality and far from equilibrium. He seeks connections between seemingly disparate complex phenomena using the notion of statistical mechanical universality. He is also interested in quantum technologies, in particular, in the questions of robustness and scalability of quantum computers.Saturday 3 June (evening) - Dr Joseph LizierDr. Joseph Lizier is an ARC DECRA fellow, and Senior Lecturer in Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and IT. Dr. Lizier studies how biological and bio-inspired systems process information.

Reflections on Boho's approach to gaming and performance

The ever-erudite Rob Reid dropped me an email a little while ago asking some questions for a paper he's writing on games and performance. Rob is one of the architects of Pop-Up Playground, the Melbourne gathering that has brought together a whole fascinating world of participatory makers, from digital gaming to interactive theatre to roleplaying to escape rooms, and on.

It felt like a good opportunity to wrap some thinking around Boho's practice, where it's come from, how we think about our work, what we're aiming for next. So, here goes.

How do you approach the design process for your interactive work?

Boho’s process really centres around working with research scientists - typically climate or systems scientists, but also urban designers, epidemiologists… Our shows usually draw on concepts from sustainability science, systems thinking, game theory, network theory, complex systems science, resilience - these fields which are often gathered together under a broad heading of ‘complexity’.

Basically, we’re looking at any sort of system in which lots of different elements are interconnected, and what arises from those interconnections. That’s the raw material for our games.

Working with scientists, we’ll go back and forth with them, building up our understanding of the system - whatever that system is - and creating a systems model. That model - which usually looks like a flowchart diagram, plus a whole series of maps, lists, other visualisations - becomes the basis for the show we build.

An example of the kinds of systems models we construct / adapt in our work.

We then go through that systems model, looking for key linkages and systems dynamics we can turn into games.

In the last couple of years, we’ve started breaking things down into two kinds of interactive activities - what we’ve dubbed ‘skilltesters’ and ‘games’.

‘Games’, in this parlance, involve choice - any kind of decision-making, resource allocation, negotiation, etc. Anything where the audience needs to predict how the system will behave, and make a call about what they’d like to see happen. Things where they have to use their strategic brain.

The other kind are ‘skilltesters’ - games where the purpose is just to win. Can you fly this bird over here holding it between two sticks, can you sort these counters out into piles of different colours in less than 30 seconds, etc… These games are often more active, more playful, and we use them to give us inputs into our system model, so we can read out different scenarios. But we don’t hinge big choices on them.

Most shows will have a mix of these kinds of activities - some games where the audience is making key decisions, thinking through problems and coming up with strategic solutions, and some skilltesters where we’re introducing ideas more playfully, giving them a quick input into the show without too much weight being placed upon their choices.

How do you account for the unexpected in your work?

Look, we’re not improvisers - we build a structure with some different pathways, some resilience to shock etc, and then we guide audiences through it. There’s room for discussion, but in some senses there’s still the chance that the audience can break the show.

That said, one major advantage we have in building an experience is that we’re very transparent with our aims - ‘we’re here to talk about this concept, we’ve made these games that do that, here’s how it’s gonna work’. The performers are usually playing themselves, facilitating and helping the audience. So, for example, when Nathan was running a piece of ours called Volleyball Farm for a Forum for the Future event in London in Nov, the game broke because we’d never calibrated it for more than 5 players. But Nathan was able to discuss the intention behind playing the game, what point we wanted to illustrate, and that worked almost as well.

Can you describe the encounter between a participating audience and your work? (ie, what's it like to play?)

We go for gentle, non-confrontational, casual. Me, I get more anxious and stressed as a participant in interactive shows than anyone, and we make putting the audience at ease the key watchword.

So you’ll be met - in say a foyer, if we’re doing it in a theatre - and you’ll be told what’s going to happen, and you’ll be guided to a table, or to your seat - given a little more of a heads up about what’s going to happen - and then you’ll be introduced to the facilitators, and then you get your hands on whatever it is. Gentle, all the time.

The games themselves, often are drawn from boardgaming, and there’s a well established practice in boardgaming of how to introduce rulesets to players - good, thoughtful advice I think we’d do well to learn from. There’s an order to how you introduce information:

1. Who you are in the game2. What your objective is3. How you achieve that objective4. What does a turn consist of

and so on. Not always appropriate, but it’s nice to have a clear, logical structure for how information goes.

The experience is often divided roughly into three different forms: games/interactive components, theatre/narrative, and performance lecture. We’d tend to cycle between these three forms rapidly over the course of a show, with the weight shifting between them as we build to the end.

How does narrative/mood/meaning emerge from the experience of your work?

It all happens in the post-show discussions!

Well, mostly. We usually build a show with a post-show chat built in - a conversation with a guest scientist or an expert in the field we’re discussing. Then we’ll have a glass of wine, and a really informal conversation with the audience. That’s where the ideas underlying the show get unpacked, that’s our chance to dive in deeper.

Of course, that’s not to say that the show itself doesn’t also bring out the ideas, but we think that explicit conversation afterwards is really important.

What/who have been your influences?

We started off making interactive work in Canberra with no-one else around doing it - not in the way we were, anyway. We knew we weren’t the only ones making it, but we couldn’t easily find out who else was out there, and what their stuff looked like. So we made a lot of stuff up.

Our initial impetus was to do computer games live on stage. We adopted frameworks and conventions from old computer games, and adapted them to stage. Hacked gaming controllers (console controllers, joysticks) where the audience controlled the actors live onstage. Our first piece was a game called Playable Demo, where the audience piloted the actor through a short scene in the style of an old LucasArts adventure game, using a torchbeam as a mouse cursor on stage.

A little deeper into our practice, we’ve taken a lot from some of our closer collaborators. Applespiel, obviously, and Coney. Applespiel for their actual genuine expertise in participatory theatre (as opposed to our make-it-up-as-you-go style) and Coney for the superb philosophy and vocabulary around how a playing audience could and should be treated.

Finally, we’ve learned a lot from scientists, particularly those working in the field of participatory co-modelling. This is a form of practice whereby scientists collaboratively construct a working model of a social-ecological system - for example, a region of farmland, or a river system. Then they bring together stakeholders from that system to discuss and debate issues facing it, with the model as a platform to facilitate discussion and compromise. Their tools for audience engagement may be a little rudimentary, but the sophistication of the underlying models they’re using put most theatre-makers to shame.

Young Boho. Jack & David in A Prisoner's Dilemma, circa 2007.

What drew you to working in participatory/playful performance forms?

We started Boho in late 2006: Michael Bailey, Jack Lloyd, David Shaw and I. Jack and I had made an interactive scene called Playable Demo in 2005, based on old adventure games. (In the floppy disk era, you would often get a single scene from a larger game as a kind of interactive advert for the whole game.)

We took that format and combined it with the science of Game Theory to make our first show, A Prisoner’s Dilemma. Game Theory is a great tool for game-makers because it breaks real world scenarios into well-defined mathematical structures. We created a whole series of micro-games based on different Game Theory thought experiments (the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, Dictator, Ultimatum) and threaded a Harold Pinter-esque narrative through them.

That show really placed us in a very particular niche: ‘interactive science-theatre’. What even is that. But it was good to be able to label ourselves as something for a couple of years, even though now we’ve spilled out in a lot of different directions.

 Food for the Great Hungers, 2009. 

What's the benefit/advantage of playing with a participating audience?

Ahhh, well, the trick is what we all know now, you and me and all the artists making participatory theatre, which is: the audience is always participating - it’s just a question of how. Sitting passively in the dark watching and not talking is a form of participation - we’re just so trained by theatre conventions that we take it for granted and don’t realise it’s a choice, a compact we all (artists and audiences) agree on.

Same with making site-specific stuff - you realise that the theatre venue isn’t a necessity, it’s an option - you use it sometimes when the moment calls for it, at other times you let it go.

Whatever level of participation the audience engage in, that’s a trade-off. If the audience are moving around outdoors experiencing your work, they’re feeling much more exhileration, excitement, there’s opportunities for happy accidents and beautiful unique experiences, but you run the risk of losing their focus, of them being distracted, feeling lost or confused.

If the audience are seated quietly and watching a well-lit stage, that’s ideal for delivering complex information and making sure everyone sees the same thing, but you’re talking at them rather than having a conversation, and you run the risk of boring them / annoying them if they feel like they can’t leave.

We (Boho) choose the level of interaction based on what we want their experience to be, what we’re talking about, what we want to discuss. If we want to talk with them about how tipping points or regime shifts occur, maybe that’s best if we just explain it as clearly as we can, using whatever theatre imagery works best. But if we want to illustrate the challenges facing local government when they’re evacuating small communities from a potential volcano eruption, maybe we want to give them the experience of trying to make decisions and negotiate compromises with imperfect information.

 True Logic of the Future, 2010. Pic by 'pling.

What mechanics do you use to encourage and support player agency?

Typically our games are quite short, and there are lots of them throughout a show, interspersed with narrative / storytelling moments, or micro-lectures. That means we can guide the audience through the aesthetic experience quite closely, rather than setting it up at the beginning of the night and just letting them roam free.

That gives us a better chance of managing certain player dynamics - reining in hot players who are dominating the games, or drawing in quieter, more passive players.

But player agency? Not our highest priority, honestly. We’ve usually created quite a curated experience, and though each game is completely interactive, and the whole show has a lot of different states and outcomes (usually in the thousands, if you tally it all up), we’re not running a LARP - we have quite a detailed sense of where we want the audience to go, and we’re happy to take them there.

- David

For a high-speed example of all of these principles in action (more or less), you can check out Jack and Mick's 18-games-in-18-minutes performance at TEDx Canberra:

Democratic Nature: the first prototype of a new work

So Boho have just been in Stockholm for the last five weeks, from the last warm burst of summer through to the first winter snow. We've been working with Swedish NGO Miljöverkstan, on the second phase of our collaborative project Democratic Nature.

Democratic Nature is a development of the model we developed at University College London over 2011-12, and tested out for the first time with Best Festival Ever. The format of the work is based on the methodology of 'participatory co-modelling' - a practice whereby scientists work with community members to map and model a social-ecological system, and then use that model to help facilitate discussions and conversations about that system.

Our goal was to try to bring some of the skills we've developed making interactive experiences to bear on this process. Best Festival Ever was our first full exploration in this area - building a playable model of a fictional music festival. Democratic Nature is the next step for us - using these same skills to map and model the real world system of Flaten.

Flaten is a nature reserve just south of Stockholm. It's a beautiful lake, surrounded by a forest of oak, pine and spruce trees, right on the edge of Stockholm city. In the 1930s, it became a hub for young Stockholmers learning to swim, and it's still a major recreational destination. It's been a space for various groups to set up camp and live in, legally or illegally. It's the home of various endangered species, insects and birds. And it's coming under increasing pressure as Stockholm suffers a housing crisis in the wake of increasing migration and asylum seekers.

In January - February this year, we undertook the first phase of this new process: research, meeting with experts, mapping, making new game devices and talking about possible structures for the new work. This month, our focus was on building a prototype. Over the month, we constructed a full working version of the show, which we tested with three scratch audiences this last week.

Democratic Nature consists of a few key games: a sequence we call 'Worldbuilding', in which the audience play through the history of the region, from the end of the last ice age through to the modern day. There's a game looking at the competition between oaks and spruce in Flaten forest, a game looking at the algal blooms that impacted the lake in the late 1990s, a game about Flaten beach on a summer day, and our collective favourite; a game we call 'Governance' about managing the nature reserve.

We're really fond of the Governance game - it's a nice mechanism that we haven't used before, in which the audience undertake a number of different projects scattered throughout the room simultaneously. It's a nice mix of cooperation and competition, and it's generated some interesting discussions in the scratch shows.

We were lucky enough to be joined this time by two of our favourite collaborators: sound designer Nick McCorriston, who produced a soundtrack based on field recordings from the Flaten area, and designer Gillian Schwab, who constructed an incredible array of set and props.

Following three scratch showings of the prototype, we've now wrapped up this phase of the work, and we're heading out of Sweden on to the next thing. We're planning to be back in Sweden in mid-2017 (Scandinavian summer!) to undertake the final development; tightening and calibrating the work, and then working with local artists to translate it into Swedish.

Best Festival Ever in Melbourne: a new brace of scientists

So the Best Festival Ever team is in Melbourne this week, currently doing some script tweaks and prop fixes, and tightening the screws on the work in preparation for our season here next week. Three years after Arts House supported an early development of the work in 2013, we’re finally bringing the full show here, as part of the Performing Climates program.This is the fourth city in three countries we’ve brought Best Festival Ever to, and coming up on our fiftieth show. It’s pretty exciting to get to bring the work to Melbourne, to share it with some of our favourite collaborators and supporters.It’s nice to have a few days to dive back into the script, to really drill down into some key questions around what exactly we want to communicate from systems science, and how we can best frame these key ideas. And, of course, to get to play with our music festival storyline, and make sure it’s exactly as delightful and ridiculous as it should be.The most exciting part from our perspective, though, is the post-show conversations with scientists. This is a really key feature of the show, where we unpack some of the ideas from climate and systems science that have informed the making of the work.This season, we’re honoured to be joined by scientists including Mark Burgman (University of Melbourne), Dave Winkler (CSIRO), Anne-Marie Grisogono (Flinders University), Kevin Grove (Florida International University), Lauren Rickard (RMIT) and David Batten (CSIRO).Tuesday 5 July - Mark BurgmanMark Burgman is head of the school of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conservation Biology. He works on ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment.Wednesday 6 July - Dave WinklerCSIRO scientist Dave Winkler works across radioastronomy and compututational molecular design. He’s published on nanotechnology and regenerative medicine, and his work is often concerned with applying the tools of small molecule research to complex biological systems.Thursday 7 July - Anne-Marie GrisogonoJoining us from Adelade is physicist Anne-Marie Grisogono, currently an adjunct professor in the Engineering Faculty of Flinders University. Anne-Marie worked for more than 20 years with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, applying complex systems science to the defence problems faced by Australian troops during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.Friday 8 July - Lauren Rickards and Kevin GroveResilience experts Lauren Rickards and Kevin Grove join us from RMIT and Florida International University, respectively. Both have worked applying resilience thinking to disaster governance and emergency management in areas such as the Caribbean, and cases such as the Hazelwood Mine fire in Victoria.Sunday 10 July - David BattenCSIRO systems analyst David Batten works with computer models to tackle real world problems such as Australia’s electricity, transport and water systems. He’s written ten books exploring how modelling and simulation can help us get to grips with real world complexity.These discussions unpack some of the ways scientists use systems thinking to get to grips with the complex challenges facing us today. For us as artists, Best Festival Ever was always intended to provide the platform for these sorts of conversations, and it’s pretty exciting for us to be able to bring on board scientists and thinkers of this calibre.If you’re keen to come along, you can head to the Facebook event for more details of time and place, and to grab tickets.