Come Out and Play

New York’s first annual Come Out and Play Festival is an opportunity for people in the NYC area to try out a variety of ARGs and street games. The fest is a major event and likely to be a fixture on the scene for years to come. Many of the games don’t require registration, so if you’re just hearing about this now and you’re able to get to Manhattan, check it out. After all, who wouldn’t want to try going to spy school or playing Space Invaders on the wall of a building?

The festival’s four featured games are offerings from some of the best designers in the business. In addition to the second playtest of Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost’s Cruel 2 B Kind (see my earlier post), here’s what else tops the bill at COAP 2006:

Manhattan Story Mashup

Approximately 250 players will move around Manhattan, taking photos which match a given target. Targets are words from stories, written by visitors on the Manhattan Story Mashup website while the game goes on. The resulting illustrated stories are shown on large public signs in Times Square in real-time and on Manhattan Story Mashup.

Identity

Identity is a large-scale social game of secret organizations, covert intelligence, suspicion, trust, cooperation and betrayal. Over the course of three days, five teams will compete for world domination. The goal of the game is to discover which players belong to which team, without allowing your own allegiance to become known.

Plundr

Plundr is a location-based game of piracy and black market trading. Start out as a bilge-spewing land-lubber in a leaky tub, explore the real world in search of riches and infamy, upgrade your vessel into a mighty warship and amass a fortune in ill-gotten goods. Arrrrr! (Come Out and Play)