Inspiration: Everwake

View the Everwake trailer

To round off a week in sunny Wales with Alex Fradera (teaching at Atlantic College, spending time with Be Amazing Today and checking out PlayARK), Mindful Maps had a splendidly spooky time playing Everwake.

Everwake is a new type of entertainment and narrative which mixes street gaming with online storytelling and play to create a magical and frightening world of ghosts and spirits. It is a pervasive game combining puzzles, running, intrigue, and theatrical happenings. The event encompassed the whole of the Canton area of Cardiff and required players to move between several locations in small groups. You can see a slideshow of photos from the game here.

The parts of Everwake I found inspiring and liberating were:

• Doing something physical based on a map: such as running around finding locations and avoiding ghosts on the way.

• Experiencing an area I know well in an entirely different way: the narratives and stories in Everwake made me see Canton in a whole new light.

• Being told stories in context: Everwake uses existing locations and theatrical elements to set the scene, which included strong visual, sensual and kinesthetic elements. These things made the narrative very powerful for the players.

• Absorbing information and narratives through interaction and play: although terrifying at times, Everwake was a good bit of play & fun. These qualities helped players to absorb the information presented in a fresh way.

• Natural highs and team spirit: after being collectively spooked, chased and excited for two hours the adrenaline was certainly flowing. Our team were high as kites after the game and we enjoyed a de-brief over a stiff drink. Can playing games like Everwake help us tap into new ways of working in teams?

The questions I’m left holding from the game are:

1) How can mapping processes involve elements of games, play and physical movement?

2) How can we use theatrical techniques (performance and visual) to enhance the narratives we create?

3) When is Everwake 2 coming out please?

Quote of the day: Small is Beautiful

Mindful Maps is currently inspired by E.F. Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. Here are some word’s I’d like to share (more of an extract than a quote!):

“When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than a mere division. Maybe they cannot themselves formulate precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. ‘Well I don’t know’, you hear people say, as an impotent protest against the unintelligibility of the world as they meet it. If the mind cannot bring to the world a set – or shall we say, a tool box – of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as a chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events. Such a man is like a person in a strange land without any signs of civilisation, without maps or signposts or indicators of any kind.”

- Schumacher, E.F. (1973), P68-69. This edition printed 1974 by Sphere Books Ltd, UK.