Last week I spoke to Hilary O’Shaughnessy, the artist behind Make and Do, who are bringing The Journey to the End of the Night to Dublin. Hilary herself has played the street game in San Francisco, where it began and is played every year. She has also played other city-wide street games such as 2.8 Hours Later, a zombie street game, which she played in Bristol. Hilary says that street games are a great way to experience a city and get to know the people who live there. Games are all about connecting with other people. You are surrounded by people with the same goal as you and very quickly find yourself talking to strangers and getting to know people.

With Journey, these connections between strangers start before the game begins. The creators of the game (Ian Kizu-Blair, Sean Mahan and Sam Lavigne) have released it under a Creative Commons/Non-Commercial license so anyone can organise a game, but not for profit. This means the game is run entirely by volunteers – dedicated enthusiasts who get involved because they think it’ll be fun. Hilary is currently assembling the Dublin team.

She is also one of these enthusiasts but says that people sometimes have difficulty understanding what street games are. She compares it to trying to explain a bicycle to someone who has never seen a bicycle before. One of the reasons she is bringing Journey to Dublin is to introduce the city to street games. Her hope is that once people get what it is, they will begin to create and run their own street games. She feels that there is scope for a lot of people with different backgrounds to enjoy and create street games.

Hilary’s own background is in theatre. She was Joint Artistic Director of Playgroup, the theatre company that produced the award-winning Berlin Love Tour, and is currently Artist in Residence (with Make and Do) at Project Arts Centre. She recently spoke at the IndieCade Conference in New York about Outsider Games – games by people who have no formal training in designing games, the valuable things this lack of training can add to the creation of games and how it can increase the pool of potential players. Hilary also has an MA in Interactive Media from UL, which she did in part to learn about ways to add technology to games. She is interested in tech as a way to extend the experience of the game and add an extra layer, but says that’s important not to forget the people are.

Journey, which will be part of the Darklight Festival, will have a digital storytelling strand to the game, where people can share photos, tweets and vines. (I won’t be in Dublin for the game and I’m glad I’ll be able to watch it unfold online on the night.)

Hilary’s next goal is to bring a play festival to Dublin, to further stimulate the game making and playing community in the city. She says that it won’t be aimed at children because they don’t need help or encouragement to play – they do it everyday. It’s for the adults who have forgotten this vital skill. There are festivals already running in many European cities such as Ig Fest in Bristol and w00t in Copenhagen. Later this year, Hilary will be presenting her own game CHARGE! at A maze in Berlin. Hopefully Dublin will embrace street games with the same enthusiasm as these cities and we will see lots more games happening here.

Related post: The Journey to the End of the Night