Slow Game is an open source project, inspired by and adapted from the Slow Games, an original art project by Ishac Bertran. Please see his website for in depth documentation and description of his original project that precedes the one noted here.
In extending Bertran’s project, in this project, we apply a slow interaction framing on a tangible interactive game that enforces a very low frequency of interaction: one move a day. The game exists as a small 5cm cube, with a low resolution display consisting of 64 tiny white lights. The game is based on the classic video game ‘snake’, where the player manoeuvres a line which grows in length, with the line itself being a primary obstacle. The game is played by physically rotating the cube, which turns the direction that the snake moves. By reducing the feedback loop to a frequency of a day, Slow Game radically challenges our memory, observation and patience.
This project is in collaboration with Ishac Bertran, Garnet Hertz, Ron Wakkary, and students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emily Carr University (ECU) including Matt Harkness (ECU), Henry Lin (SFU), Sam Beck (ECU), and Perry Tan (SFU).
We have recently finished a batch of high quality, hand crafted maple wood implementations of Slow Game. This has offered an opportunity to consider the process of making in light of strategies for creating slow technologies. Our main goal is to use these artifacts for field deployments in people’s homes and everyday environments.
Publications
William Odom, Ron Wakkary, Ishac Bertran, Matthew Harkness, Garnet Hertz, Jeroen Hol, Henry Lin, Bram Naus, Perry Tan, and Pepijn Verburg. (2018). Attending to Slowness and Temporality with Olly and Slow Game: A Design Inquiry Into Supporting Longer-Term Relations with Everyday Computational Objects. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 77, 13 pages. (.PDF | ACM Link)
William Odom, Ishac Bertran, Garnet Hertz, Henry Lin, Amy Yo Sue Chen, Matt Harkness, and Ron Wakkary. (2019). Unpacking the Thinking and Making Behind a Slow Technology Research Product with Slow Game. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15-28. (.PDF | ACM Link)