Network Knockout

Interactive hybrid installation, an old fashioned ball throwing game mixed with a quiz about your social network.

For the Social and RFID HackersCamp @PICNIC 2009 we designed, play-tested, developed and built a cockshy (ball throwing) fair-like installation. It was a combination of a simple physical game and a quiz where two players were invited to throw balls towards a multiple choice screen displaying knowns and unknowns from their social network.

When in 2009 Mediamatic invited us to the best Social HackersCamp yet, with an incredible support staff, a lot of international guests, a fantastic cabin on the site to work from and a seemingly unlimited set of tools, we were highly motivated to make an awesome piece. Inspired by the success of the Wii and actual sports, together with Tim Olden and Tijmen Schep, we started drafting an installation with physical game elements.

With the help of Erik Borra we designed a game that plays with elements from your social network, i.e. the people who you’ve depicted as your friends. The game assumes at least that you recognize the avatars of your friends. As an example of a quiz question: The game asks two players, with an overlapping network, who the shared friend is from three avatar images. Both players will see two familiar avatars and one unknown, so the question for both is: who of the two friends is most likely to be also befriended to your competitor?
The game started when both players swiped their ikTag, their personal RFID badge of the PICNIC festival, so the game could look up their profile and friend list in the festival database. It would then render these kind of questions from the social network of you and your competitor: recognize or guess which avatar is the answer to the quiz question asked.

Playing with your avatar friends, and playing against a friend or known, while gaining insight in their network, was an intimate, awkward, but at the same time an intriguing, fast and fun game. The fast and fun part was naturally amplified by the rule that the fastest to throw scores higher, the fun questions, and the fast video-game like animations.