Slow Game - Garnet Hertz, Will Odom and others (2015-current)

Format: Custom Open Source Hardware & Fabrication

Description: The Slow Game project draws on the practice of playing Chess with a remote opponent in which people would literally send their next move through paper correspondence via the post as inspiration for design. This activity required players to live with their chessboards over long periods of time as they contemplated what their next move might be. 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 ÔsnakeÕ, 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 between Garnet Hertz, Ishac Bertran, Will Odom, Ron Wakkary, and students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emily Carr University (ECU) including Henry Lin (SFU), Sam Beck (ECU), Perry Tan (SFU) and Matt Harkness (ECU). Slow Game is an open source project, inspired by and adapting from Slow Games, an art project by Ishac Bertran. We are currently developing a batch of high quality, hand crafted maple wood implementations of Slow Game for field deployments in peopleÕs homes and everyday environments. We are also developing a DIY electronics kit for anyone to assemble and customize their own slow gameÐboth in physical form and materials as well as the computational game itself. We plan to release this kit via a major North American electronics distributor in 2018.

Slow Game prototype