City of Play was an organization that created, produced, and promoted playful ways for people to engage with their city and with each other. We supported a variety of amateur and professional game designers to find, invent, and play original, new, and obscure sports and games, favoring player interaction over competition. City of Play also produced the Best Games Fest, an annual festival of new games, and The City Spree, an annual 5K race without a course.
Beyond games, we also used playful projects to give ordinary people the agency to affect positive change in their city by helping to reimagine their relationship to their urban environment and to one another. City of Play employed numerous emerging mobile and IOT technologies as well as physical product and informaiton design to facilitate these experiences, in an effort to help make people happier and cities more fun.
Players Beat the Heat at the Come Out and Play Festival
Players scream with delight as each try to tap the other's hands
Play adding color and vibrancy to a downtown festival
Players communicate and coordinate in a game of Remote Control People
Experimenting with playful ways of using new technologies
Players ffrom a variety of cultures and backgrounds playing together
Players turn an abandoned urban lot into a stickball field
An urban stag hunt adds beneficient surrealness to an ordinary street
Urban area control games with early geofencing technology
Games projects on buildings
Players race through streets to find precious tokens