- Venue
- Broadway Media Centre
- Location
- East Midlands
Sandpit is a monthly event held in London where game ideas and social, playful experiences invented by artists and game designers are played out by members of the public. Sandpit is currently touring ten UK venues, and came to Nottingham as part of the GameCity Festival.
What attracted me to attend Sandpit was a sense of childish frivolity and the rebellious notion of being an adult still having fun through play. I am reminded of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), whose theories on childhood education site play as a highly important part of development, recommending ‘varying their games to make them pleasanter without the least bit of constraint’. Although I didn’t quite lose all inhibitions during this experience, coming together with strangers purely to enjoy myself seemed adventurous, and certainly outside of my normal comfort zone. My personal interest in hoax, humour and instruction drew me to Sandpit with a specifically directed curiosity. My preconceptions of the event involved corporate drones let loose for a night of puerile jokes and running around; all of which reinforced the attraction. In reality this was far from being the case, with most players under thirty and from various walks of life. This aside, there was definitely a sense of excitement in choosing to place your time into the hands of artists.
On arrival each player received a list of the evening’s events, which included the scheduled games and also some informal games taking place throughout the evening. We could choose two scheduled activities from the nine available (making sure they didn’t clash), however it was difficult to participate in the parlour games as although the appropriate pens and paper were provided, the busy Broadway foyer hardly served as a suitable setting. Two of these did take off however, ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’; a simple ruse using playing cards, and ‘Trap Street’, where a crudely drawn but roughly accurate map of Nottingham could be added to by any players, writing on their own landmarks whether real or imaginary. This helped bring people together and served as a useful tool for starting conversation with other Sandpit participants. Inventive and engaging, I was pleased to be involved in something that celebrated the humorous and existed somewhere on the fringe of interactive performance art. Genres were difficult to apply to Sandpit, which I found refreshing; this event could be encountered from a number of aspects and highlighted the importance of a wide variety of influences within an individual artistic practice.
After amusing ourselves with these distractions for a time, the real games began. First on our list was ‘Night of The Vampire’, for which twenty of us took to the city streets in search of cards representing coffin nails with which to defeat the vampires that secretly walked among us. The search took place around the outside of a large building in the city centre, which wasn’t particularly atmospheric; glaring orange street-lights, intoxicated locals. The blood-sucking members of our party were chosen in secret, and carried ‘Bite’ cards that could only be combated with those labelled ‘Holy Water’. Staying in a group seemed the key to avoiding vampire venom, but unfortunately this lost the momentum of the game, turning hastened quest into leisurely stroll. I was fully aware that our venture was completely innocent, not causing any disruption to ordinary city night life, and yet there was something that made this feel subversive. Forever aware of those who ask for what purpose art is created, I enjoyed the answer Sandpit offered; these active games pushed boundaries in proposing pleasure purely for the sake of pleasure. It was good to be out in the city using its streets for a purpose other than shopping, and I took a certain delight in knowing that while I was out stalking the streets for coffin nails, others were flicking channels in their living rooms.
After a half an hour interval mainly consisting of playing ‘The Man Who Was Thursday?’, six of us were called together by means of a horn to play ‘Ponzi!’. Initially I had my concerns about my ability to partake in this activity, given the description depicted a game of ‘high finance’ and ‘the stock market’, neither of which I have any knowledge of. It came as a pleasant surprise then, that our guide was not only clear in his instructions, but also a highly theatrical individual donned in a charity shop suit, who made the whole experience very entertaining. ‘Million dollar’ chips were assigned value unless they were those of the secret fraudster among us, and rounds of frantic trading made for an exciting and fast paced exchange. The fact that I was one of two fraudsters gave me a particularly fiendish sense of satisfaction, but as the players happily assumed their roles as bankers, I saw demonstrated a method of ‘playing pretend’ that clearly doesn’t lose its thrill beyond childhood. ‘Ponzi!’ played to my fascination with lying, and especially with how individuals react when they suspect they are being told an untruth.
The instructional element within these games let me view first hand the authority this format commands, as individual steps constantly demand the next one to be consumed. This event reinforced my belief that instructions and diagrams draw people into engaging with them, whether physically or conceptually. In the same way one might keep coming back to an unfinished crossword, the mind is lured into assessing the extent of truth and the consequences of what is presented by the artist.
