About

Hello. I'm a freelance game designer, researcher and writer living in London. If you want me to design some games, do some research or build some narrative for you, do get in touch: my email address is holly@severalbees.com.

Current and upcoming projects

• Ludocity: A wiki for pervasive games and new sports.
• The Sandpit: a monthly games event for playing and testing new games, associated with the Hide and Seek festival. Previous Sandpits have taken place at Shunt, the Hayward Gallery, and Battersea Arts Centre, among other places.

Recent games

• Streetlight: projected lights and playful stories with MOTH in North Kensington.
• Space Station Dana: an astronaut recruitment game at the Dana Centre, co-designed as part of adventure agency Coney.
• True or False: A tour of Chelsea with two duplicitous guides and a series of game-based forfeits; part of In Transit 2008. Photos here.
• The Hide and Seek Sandpit: as part of the Hide and Seek festival at the Southbank Centre, I programmed two days of low-tech high-fun games, several of which were developed through monthly Sandpit events.
• Trap Street: a collaborative map of London built out of the fallible memories and deliberate lies of passers-by.
• Estuary and Urbex: online spaces created as part of Arcade, a protoype online/real world space created by the Playbeards in the cellar at BAC.
• Bees: A game of communication, pollen-hunting and kazoos that ran at the Southbank Centre's Slow Food Festival.
• The Rubbish Game: an evening-long game that ran at the Science Museum's Dana Centre, again co-designed as part of Coney.
• The Soho Stag Hunt: a chase that ran as the finale to The Soho Project, an ARG I did some research and design for.
• Thoughtcrime: a game and theatre piece where players listen to broadcast monologues and try to find the actors in a crowd.
• Plus ambient trading game The Man Who Was Thursday, puzzle trail Cake Hunting, collaborative play-building game Confabulous, a treasure hunt at the Newcastle Discovery Museum, and other bits and pieces that aren't documented online.

Recent writing

• 16 Across: a puzzle built from 41 short stories about Adelaide that was part of a PhD in online writing and location-specific narrative.
• Raspberry Debacle: Food blog, currently on hiatus.
• The Sandpit website: occasional blog posts and essays on pervasive gaming in London.
• Clockers: a feature-length clockpunk Hackers parody written with Brendan Adkins.

Useless things

• The Evening Standard Headline Generator: recombining photographs for endless new headlines. ROYAL CHICKENS TO BE LEGAL.
• The Shakespeare Quote Generator: for easily-amused Shakespeare enthusiasts. Neither a borrower nor a squirrel be.
• The Mechanical Contrivium: auto-generated trivia on a subject of your choice. It trivs your ears.
• The Christmas Song Generator: which puts a word into a Christmas carol in order to amuse briefly.
• What Poetry Form Are You?: in case you wanted to know.

Personal things

• A Flickr account: mostly museums and slightly amusing signs
• A del.icio.us account: which I should really use more often given that it's about the only place I've ever been quick enough to get the username "holly".
• A boardgamegeek account: which I think you have to be logged in to see, but mostly all you'd learn is that I don't like chess much.
• A livejournal: updated approximately annually.