SME Partner

Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield

Academic Partner

Dr Harriet Hawkins, Royal Holloway, University of London

Project Title

Mobilising Play Your Place

Project Description

Play Your Place is an open participatory artwork that offers audiences a chance to draw, build and play alternate realities for their towns. Originally launched in 2013 Play Your Place was co-created by Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield and artist Mary Flanagan.

Between 2012 and 2014 Play Your Place ran a series of events in Southend, inviting residents to contribute content and ideas that would then be turned into a series of online games. On the 28th of June 2014 Play Your Place took part in the SouthWestFest Gala Day where residents of South Westminster took part in developing their own series of games.

Furtherfield’s collaboration with Royal Holloway University of London brought Dr Harriet Hawkins into the mix to contribute to the ongoing reflection and theoretical contextualisation of the Play Your Place using Play Southend and Play South Westminster as preliminary case studies. Dr Hawkins’ report examines the audience engagement, investigates the understanding of place in both site-specific and online terms, and looks towards future iterations of the project.

She argues that Play Your Place “has a role in producing citizen subjects… empowering and engaging individuals in their local political processes” making a case that game design has the potential to connect expert and local knowledge in a distinctly political act.

For Furtherfield involvement with Creativeworks London has helped the “development of an authoritative voice for the project and clarity of communications”. The collaboration has assisted with Play Your Place projects with the Tate Britain, and inclusion in festivals such as The Web We Want (South Bank Centre), Capture All (Transmediale, Germany) and CLICK, Denmark.