I’ve just finished working on a Fun Palace in Parkes, New South Wales – Australia’s first. Taking place in public venues like museums, theatres, and libraries, Fun Palaces invite people to explore art and science on their own terms. In Parkes, that meant letting the community try their hand at games devised by local kids and teens.
Much like our zombie, time travel, and giant monster events, all the effort was in the preparation. If you set up the activities right, participants don’t need much from you on the day. Their own fascination draws them in – and keeps them engaged.
Preparation for something like this includes obvious stuff – admin, logistics, testing the games. Last year, we even managed to boil down the process to six bullet points. What gets missed in that brief version is the inspiration and writing phase, which involves a lot of long walks, daydreams, and listening to music. As David Mamet once said, writing is to hanging out as tasting food is to cookery.
I’ve always cherished that line. It’s one reason why, alongside Fun Palaces, I recorded a podcast about Transformers with Neill Cameron and Daisy Johnson this month. It let me hang out in the world of pop culture while planning for Parkes. That kind of thoughtful immersion is a vital underpinning of the events I run, because in many ways pop culture is the folk culture of this mediatized world. I think very hard and probably way too much about how to mine the media for ideas when creating events and opportunities to play in public spaces.
Today I want to talk about how action-adventure, that most popular and often least profound of genres, can be a fruitful source of inspiration. That’s not just because even the dumbest slam-bang narrative drips with messages about gender, society, power and culture. It’s because the very business of action-adventure is problem solving.
We’ve had an amazing start to the Fun Palaces weekend here in rural Australia. So far, since our doors opened, over 260 people have come to try their hand at the challenges we devised together with local kids. That’s great numbers for a small rural community.
It’s the big day! Three hours from now, Australia’s first Fun Palace opens in Parkes Shire Library, New South Wales.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Games designed and built by local kids and teens will be on display for the community to have a go over the holiday weekend. There’s also a chance to try Parkes Library classics like Paint Like Michelangelo, a dinosaur dig, and a few more surprises besides.
Events have a supervillainous theme this year because many of our activities were inspired by British author Louie Stowell’s book The School For Superheroes, so we’ll also be rolling out a superhero-themed tabletop roleplaying game. We worked with local teens to devise, design, and test this game, which is quick to learn, easy to play, and inspired by the work of sci-fi writer, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow.
The game will be available for the whole community to play in or out of the library after the Fun Palace closes, and we’ll aim to share both the game and our design process online as soon as possible. In the meantime watch @parkeslibrary and @drmattfinch on Twitter for the latest updates over the long weekend!
In the meantime, let me leave you with a personal favourite from our pre-launch photo gallery.
The Parkes Shire Library is sponsored by a number of organisations including Charles Sturt University…which led to this glorious caption card on one exhibit of the kids’ games.
Preparations for Australia’s first Fun Palace are well underway in Parkes Shire. Today, PRIME TV news visited Parkes Library to interview local kids and teens who were designing fiendish supervillain games. Over the Fun Palaces weekend, 4-5 October, local people will be free to come in and try their hand at the challenges the children have devised.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The games are inspired by British author Louie Stowell‘s book The School for Supervillains. It follows the adventures of Mandrake deVille, daughter of a villainous family, who wants to join the forces of good despite being sent to a supervillain boarding school. Parkes kids on their school holidays, helped by staff and teen helpers, have been challenged to make games and activities based around three different elements of Louie’s book. These are the Mutant Maze, a Giant Robot room, and the sinister Nightmare Chamber.
Children are free to interpret these themes however they wish. But to encourage and inspire them, Parkes library staff each created a prototype in the run-up to Fun Palaces 2014.
Building on the principles of play-based storytelling and open-ended learning, three staff members each chose a theme which they would bring to life. Craft whiz Sandie got Giant Robots, early childhood specialist Debbie got Mutant Maze, and branch boss Tracie got Nightmare Chamber.
I asked them about their activities just before events kicked off this week.
“I was reading Viv Schwarz‘s Welcome To Your Awesome Robot, and Matt had told me about a pirate-ship game he’d played at Britain’s National Maritime Museum. I combined these inspirations and made a game where players had to run a gauntlet of cardboard robots, all the while carrying a delicate tissue flower across the room. The green “flower” represented a vital radioactive element. You had to put it into a special box to shut down the robots! The robots themselves were played by other children – they had to try and knock the tissue paper out of your hand. One was allowed to throw scrunched-up paper balls at you. One could attack you with paper streamers. And the third could blow the tissue out of your hand! By putting cardboard buildings and rocks in your path, players had to think and move fast to get through the giant robot obstacles and shut down the threat to the city!
“I’m a perfectionist and very focused on visual design. My background is in hairdressing and I’m always being asked to tart up the library displays and make them look ‘just right!’ It was great to understand that these games were prototypes and didn’t need to be obsessed over to the tiniest details. The whole point was to inspire the children to make their own things, so a sketched-out, rough draft version of the activity was actually better!”
“Sandie’s activity is really clever and involves a lot of tactical thinking. I went down a different route – games of chance. I remembered the old funfair games of my childhood, where you put a ball in the slot and it came out in a random spot. If you were lucky you won a prize! It was great fun figuring out how to replicate this in cardboard.
“To make the game more compelling and tense, we added a further challenge. If you got an odd score, you were a supervillain, if you got an even one, you were a superhero: players had to say before they started which one they wanted to be.
“This kind of work has made me feel free to be a new kind of librarian. After so many years tending the shelves and the office, you realise that this kind of play is also about helping people to learn whatever they want to learn. It’s pure libraries, and lovely to know that we’re supported in exploring this kind of activity with children and young people.”
“My inspiration started with TV and movies: Monsters, Inc; the Doctor Who episode ‘Listen’, with the hands under the bed; and Sid’s Room of broken toys in Toy Story. We brought a bed into the library and made it look beautiful – but underneath lurked something more sinister.
“Players had to roll dice and their score let them choose from one of six boxes. Each box contained body parts from old broken toys. Working in teams, the players used their body parts to make a new hybrid creature – creepy and weird!
“I was worried my game was too simple, but Matt pointed out that this is a ‘sandbox game’ in the spirit of Minecraft or Lego. It’s open-ended and based around building whatever you want to build. Following our instincts, Sandie, Debbie, and I had developed one tactical game, one sandbox game, and a game of chance – different ways to play for different players! And the children were free to do something different even after they’d seen our prototypes.
“It’s funny, because at library conferences you get a lot of buzzwords like ‘gamification’ or talk about ‘the maker movement’. For a little country library it can seem intimidating – like you MUST have a 3D printer or you’re not “21st century” enough. We just won a national award for innovation, but what we do here – play, and letting people learn on their own terms – is really what community libraries have done all along. We’re just less focused on shelves these days!
“As a manager, the last few years have been about developing my staff’s confidence and skills to design, deliver, and support children’s play and the great learning families get from playing together. Whether it’s dads building boxcar racers for their toddlers, teenage zombies in a country showground, or taking part in the Fun Palaces movement, we’re pleased and proud to know that Parkes Shire sees its library as the place to come for programmes that are surprising, fun, and a little bit different.”
Parkes Fun Palace opens 10am-2pm on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th October at Parkes Library, Bogan Street, Parkes 2870 NSW. Stay tuned for a few more surprises before the big launch at the weekend!
Today was the first day of our school holiday events leading up to Parkes Fun Palace on the weekend of 4th and 5th October. Local kids came in to design and build games based around Louie Stowell’s book The School for Supervillains.
Photos and videos to follow – you can sneak a peek at the Parkes Library Facebook page if you like – but until then, here’s a radio interview I did with ABC Central West, speaking about Australia’s first Fun Palace and its basis in the work of British theatre director Joan Littlewood.
Next week, the national award winning team at Parkes Library host their first ever Fun Palace event. As you can see from the photos, we’re currently hard at work preparing…
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Fun Palaces take place on the weekend of 4th and 5th October 2014. You’ll find them in theatres, libraries, museums, and public spaces around the world. They give people the chance to take part in the exciting business of art and science, wherever they live. Thanks to the wonder of time zones, Parkes will be the first Fun Palace in the world to open its doors.
Theatre director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price came up with the idea of Fun Palaces in the UK, back in the 1960s. They imagined “a laboratory of fun” that would serve as a pop-up community venue for both art and science.
The Parkes team will give the concept an Aussie spin, drawing on their tradition of immersive and interactive play. In previous years, Parkes’ librarians have organised thrilling zombie sieges and Godzilla battles. I designed these interactive games for Parkes with the idea that young players would generate unpredictable outcomes.
This year we’re putting even more power into the hands of children and young people. Over three days next week, Parkes Library staff will help local kids create their own challenges for the weekend Fun Palace.
Local teens will join library staff in mentoring younger participants, too. We’ve always been keen on the idea of mixed-age play, pitting teens against kids in 2013’s Big Box Battle. It’s really exciting that “graduates” from our previous games are now volunteering their time as Fun Palace mentors.
On the weekend itself, Parkes kids will share their creations with the whole community. There’ll be a special roleplaying event drawing on the inspiration of games like Dungeons and Dragons. There’ll also be a chance for families to try out some of Parkes Library’s greatest hits, including a dinosaur dig and “Paint Like Michelangelo“, plus a few more surprises besides. Many of our activities can be copied at home without fuss or expense, so that the spirit of fun continues beyond the weekend!
As you can tell from the photos, we’re still putting the finishing touches to next week’s event – plus, we aren’t going to over-plan. We want to be surprised and amazed by all the unexpected things our participants devise!
Stay tuned to this blog for more details next week – with a special pre-Fun Palace blog post on Friday 3rd October.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 