© Jörg Metzner
SAX@PLAY
Genre an interactive augmented reality theater game in urban space
In order to make the city even more livable, the focus is on citizen participation. As a surveyor, the audience is released into the urban space with a measuring device to collect data. The way to the smart city is the goal: What is the city around me? What role do I play in it? The staging of the public space with digital technology reinterprets the places, turns the spectators into players and puts them in Kafkaesque situations.
SAX@PLAY was developed in several production phases:
In a three-day, completely digital hackathon, various game concept ideas were developed under the guidance of expanding focus and TinkerTank with the project participants (theatre trades, representatives of the cities involved, game designers, authors), all of which take Franz Kafka’s novel “Das Schloss” as the starting point. From this, selected concepts became a structured basis for the subsequent app development in a joint process. The game scenes and audio recordings are contributed by the state theaters.
For the concrete implementation of the Sax@Play app, expanding focus created several prototypes to test individual game mechanisms. In the further process, a first playable version for user testing was created in close communication with the cooperation partners. The functions were refined with the results, then tested again and the design for the release in mid-March 2022 was completed.
This iterative way of working enables tight feedback loops and constant adjustment towards the best possible result.
The finished game is provided for several cities (including Berlin), each with an individual route and locally-based content, starting in Freital with “Freital@Play”.
© Jörg Metzner
SAX@PLAY wurde im Rahmen von „dive in. Programm für digitale Interaktionen“ der Kulturstiftung des Bundes entwickelt und des Weiteren gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (BKM) im Programm NEUSTART KULTUR.
