August-Sept-Oct  2025

By Carlo Tolentino, Aramiha Harwood, Ashleigh Dharmawardhana & Lucy Buxton

In 2024 members of the future play lab and urban design researcher Quentin Stevens (RMIT) explored areas of the Port Phillip Local Government Area in naarm Melbourne to locate potential sites for playful activations. One of those sites was an open grassy space close to the Tram Depot in South Melbourne, known as Kirrip Park. Located within the Montague precinct, this is an area of South Melbourne that has recently been redesignated as ‘mixed purpose’ by City of Port Phillip Council. Formerly zoned as Core Industrial land, Montague precinct is seen as strategically located with good access to public transport and close proximity to Melbourne’s CBD area. With what is seen as strong urban structure  (local schools, wide accessible roads and parking, public transport, a market close by), the precinct is proposed as ideal for urban renewal of residential spaces. 

City of Port Phillip, Montague Precinct Structure Plan: https://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/media/cxcbxagp/montague-precinct-structure-plan_executive-summary-introduction-vision-guiding-principles.pdf

While Kirrip park was not a possibility for us, City of Port Phillip indicated that it would be interested in playful activations that could be implemented in the Montague precinct. Carlo approached a local apartment development across from Kirrip park, The Gladstone, to see if a parklet would be of interest outside their newly built residential towers. The community outreach and partnerships manager at the Gladstone, Demi, agreed to have the parklet.

The Gladstone is a new build on Gladstone St, South Melbourne, operating under a ‘build to rent’ model of operation (the new apartments are not offered up for sale, but are rented out by the developers Greystar). The Gladstone provides 700 rental apartment homes in South Melbourne. Of this, Demi (the partnerships manager) estimated that – in early August – there was close to 50%occupancy of these apartments, with this set to increase significantly until the end of 2025. The three towers include various types of residences such as studios and one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments, with rental agreements available from twelve months up to three years. Within the three towers there are many community spaces with amazing views of the city. There are swimming pools, gyms, saunas, community kitchens, community bbq areas, internet/printing/workdesk offices, dog walking parks and even a dog-cleaning station(!).

Of course, putting a parklet outside the Gladstone – as a space for locals to linger and utilise – would put it in competition with the many  facilities offered by the apartment complex. In turn, the local area is still mixed in its use – i.e much of Gladstone St consists of mechanic workshops, car-spray booths, office blocks and other industrial service/manufacturing commercial properties. The role of a parklet to provide a connective space for community, in the middle of a new apartment complex and a street of garages and office-blocks, is a problematic one.

These problems have been presented to a class of 2^nd and 3^rd year Interior Design and Architecture students at RMIT (Parklet Interior Design Studio) to explore means and ways of utilising playful activations within the parklet.  In this studio, students explore how interior design can use qualitative human insights and analytical methodologies to develop useful and connective spatial environments that adapt and respond to their context and evolving user needs. Working collaboratively with the practitioners and researchers at the future play lab, the students are offered a practical, real-life project to think over and experiment with.

The parklet was delivered to the front of The Gladston on a cold, wet and windy Winter day at the end of July. On the same day, the Interior Design students met up with future play lab staff at The Gladstone and were given a tour of the towers by Demi. Given the amazing facilities, warm treatment by staff and apartment residents, and the awesome views of the city from the higher floors – it was hard to see how the parklet could attract people to use it, exposed as it was to the cold wind and rain.

It was hard for the students to understand, but the Parklet is a place of playful experimentation. Playful design would also give them permission to try things out. If they failed, then there would be valuable and meaningful learnings to be had from that.

An initial example of this is Ashbury, the social media character, created to help promote playful activations within the parklet on a calendar of dates through to October. More about Ashbury to come!…

Friday, September 19, 2025

By Lucy Buxton and Aramiha Harwood

Late on a Friday afternoon, a group of people gathered along the Birrarung to take part in a facilitated walk guided by the recordings of Dr N’arweet Carolyn Briggs. After a day of strong winds, the sun broke through just in time, offering the perfect moment to tune in to N’arweet’s voice through our mobile devices. This walk was originally created by N’arweet, Dr Troy Innocent, and the Alliance of Praxis Research as a live, in-person journey for Melbourne Design Week 2023. Since then, N’arweet has recorded the walk, transforming it into a self-guided digital experience accessible through the use of a mobile device, internet connection, and headphones.

N’arweet’s recordings immerse participants in time travel, carrying us back to the year 1883 and then forwards to 2100. Along the way, we are invited to uncover and remap the original course of the Birrarung, while also generating wishes for our shared future. Participants are encouraged to capture and care for a “watery companion” in a recycled vessel, carrying it for the duration of the walk, before returning it to the river. Stopping and listening at four locations between Enterprize park and Southbank, participants encounter hidden memories of waterways and engage in play design to intimately reconnect with each droplet.

Joining this iteration of the experience were a diverse group of professionals – three creative producers, two environmentalists, one researcher, one physiotherapist and a very friendly dog. Seeing as not everyone knew each other, I opened the walk by inviting everyone to introduce themselves with their name, where they were joining us from, and a small reflection on their connection to water. 

Ahead of the walk, participants completed a short pre-experience survey, exploring their existing connections with the Birrarung and their feelings of ecological responsibility towards the river. Their responses described the Birrarung as “murky,” “polluted,” “muddy” and “historic.” When asked what the river would be like if they were a person or character, responses varied from “an old person. Slow and tired but stubbornly continuing to move and get to their destination,” to “a person who is alive but dead – alive in that they still live and hold value and importance, but dead in that they feel the weight of not being appreciated or loved like they once were.” Another described the Birrarung as simply, “my father.” Collectively, the responses revealed a perception of the Birrarung as polluted, and personified as an older, wounded yet wise character.

We met at 3pm at the first location, using bright pink astroturf shapes as a meeting place, a playful nod to the parklet branding at the Future Play Lab. Participants selected a recycled vessel from the collection I had brought along, before being invited to collect some water, most opting for doing so directly from the water’s edge.

With our headphones on, we followed N’arweet’s voice to the second location and back in time to the year 1883; the year the Yarra waterfalls were demolished. Some participants gazed out to the river as we listened, while others chose to write in a journal to record their thoughts. When invited to play a game that involved disrupting each other’s vessels to spill the water, most people were reluctant to do so. Instead, I suggested we each pour a little bit of our vessels out onto the wood decking, to watch how the water flowed and to reflect on N’arweet’s words about how water always finds its way back. We then came together to replenish each other’s vessels, sharing our resources to restore our watery companions, before continuing our journey across the bridge to the third location.

When we reached Southbank, we were teleported forwards to the year 2100, where sea levels had significantly risen, contaminating all water. We used a red spice as a contaminant, adding a pinch into our watery companions. Everyone was invited to silently make a wish for the future, and reflect on this as we walked to our final location. One participant shared anxiety about what was going to happen to our watery companions – would we keep them or would they be lost?

At the fourth and final location we put our watery companions together to form a body of water on the deck, near the water’s edge. When N’arweet instructed us that it was time to let our companions go, we each released them back into the Birrarung.

We came back together to reflect on a few questions – I invited the group to firstly share their wishes for the future. Responses were very climate-motivated and included “I wish that as humans we would do better,” and “I wish that the world would stay the same as it is now.” When asked if anyone had any reflections or commitments that they wanted to make, one participant noted that she was surprised at how clear the water was when put into her vessel, and how this changed some assumptions she had previously made about the river’s murkiness. Another participant noted that the people making decisions that affect the water often do not directly visit the waterways, and that the walkshop could be a powerful tool to share with policymakers to shift the perspectives of people in a position of power over the Birrarung. Another participant reflected that the walk had shifted the way he sees the Birrarung and rivers in general.

Responses from the post-experience survey revealed a noticeable attunement to the river’s trauma, perhaps as a result of becoming aware of the effects of colonisation and industrial pollution on the Birrarung. The river was described as “disturbed, injured, but resilient.” One response personified the Birrarung as –

“Patient and wise. A person you could sit with and learn from for hours – with many cuppas and biscuits of course. Birrarung has an extensive knowledge of animals, plants, law and history of the place and would advocate for care and change at government level.”

Overall, the walk was a success, bringing together people from diverse fields to time travel, remap the original meander of the Birrarung, and generate wishes for its future. It was a privilege to facilitate this experience with N’arweet Carolyn Briggs in digital form, which now serves as inspiration for developing future playful walkshops along other waterways in Naarm (Melbourne) for Play About Place.

The Seven Sins Festival – Fri Jun 20 & Sat Jun 21, 2025

“Okay, sorry, I’m just distracted, I’m like a child here.”

by Aramiha Harwood, Troy innocent, Lucy Buxton & Carlo Tolentino

RMIT future play lab were invited to participate in the Sinner’s Roast event at Prahran Market, which ran over two nights – Friday and Saturday 20th and 21st June, 2025. The future play lab situated an urban play activation within the market. The urban play was set in 2050, to invite festival attendees to imagine their lives and the role of markets for themselves, their local communities and society in general.

A small-scale LARP (live action role play) was played within the market. A character, Mr Lone Avocado, enlisted festival attendees into participating within the game – offering a drinks card if they successfully finished the game. He sent them to meet a roaming CityAI character (cosplaying as an android), within the interior of the market. The CityAI directed them to a creative placemaker, located by the luminescent garden. The creative placemaker finally led players to some tables, lit up by blacklight globes in the middle of the dark market, where players were invited to play with tabletop musical instruments, paints, tapes and highlighters – while answering broad questions around speculative futures, markets, place and self.

Having the opportunity to play while speculating on relationships with Prahran market, markets in general, and the way humans shop and interact, drew some heart-felt and extensive responses from play participants. Engaging imagination and play, it seems, offered people the permission to engage with personal reflections – while also weighing up very practical considerations in the present and the future.

Interview Questions asked participants: how they ended up attending the Sinner’s Roast; what they felt about a market in general, and Prahran Market in particular; and how People, Money and Food might interact in a speculative future of 2050. While participants answered these questions directly, they freely engaged with concepts of play, speculation around the future, and their feelings about place and Prahran Market. These question responses, and broader/open themed responses, are outlined in direct quotes below.

What brought you both to the market tonight and what’s your connection to this place?

• We are, I don’t really get to do a lot with his family because I’m always at work. So it’s just the one time that I could come to one of these things and they’re always so much fun. I love markets for that reason, yeah.
• We live just up the street. Very close, very convenient. We heard the music. Yeah, it was hard to ignore. Came towards the music.
• Well actually I saw it on Facebook, but we are locals, well semi-locals here, so we shop here on the weekends. So I saw it and I thought, what a different way to utilise the market.

And what does the concept of a market mean to you?

• One thing I really love about markets, like every time I come to whichever market it is, and say in the case of Prahran Market, literally every time I come here, I remember… the other times I’ve come here. Like I remember coming here when I first got to Melbourne. I’m not from Melbourne but I’ve been here 40 years now and I remember the first time I came to Prahran Market in 1985. Wow 40 years!. Yeah and it’s got a lot of special meaning.
• I think I think community connection and also cultural, cultural connection. You see a lot of, you know, international based markets and. I think pretty much every every person here has come from a different walk of life. So I think it’s important to, you know, I suppose, just knowing ourselves where we come from. I think it’s important to view all of it, but yeah, because that’s probably one of the reasons that’s probably the main reason I go to markets and doing this kind of stuff.

We’re imagining that the shapes on the table we’re playing with represent people, money and food. So we’ve got three resources. Imagining that it’s 2050 –  How do you see these three resources working?

• I think markets are where people come together because you’re in your house. You’ve got everything, you’ve got the technology, and you’re going to need humanity and human connections… I think markets are going to become very, very important.. And they’re really going to provide… I think they’re going to have to provide space for people.. for humans to be human. And I think markets are going to enable spaces for creativity for human emotion, for innovation, and for people to connect in a human way. I think markets are going to be essential.
• I feel money is going to increase and connection will somehow increase, because we’re only getting more as the years go by. But food will obviously the same, which is why in relation to the markets, food is big, because we’ll have our money, we’ll have our people and connection to stuff, but food is big to make, because of what I just said.

Themes Around Play

• First of all, you’re obviously living it (play) and it’s live. You can basically touch it. (Our son) does game and that’s that’s cool Yeah, and  I’m totally happy for that to happen but he also knows that there’s a side of our lives where he needs to come out and he needs to experience and involve himself with other people and, People of all different demographics, you know, I think he gets a lot, a lot out of that. And you wouldn’t experience that if you’re just sitting at home on your sofa.

• I mean, just imagine, like two minutes back, he (son) was just literally saying, “I don’t want to be here, I want to go home.” What would he do? Go home, watch something. But now he’s sitting and interacting with the things which are around, not whinging at all. That makes a difference. If your community has availability of doing something outside and anyone can come, there is no, like, need to pay something. And he can come and just spend time and, you know, he can come out. Do spend time. Else people just go home and get busy with electronics and that’s it. Less talking among each other

Immersion and Interaction as an Experience with Play

• So, I’m definitely one that would be like, no, someone’s trying (to play) here, so let’s try and get involved and even if we don’t like it we don’t have to stay at it let’s just experience it and then move on and look sometimes those little memories the kids learn from that or go oh do you remember that time when and it might not be something major could be something quite, minimal but that remains as a memory in their mind so I think that’s really interesting.
• Oh look, it’s great, we’re totally different, old people, we’re on and we’re just chatting to a lady outside who’s a little old to go to, get through, got the instructions, we haven’t met her before, but yeah, great meeting people, just have that interaction with other people.

The Seven Sins Festival – Sat 14 and Sun 15 June, 2025

by Aramiha Harwood & Carlo Tolentino

The Sin Series at Prahran Market was an autumn/winter festival event that took place over 8 weekends during May and June 2025. Each weekend featured different activities, music and entertainment, as well as associated delicious foods, related to the various themes of Sin. Sloth, for example, offered gentle acoustic music, mulled wine, and cosy romcoms on big TV screens. Gluttony presented a sausage-eating competition, while Pride was celebrated with Drag Queen Bingo. The entire festival would culminate in a weekend of night-time food, music and activities at the Sinner’s Roast.

The idea for play busking came from creative director Carlo Tolentino at a future play lab planning meeting. Team members were contemplating the slow movement associated with obtaining permits and planning permissions for pop-up events and parklet activities – including at Festivals. Carlo suggested that perhaps play activation artists could operate as buskers on the street, with a little mobile set of equipment they could take from place to place, to run 2-3 simple games/play-activities for passing foot traffic. The only permissions required would be getting a busking permit from local councils.

The future play lab were approached by City of Stonnington to see if we would be interested in play-related activations at the Prahran Market during the Sin Series festival. Two weekends were provided as possible dates to get involved. The first weekend would encompass the hustle and bustle of the day-time market, celebrating the sin of Pride (also coinciding with the Pride Festival). The second weekend would be during the Sinner’s Roast of the final weekend – to be held at night-time.

For the sin of Pride weekend, it was thought that the play busking model could be one that would work in this context. It would be during the day and in a market – local foot traffic would be used to interaction with busking artists in a market setting. The possibilities of play busking could also be explored in Prahran Market, with a variety of places and spaces afforded to the play lab team/s to try out and experiment with.

Two Playful Spaces Officers (PSO’s), Vaishali and Lester, operated throughout the Prahran Market for two days with a single suitcase of play activation equipment and games. Not only did they operate as facilitators of the games, they could also bring their expertise in game design and facilitation to changing the rules and conditions of the game/s – depending on where they were, at the time, and who they were with.

Both PSO’s felt that each play space—whether urban parks, indoor venues, or public streets—presented unique challenges. These included accommodating different group sizes, energy levels, and the diverse personalities and interests of potential participants, requiring tailored ways of inviting people to play.

Moving from place to place as a play-busker demanded careful consideration of how people could interact with new spaces and how best to engage them. Vaishali and Lester argued that play-busking games must be inclusively simple to foster spontaneous, meaningful interactions across different age groups, as people would often join after observation of the game/s first.

For the Saturday event, both elders and young adults were present at the market to do their shopping, while Sunday saw more family-oriented participation with partners and toddlers. Game explanations and demonstrations were targeted to different age groups. It was noted that on one occasion, specifically on Sunday, two games were run simultaneously to accommodate toddlers’ individual interests. The games played included Lemon Joust, Square of Sounds, Fox and Squirrel, and Zen Counting. For ‘Square of Sounds,’ instruments were incorporated into the play, and participants learned to play music by pointing out icons.

Audience Engagement and Invitation to Play

Lester and Vasishali mentioned initial difficulties in engaging market-goers, as people were primarily focused on grocery shopping. Initial attempts to invite people by shouting about games led to confusion and onlookers questioning the event. The strategy was then changed to inviting people to play ‘free games,’ which resulted in more positive interactions, including smiles and inquiries. The wider demographic of participants demonstrated that urban pop-up play could appeal to a diverse range of ages, suggesting potential for broader community engagement. The PSO’s were also able to engage people through conversations around the future play lab itself and the concept of urban play.

Venue and Setup Considerations

On the first day, at the first location (an entrance into the food hall section of the market), the team struggled to invite people to participate. Market security referred to this location as a ‘bad’ area. This highlighted the advantage of a busking-style setup, allowing the PSO’s to pick up and move to locations with more crowds. Considerations for location selection included ensuring the safety of participants, avoiding disturbance to other shops and/or businesses, and being mindful of existing amenities like dog water bowls and tables. Issues such as cold conditions in the food hall were also noted. At the end of the first day, an outer space was tried, but most people had finished their shopping so it was a quiet area.

—

Overall it was felt that this first go at play-busking was a success. By moving around to different locations within the Prahran Market, and adjusting the games to the audience/s at any given place and/or time, there were some very useful and meaningful interactions with the diverse groups who frequent the market on the weekend. There will definitely be further adjustments and tweaking for future events. This may include introducing different or additional games on different days to offer variety, varying game difficulty levels to suit participants’ ability levels, and continuing to move play locations to encourage maximum engagement. The experience and capability of the PSO’s – as facilitators and game-designers – cannot be overestimated in its importance for play-busking in particular.

Of course there was not too much time for those of us at future play lab to reflect on play-busking as a method. We needed to get ready for the following weekend of play activities at the night-time festival Sinner’s Roast!

Urban Play activations in the Darkness… what Fun! More details coming soon…

A Chance to Test Pop-Up Urban Play

by Aramiha Harwood, Troy Innocent, Carlo Tolentino & Lucy Buxton

On Sunday 6 April, future play lab participated in the Satay and Reog Festival at Prahran Square in Naarm Melbourne. Run by the Indonesian Diaspora Network Victoria, the festival offers a range of cultural performances, food stalls, and fun activities for attendees – with a focus on Indonesian culture, food, and street games. The event fosters community involvement and is attended by many families and children. Activities include traditional dance, fashion shows, parades, music, and various Indonesian food stalls – including satay, of course!

The future play lab were invited by the City of Stonnington to activate some of the space at the Festival through play and games as part of LP220100066 Play about Place. The opportunity to participate meant that the future play lab would have limits on space and time in which to operate, presenting a chance to test the urban play pop-up’s modularity. The team assembled included a Creative Director (Troy), Creative Producer (Carlo), and three Playful Spaces Officers (PSOs).

Carlo devised a ‘medium size’ version of the future play lab’s pop-up play activations based on Troy’s curation and design for St Kilda Festival during brat summer earlier in the year. This medium size pop-up focuses on mobile and agile elements of games and play.  This medium version was designed to have games and play equipment that are easily transportable, could be set up relatively quickly, and could be packed up just as fast.  Lemon Joust and Sound Square were included in this medium size activation. In addition, an Indonesian student at RMIT helped to implement two other Indonesian games in particular:

One, Two, Three – Wooden Man: a variation of the game Red Light, Green Light, or Statues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statues_(game)

Semut, Orang, Gajah: a variation of the Rock, Paper, Scissors hand game https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=5079

Testing of this medium version of the urban play pop-up occurred at the festival, focusing on things such as mobility, modularity, and the use of astroturf shapes to create inherently playful spaces.

On the day, Troy explored different activation sites, observing these for 15-20 minutes, then directing relocation of the activation. The initial location was not ideal due to security concerns and was not encouraging for children and families. Over the day, the Play Activation was moved three times. Each location was used for different durations: the first for 40 minutes, the second for about 1 hour, and the third for nearly 2 hours. Lemon Joust was the most played game on the day. The Indonesian games were well-received by attendees familiar with them, inviting them to play.

Of the three locations, each offered a different context:

• site one: chosen by the event organisers for line of sight with the main stage and audience area
• site two: selected by creative director to be more enclosed and secure, and to intersect with foot traffic from nearby Greville St
• site three: selected by creative director after grabbing a satay snack and observing the busiest area for foot traffic adjacent to food trucks and connecting to nearby Prahran Market. This location also included seating and a set of rock steps ideal for musical instruments and equipment.

There were some difficulties on the day. Sometimes the bands that performed at the festival were very loud, which meant that the Play activation music and discussions involved in engaging play-participants were difficult to hear. The outdoor scope of the Festival meant that the play activations were exposed to heavy wind on the day, and rain meant that the event packed up an hour earlier than expected. It was also felt by some of the Play organisers that the Square itself was not an inviting space – the concrete boundaries of Prahran Square closed off passing foot-traffic who may have been interested in what was going on.

General observations from Play organisers and facilitators noted the overall success of the Play activation at the Satay and Reog festival. Overall Click-counter numbers for the day had 275 people who engaged and/or participated in future play lab activities. Children, parents, and even band members – who were performing on the day – participated in games. When it came time to move the Play to another location at the festival, some parents and children actively helped move equipment between locations – indicating a strong desire to continue playing. Perhaps this relocation activity could be turned into a game itself? Something to think about further…

Familiar Indonesian games significantly encouraged engagement from the Indonesian community, as many attendees recognized them from their childhood.

In terms of mobility of the Play activation, and moving to new locations, it was noted that sight lines are very important for visibility and engagement. The second location had poor sight lines as it was behind a tent and a stage – so it was harder to get an audience to come and play. It is thought that visual cues and open spaces can be important for inviting play, creating a welcoming atmosphere.

Reflecting on the roles of the Playful Spaces Officers (PSOs), it was suggested that providing a  clear division of responsibilities could help in engaging more members of the public as potentil play-participants. For example, one PSO could be actively inviting people to play (“hooking them in”) while another could be running the game itself. This could be really useful for PSOs, as it can be hard to maintain attention on one thing, while trying to do another.

It was noted that adults were mostly observers, with some participating alongside their children. This identifies the need to better invite adults to play themselves, not just watch their kids. Opportunities exist to leverage instruments or other engagement tools to encourage active adult participation.

Overall, the Satay and Reog Festival 2025 was an opportunity to try out a medium sized Play activation on site. future play lab organisers have been sufficiently encouraged by this agile and mobile approach to play activations to try this at future events – perhaps making the activations even more ‘pop-up’ in style and approach. Both future play lab organisers and PSO’s were also afforded the opportunity to practice and hone their skills and craft as Play activators – using the opportunity to reflect and build on their knowledge and experience for the future. The future play lab would like to thank the Indonesian Diaspora Network Victoria and the City of Stonnington for this opportunity to be a part of the 2025 Satay and Reog Festival.

Terima kasih!

Discovering St.Kilda’s Urban Play Personality

by Carlo Tolentino, Aramiha Harwood, and Troy Innocent

The future play lab was officially part of the St Kilda Festival in partnership with the City of Port Phillip. Happening on a sunny Saturday of 15th Feb 2025, St Kilda Festival is an annual festival that celebrated local culture, live music, food and art along the St Kilda foreshore.

“Since the first St Kilda Festival in 1980, this well-loved annual summer celebration has established itself as an iconic event that brings the community together.

In 2023 we introduced a new two-day format, which was a huge success in its inaugural year, attracting more than 375,000 live music lovers over the fun-filled weekend.” (stkildafestival.com.au)

This is the first of numerous planned Urban Play initiatives, that the future play lab’s ARC linkage: Play about Place: Expanding the impact of Creative Placemaking after COVID aims to explore, test, and iterate on. The idea of a Pop-up Urban Play event, emerged during the event’s planning phase of and frames the lab’s themes and activities during the St Kilda Festival, with the aims of getting to know the people in the neighborhood through a combination of planned and spontaneous urban play.

On the day of the festival, the lab’s Pop-Up Urban Play booth and play space would be enclosed within a 7m x 14m area situated along Shakespeare Grove. The location itself provided active foot traffic from festival attendees, and a prime location just across Luna Park and in proximity to youth activity related booths and music stages. Within the designated space, the future play lab team setup a marquee to provide shade and serve as a booth for open music play, conducting new playful surveys, and provide information on what the future play lab is. The open play space was then adorned with geograms cut from pink astroturf, to create a striking and playful appearance from a distance, as well as functional symbols to situate urban play games.

The urban play games were a number of pre-selected games combining Aboriginal games, new games movement, and music games. A number of Urban Play menus were held up by PSO’s (Playful Spaces Officers) to encourage curious passersby to pick a game to play, as well as empower players the choice to play an urban play of their choice. Competitive and simple to understand games were the most popular, such as lemon joust and oddball.

”Would you like to know your Urban Play Personality?” was an opening line said to curious passersby and playful participants in order to test a newly devised playful survey to gather feedback on what kind of urban play games people in the community would be interested in playing or potentially be seeing in their neighborhoods. A distinct playful personality badge was then given to participants who completed the survey, to which other passerbys would appear to be curious about and consequently also be inclined to discover their Ubran Play personality themselves. A table was set up with a spread of various musical instruments, and helped in attracting festival attendees into the Urban Play booth to engage in open music play, the playful survey, and even lego building.

‘We developed a set of urban play types cross referencing popular play personality surveys as both a method for collecting data and as a tangible reward for play by providing colourful badges for participation that identified people as creative placemakers, playful citizens, urban storytellers etc – this was also a way to get to know the people in the neighbourhood’

Associate Professor Troy Innocent

Over the day, there were a total of 461 people who were recorded (via clicker count) enjoying  Urban Play Booth activities. Of this number, 68 of them took part in the Urban play type Quiz for the Future Play Lab. These Quiz participants were a diverse bunch – while more than a third (36.8%) of respondents were between the age of 30-39, there were relatively even numbers of age groups, from teenage years (19 and under – 16.2%) through to senior years (50 years and over 10.3%). Close to half of Quiz participants lived locally (49.8%) while another 40.3% lived close by in Melbourne. Only 9% of Quiz participants came from outside Melbourne.

From the Quiz results, there were some points of interest. Fun seemed to be the greatest motivation for participants in Play (“I just want to have fun” = 65.7%). Connection to Place and Home as a location where you live at a given time, was highlighted by the majority of quiz-takers (58.2%). More than a quarter (28.2%) felt that Home was more of an association of where you grew up. When questioned on climate crises in their local neighbourhoods, a large majority (60.2%) felt that working together as a community was the best way to adapt and overcome challenges. It is interesting that 30.4% of the participants felt that fun and games were an essential part of building local community.  

A number of Urban play Lego kits were also prepared for the two Urban Play workshops during the day. The Urban Play workshops were meant to be a more structured approach to making attendees play through all the urban play menu games, an info session to Urban Play, and creating their own Urban Play block and neighborhood through lego. During the day however, the building of a lego Urban Play neighborhood was organically done by excited children, teens, and their parents already engaged with the various urban play games that were continuously happening throughout.

The pilot activities and materials in the Urban Play pop-up were:

• A temporary pop-up setup through a marquee/tent.
• Urban Play Menus to select games.
• Astroturf shapes to establish a playful space.
• Urban Play games
• Lego kits for
• Playful Survey + badges
• Pilot prototype – meet people in the neighborhood

Overall, the combination of pop-up urban play setup, urban play menus, playful surveys, and urban play lego kits proved to be very successful in how the whole day of activities came together. There were at least 1,000 people who passed through the pop-up Urban Play space to either play, take photos, and discover their urban play personalities. Pilot Urban Play systems that provides the team with a wealth of new information to plan out the Future Play Lab’s Urban Play events throughout the rest of 2025, while gathering meaningful data through playful surveys and community consultation.

A Day of Play in Future Libraries

by Aramiha Harwood

In late 2024, on the first day of the Melbourne International Games Week festival, Future Play Lab joined with narrm ngarrgu Library to put on a day of Play in the Library.

https://futureplaylab.io/projects/future-play-library

narrm ngarggu is a new City of Melbourne Library and Family Services Centre which opened in late 2023. narrm ngarrgu (pronounced nahm nar-GUW) means ‘Melbourne Knowledge’ in Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung language.

Located in the Queen Vic Market precinct of CBD Melbourne, this new library caters to a broad range of clients – young people, families, domestic and international students, tourists and commuters. Not just a library space, narrm ngarrgu is an urban oasis, designed so everyone in our diverse community can explore their interests, learn something new and access integrated family support.

We were interested in the role of libraries as essential social infrastructure connected to place and the role of play in bringing people together to energise and interconnect existing communities, and provide the creative spark for new ones. The opening event included representatives from Bayside and Manningham Council, sparking off conversations on this theme at the start of the day.

With this in mind, narrm ngarrgu brought together the gaming community in Melbourne to explore the potential of play and gaming to connect, explore the future and to share knowledge with each other. Librarians and gamers, designers and playmakers, researchers and enthusiasts, families and communities, were invited to sample and engage with some possibilities for the future of play – and to imagine the library, as a third place, supporting this.

During the day, there were many opportunities to experience different types of play – organised and freeform – throughout the library. Participants were free to diversify their experiences, by moving from place to place, from play to play. There were web-based games available on the public computers, supplied by game design students at RMIT – via Games Kitchen. https://rmitlink.rmit.edu.au/Clubs/Games-Kitchen

LEGO and jigsaw puzzles were left for younger library attendees to use in the multifunction room on level 3, while Boardgames were placed on multifunction tables in the Event space on level 1 for anyone to come and play with.

There were several games in particular which were memorable for their engagement and fun.

The Werewolf social game, a perennial favourite for many gamers, was discovered by a group of librarians. Asked to roleplay themselves as villagers (with a couple of insurgent Werewolves), the group worked together through the complex social dynamics and moral dilemmas of ‘the village’ – while trying to solve the mystery of ‘Who are the Werewolves killing our Villagers?’. The game itself is free, an example of it is available here: https://pegasusshop.de/media/pdf/51/d5/38/4250231716614_gb.pdf

The Adaptation Game asked players to consider their place in climate change and our future communities. Roleplaying themselves or an imagined identity into the near future, players faced  a growing number of climate events and aasociated social and economic ramifications (eg my player had to try and travel across the CBD of Melb when all public transport infrastructure had collapsed in an unprecedented heatwave). One of the particular elements of interest for me was the fact that the game could be tailored to specific councils and local government areas. That is, the spaces, stories and events in-game were specific to particular locations and places eg CBD Melbourne (City of Melbourne), or the Dandenong mountains (Yarra Ranges council).

https://amble.studio/

Games Kitchen RMIT and Swinburne Gamemakers also ran a Game development session during the afternoon.  So many young people came along to enjoy playtesting games and chatting about how to make some of them. This was the biggest success, from the huge number of games, attendees and diversity of imaginative/fun approaches to console and pc gaming design and animation. My Kudos and Congrats to the students from both Universities.

In the evening there were two panels held in the event space. In the first, gamemakers discussed elements of play and gaming in their relative spheres. Letoya from the Indigenous gaming collective GUCK, Leon from Melbourne Megagames, Jason from Amble Studios, and myself, discussed: the state of play in Melbourne in 2024; how the industry is looking for independent game developers; what it is that draws us to gaming, play and gamemaking; and where we think things will be going in the future.

There was some argument over what gaming represents, as an artistic pursuit or as playful distraction – and what this means for the industry and/or sector. It was argued that play can be a useful tool for learning and engagement, through the permission to imagine and to have fun that it entails.

GUCK: https://www.tsumea.com/developer-service/guck

Melbourne Megagames: https://www.melbournemegagames.com/

Jasan Tampake/Amble Studio: https://amble.studio/meet-the-troupe/

Finally, researchers involved with future play lab – Dale Leorke and Danielle Wyatt – joined Lucas Yi to discuss the role of Libraries as the ‘third place’ that could be a supporting hub for play and gaming in most communities and Melbourne in particular. Dale and Danielle discussed their book, The Library as Playground, comparing the approaches to play in libraries around the world, and the spectrum of formal and informal play spaces within these libraries. Lucas provided some perspective on the practicalities of running gaming programs in Melbourne’s libraries, given his own experiences having done so at several suburban libraries. It was agreed that play can be seen in a variety of forms and modes in libraries, and that it can be a useful means of connecting with patrons – many of whom may need the ‘permission/s’ of play to engage with their library and community further.

Overall the day was considered a success. There is talk of planning for another Future Play Library day for 2025, with hopefully further funding from invested bodies.

For me I thought it was encouraging that there were so many diverse groups there on the day – gamers, young and old, librarians, and academics. I did find it disappointing that there was a lack of engagement with each other on a personal level, suggesting the need for more social games – something that was left out of the program due to time and resources. The games, in their respective spaces and respective ludic element, remained separated from one another. The greatest disappointment to me was that, besides the library attendees who were open to trying out most of what was on offer on the day, the gamers and playmakers didn’t do likewise. One of the major reasons for making the Future Play Library day happen was for those of us non-industry playmakers and gamemakers to start engaging with one another and supporting each other. A community of practice. As someone who  designs, playtests and publishes, I recognise the importance of the community to make all of these things happen! This didn’t really happen, as I observed many of the makers and players focus on their own play activities and not really go outside of that. This was represented in the invitation to have a post-event beer, at the brewery next to narrm ngarrgu, given to all attendees and volunteers in the program, but a more structured social event embedded in the day would be more successful as many people had other MIGW commitments to attend.

I’d suggest that this may be something to look at for the future Future Play Library – a greater focus on bringing people together to share knowledge and their love of play/gaming, as a means of making it sustainable and fun.

As my father always said when beginning meetings in Maori:

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata he tangata.

What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.

ka kite anō!
seeya later!

By Dale Leorke

In mid-2024, the future play lab at RMIT piloted a workshop, called ‘Urban Commons’, to test out how we might co-design public spaces that reflect experiences of place with young LGBTIQA+ and First Nations people. Not everyone has equal access to public space, and many people, particularly those from minority groups, can feel excluded from, or ostracised in, public places that others might simply take for granted. Urban play can connect people through shared goals or friendly competition. But it can also be used to rethink and repurpose everyday objects, places and situations in the city, and to challenge or even transgress social and physical boundaries.

With this in mind, we sought to use creative and playful methods to explore how both young queer and First Nations people might reimagine and redesign urban spaces to reflect and accommodate their own distinctive experiences, needs and desires. These workshops were funded by a 2023-24 VicHealth JumpStart! grant, which helps to pilot projects that support young people’s health and wellbeing through arts, cultural and play-based activities.

In our original proposal, we planned to run a series of workshops inside the future play lab’s “playful parklet”, which has already travelled across Naarm/Melbourne hosting a series of interactive art installations, exhibitions, musical performances and augmented reality and tabletop games, as well as “urban play school” co-design workshops with RMIT students. These events have generally been open to the public and attempted to engage any passers-by. But we wanted to reimagine the parklet through queer and First Nations lenses by asking members of each of these communities to co-design content and programming for it. Ideally, a community organisation that supports young people from these communities would “host” the parklet outside one of their spaces and invite their members to participate.

After we received the funding we approached community organisations to co-run the workshops. However, it became clear that these organisations were hesitant about this idea because, reflecting its origins in DIY and temporary and tactical urbanism, the parklet is highly visible and disruptive when located in new spaces. While our playful parklet has received negative feedback from a handful of residents in the past, this has mostly been frustration over the temporary loss of two car parking spaces that the parklet occupies. But in this case, community groups were concerned that the parklet might attract unwanted or negative attention from hate groups and that their members may not feel safe inside it. This prompted us to rethink the workshops so that they were designed to be more safe and inclusive for members of these communities.

Rather than taking place inside a parklet, the workshops would be hosted in and around a community space. One workshop would focus on First Nations youth and involve walking on Country with Professor N’arwee’t Carolyn Briggs, Boon Wurrung Senior Elder. It would be followed by a discussion about how participants might use play to disrupt the Western, colonial design of urban space and reconnect with traditional ways of knowing and being in place. The second workshop by LGBTIQA+ community leader Professor Katherine Johnson would ask queer youth to use LEGO to design a small public space, modelled on the parklet, that they would feel comfortable and safe to play and connect in.

JumpStart! aims to support projects that test out ideas and implement them quickly, but with these delays and changes to the project we were over schedule and only had a short time left to organise, advertise and run the workshops. The first two workshops were held on the same day at Footscray Community Arts Centre and although we had 14 registrations…nobody showed up.

This was the result of a number of factors – not least the extremely wet and cold weather that day, but also especially a lack of time and capacity to build relationships with community organisations to help recruit participants from the particular groups we wanted to work with. The organisers discussed how the next two workshops – due to be held the following weekend – might be rethought to better attract participants. We combined them into one, shorter workshop, led jointly by Prof N’arwee’t Briggs and Prof Johnson, involving a short walk followed by a LEGO workshop and discussion, which would be open to anyone to participate. Rather than a structured program, we would simply ask participants to try out our methods and give us feedback on how we might better design the workshops in future.

The second workshop was held at Abbotsford Convent, a former convent redeveloped as an arts and cultural precinct. This time we had 10 registrations and 5 participants – although all were acquaintances or colleagues of the organisers – and better weather. We began with a walk around the Convent gardens with Prof N’arwee’t Briggs reflecting on its highly linear, controlled and commercialised design, despite its close proximity to the Birrarung (Yarra River), which had once been plentiful with birds, eels and fish. We then gathered in a meeting room full of LEGO and asked our participants to design a place that had meaning to them, inspired by their imaginations and our walk.

Our participants came up with an eclectic mix of spaces, ranging from deeply personal to more conceptual and allegorical. One (25, male, gay, Indonesian) designed a peaceful resting place for his pet cat, who had died when he was living in Indonesia and never received a proper burial. Another (29, male, queer, Indonesian) created the interior of an alien spaceship with himself at the control station, which he had “mastered” and which offered him a place where he felt “in control”. The spaceship, he explained, also had a cloaking ability so it could land in places without being seen – reflecting, perhaps, some of the tensions over “visibility” in public space that our project had grappled with.

Two brothers of mixed Vietnamese and Māori descent, meanwhile, designed more conceptual and narrative-based structures. One (17) had crafted an elaborate Mad Max-inspired arena with a figure climbing to the top of a tall spiral that resembled an art sculpture he had seen online. The figure, he explained, was unaware that when they reached its peak someone else would spring a trap, launching a giant ball from a sling to bring the entire structure down, making their efforts futile.

His brother (13) created a smaller-scale installation depicting a helmeted figure, shovel raised threateningly, interrogating another figure handcuffed to a tree about the location of a hidden treasure. Yet the interrogator, our participant explained, was unaware that the treasure chest was located directly underneath them because he was too busy using violence and coercion to seek it out, rather than simply looking at the environment around him. Discussions with the boys and their father revealed that these installations were partly influenced by N’arwee’t’s comments about the history of the place we were in, and could potentially be read as allegories for capitalism and colonialism, respectively.

At the end of the workshop these LEGO sites were reassembled on one table to explore how they might come together as a neighbourhood. They joined various other sites that future play lab members had created, including more Mad Max-inspired hovercraft, a bridge with figures pursued by a Friday the 13th-esque chainsaw-wielding figure, a silent disco accommodating body-diverse revellers, the ruins of an attempted explorable space, and a replica of our playful parklet.

On its way to being carried over, the replica parklet was accidentally dropped and broke in half. When it was restored and placed amidst the other spaces, its semi-enclosed, angular design looked at odds with the more open and porous spaces that participants had created. Perhaps these were both omens that the more contained, “hard” infrastructure of parklets needed to give way to more permeable and community-embedded “soft” infrastructure that embraces freedom and malleability of identity and expression, as well as movement. 

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Dale Leorke is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and a member of the Urban Play Network.

Over the past month, an experiment in shared world creation through an immersive role-playing game set on the streets of Naarm/Melbourne in 2050 has played out over a series of three events at MPavilion in Melbourne. Reworlding: Play The World We Want is a speculative and relational form of world-building focused on evolution over revolution, and nurturing and developing existing patterns in culture, the environment, and society.

The game itself is an OSR (Old School Revival) TTRPG (TableTop Role-Playing Game) created by Troy Innocent in the RMIT future play lab. Development of the rules and setting are continuing following the three MPavilion events, but the introduction starts with the following:

Hello, welcome.

This is Narrm, also known as Melbourne, in 2050.

The City is run by AI. That’s what we’ve been told.

For you, a megacitizen living through increasing uncertainty in The City, there are three things that matter: HOPE, COMMUNITY, and SYMBIOSIS.

The game is played out through a reworlding system using roleplay, props, places and provocations. As promised to the players, here is how the final scenario played out… by the end everyone pictured below was part of Melbourne in 2050. Thanks to Aramiha Harwood for writing up this account, and to all the generous participants who played well together.

Part III.

Played on March 14, 2024

Events take place on January 3, 2050

The Cast

Virgon Accord – Metabuilder – Penelope

Maisy Ware – Metabuilder – Nic

Dusty Crispr – Posthuman Nomad – Ben

Kiian Bernard – Traceur + their trusty robot dog ‘Donkey Teeth’ – Kel

Quiznatodd ‘Quiz’ Bidness – Activist – Ara

The Reworlder – Troy

Rave music pumps in the air as the crowd heaves in time with the music. In the middle of the crowd appear Dusty and Quiz, both of them slightly disoriented by the light and noise. How long have they been dancing? Who knows?

They bump into Kiian and Donkey Teeth, who is also dancing in the crowd. They give each other a welcoming hug and they begin to socialise with others around them. They are drawn to an intense conversation between two metabuilders, Virgon and Maisy.

Virgon believes that the world needs to be perfected as data-driven built environment. If things can be controlled and masterminded, then humanity and the environment can exist in perfect harmony. What is already there, needs to be improved upon. She is strong in hope for the future and humanity, but has little time for misplaced belief in symbiosis with the natural world.

Maisy is also strong in the belief that humanity and the world can exist in harmony, but she feels that it would be better done through reciprocal and symbiotic with nature. Respectful and fluid adaptivity to the environment, rather than selfish extraction, is the only way forward.

While the trio listen to the metabuilders, they notice someone else is listening. This person introduces themselves as Vermillion – a government worker. Quiz tenses at the mention of ‘the gubment’ but fears are allayed when she says that she is a local government worker. She says she is interested in the discussion of building a better future for humanity, in fact she could help with a policy plan to make this happen. Virgon immediately regales Vermillion with her visions of this better future, and Vermillion is immediately taken with these ideas – she’ll help Virgon!

Suddenly the rave music drops a beat, and Sesame Street’s ‘People in Your Neighborhood’ starts pumping out of the speakers. Everyone knows that this means that security is on their way, so the crowd break up and start running in all directions at once.

The group – Virgon, Maisy, Dusty, Kiian, Donkey Teeth , Vermillion and Quiz – run away into the dawn, avoiding the impending security-crackdown.  They are joined by a quiet fellow, Dion, who – while running – has little to say to anyone. It seems he would rather remain quiet and inconspicuous, perhaps a wise choice given the state of Melbourne and its AI.

Making good on their escape, the group pause to catch their breaths and make plans. Virgon would like to check out the Monolith which still looms above the local cityscape. She has been told about the sushi restaurant in it, and she is dying to eat some meat – perhaps beef, if they have it? No-one has the heart to tell her that the sushi restaurant only serves soylent green as a meat substitute…

Maisy wonders if there is any coffee available around them, but there is nothing about.

What to do next? The group decide that they’ll check out the Data Centre somewhere to the west – which also happens to be towards the detention centres and the raging bush fire. They slowly walk along the empty streets of Western Melbourne, the smoky haze getting worse, when they spy a lone figure walking towards them.

The figure turns out to be wearing some sort of uniform, which the group cannot identify. Approached by the group, the figure greets them all. It turns out that she is a security guard for a detention centre – she takes care of the AI security which controls the drones. The group is intrigued, wondering if they could get control of the drones. The guard says she could definitely provide five drones to the group for their use, but she also says that her current ‘mission’ is to bring criminals and hackers to the detention centre. She would need to bring someone into the detention centre as a prisoner, before she gives up control of the drones. The group deliberate amongst themselves. Maisy suggests that Kiian could go into detention, and the group could rescue her in a day or two, with Donkey Teeth’s help.

Kiian agrees to this plan and is handcuffed by the guard and taken away to the detention centre. She is processed and locked away in a cell. The guard immediately receives a promotion at the detention centre – she is now a Chief of Guards (COG). She hacks into the security AI and sends 5 drones to Virgon, who takes control of them. Talking remotely through the drones’ speakers, the new COG thanks the group for their help – if there’s anything else they need in the future, just ask her.

The group are unsure what to do next. They could wait to rescue Kiian, but it’s only a matter of time before government forces repair power to Melbourne’s AI and things return to normal – do they have very long?

Suddenly, from out of thin air, appears a person. This takes the group aback for a moment, but they cautiously greet this person. Of an Asian background, the person introduces themselves as Christi. She is a police officer.

Quiz freaks out. “RUN” he shouts, leaping to jump on Christi. She quickly clarifies that she is a RETIRED police officer, which stops Quiz in his tracks.

Christi was a police officer in China who just retired, and was looking for a place to retire. The group didn’t think to ask how Christi suddenly travelled from mainland China to Melbourne. They continue to discuss whether or not to rescue Kiian, and how they could do it. Christi suddenly tells everyone “I have this teleporter that can take me from any place to another. I call it… a magic door.” He pulls out a small device from his pocket. He will help the group, if they can help him find the perfect place to retire.

Virgon pitches the ideas of her megabuild – of a perfect planned mini-city, here on the outskirts of Megacity Melbourne – to Christi. There would be wide shaded streets and lovely shopping centres, and gleaming office-buildings for citizens to work in. The perfect place to retire!

Carlo likes this idea and agrees to teleport into the detention centre (with coordinates from Donkey Teeth), pickup Kiian, and teleport back out – with the proviso that he will have a home in this city of Virgon’s.  A simple and elegant solution, and the group congratulates one another when this is done with little fuss.

Virgon would like to celebrate with a coffee, but – here on the outskirts of Mega-Melbourne – there is not a coffee to be found!

Their ideas percolating, Virgon and Vermillion are keen to build this new city, but how will it be done? As if summoned by Virgon and Vermillion a crowd of at least 100 people march down the main street on which the group stand. They are all fired up, shouting slogans and carrying XR banners.

Christi chooses this time to inform the group that he also happens to be carrying a gun – which only unsettles everyone even more.

Leading the marching group is Christian, who stops to talk to the group. She tells them that she and her community group want to claim this street. It is an important part of their community and they want to prevent the outside world from developing on it. Virgon explains her plans for a new community, and Christian thinks this sounds promising. She agrees to help Virgon, if it will help preserve this main street.

The group stop their marching and begin helping Virgon to plan out this new megabuild. People quickly mark out spaces for development, and Virgon uses the Drones to rapidly start 3-D printing the buildings. All of this activity draws out other locals. Rani approaches the group and offers to serve them chai. The group agree that, without any coffee so far, chai is just as good for caffeine. As she serves the chai, Rani lets the group know that she works with a group of activists known as the Friends of the Forest. She says that her group started the bushfires towards Geelong, but they are controlled bushfires. Controlled burns are an indigenous practice, to help regenerate the environment and renew growth.

A restaurateur also approaches the group. He is trying to establish a business in the area, and this megabuild of Virgon’s offers the perfect opportunity to do so. He offers food to the builders and the group, to help sustain them as they continue their building. Quiz asks, in vain hope, if the restaurateur has any coffee he could share, but he says that he is saving it for when he opens the business.

The roar of a truck alerts the builders of an approaching vehicle. Down the road it roars, emblazoned with the letters ‘SES’ on the sides of it. Out leaps an SES emergency worker, asking for help. Her name is Sarah, and she needs some people to come and aid her in removing some collapsed trees. She reckons that these are the last of the trees blocking government agencies from re-establishing power and connection with the AI data centre. Once these trees are removed, Mega-Melbourne will soon return to normal.

Rani says that the trees should be left to burn as they are, or else nature’s balance will be disrupted. Christian and the restaurateur feel that, if the all-powerful AI was to be restored, the street and the megabuild should absolutely be protected from the AI’s control and oversight. How could this be done, though?

Vermillion suggests contacting the COG security guard. The security guard had told the group that she was an accomplished hacker – perhaps she could hack the AI when it restarts and keep this megabuild out of the AI’s sights? When they manage to get the security guard on the radio, she assures the group that she can definitely do what they ask.

As if to back up this plan of the group’s, Sarah also lets everyone know that she knows where Claire and Mushen can be found. i.e they are underground, hacking into the AI to ensure that it remains down. If they help her restore power, she will let the group know where Claire and Mu-Shen are.

Reassured of all this, Kiian and Donkey Teeth – with Carlo and Dusty’s help – teleport to the Trees and they help to remove the trees. It is only a matter of time until the AI system is restored. What should the group do? Continue with the megabuild with this new community of people? Or find Claire and Mushen, and bring down the data centre that houses the AI?

Virgon is happy with the megabuild, and wishes for it to proceed – a happy, perfect, shiny urban system. A property developer approaches everyone and throws her support behind Virgon, suggesting she could find more people to come live there.

Quiz is not happy, he thinks that the system needs to come down for good. Rani argues that man’s relationship with nature needs to be returned to balance.

Maisy stands up and addresses the community – she argues that humans can no longer see themselves as the sole arbiter of all that happens in the environment. As people, we have a chance to build something anew in Melbourne – renew it, as it grows out of the ashes of the former AI-controlled Megacity. Much like new bush will grow from the burnt remnants of the old. Open spaces, living with the bush and the environment – respectful of it.

It is left to the community to decide. Everyone meets to discuss, and negotiate with one another. Secret Deals are struck, agreements for the future are made.

In the end, it isn’t even close. The community go with Virgon’s plans. Why? It is the will of the community, and that is enough.

The AI is restored, the system begins anew. The COG hacks into the system and protects Virgon’s mini/mega build from the AI’s sensors – it will grow on its own, independently.

Quiz shakes his head. They had the chance to bring down the all-encompassing AI system and free Melbourne’s citizens, and they’d let it slip through their fingers. He’d run out of hope, now.

He approaches Christi and asks the retired policeman to ‘magic door’ him somewhere  else in this World.

“Sure” says Christi, pulling the teleporter out of his pocket  “Where would you like to go?”

“I dunno” sighs Quiz “Somewhere that at least has Coffee.”

By Dale Leorke and Aramiha Harwood

The Future Play Lab’s annual Play About Place Symposium returned for its fifth iteration, this year held at RMIT’s Melbourne CBD campus and coinciding with Melbourne International Games Week in October 2023. Its theme was the “playable campus”, with talks, workshops and playable installations exploring how creative placemaking and experimental game design in public spaces can make university campuses more inclusive and resilient.

The symposium opened with a keynote by Dale Leorke and Danielle Wyatt, who discussed how examples of “playable libraries” from their book The Library as Playground might translate to the playable campus, followed by a Q&A with Lab director Troy Innocent. The symposium then involved two hands-on workshops where participants were invited to reimagine and rebuild RMIT’s Bowen Street as a space for play, interaction and reconnection with nature, Country and place using LEGO. Both workshops had about 18 participants, most of whom were women or non-binary.

Alongside the symposium, five playable installations created by students in the Lab also ran across the RMIT campus, putting these ideas into practice.

Playable Campus as a Living Lab

The first workshop was co-facilitated by Innocent and Lynda Roberts, Senior Advisor in Creative Communities at RMIT, along with Leorke, Wyatt and Prof Lisa Given, Director of RMIT’s Social Change Enabling Impact Platform and Professor of Information Sciences. In this workshop participants were invited to recreate Bowen Street – an internal street that runs through the heart of RMIT’s city campus and serves as a corridor between two busy roads at each end – based on how they think it should look in one year’s time.

Several rectangular tables were joined together with LEGO baseplates at their centre to provide the “canvas” on which participants would recreate Bowen Street. Participants tended to stay at one section of the table and contribute various LEGO pieces to build up the campus’s infrastructure, buildings, outdoor furniture, public spaces, and – of course – people. Others focused on curating their own “mini-sections” of the campus, some of which included a graveyard populated with skeletons “for the ‘under’ community to meet and discourse”; two “daredevil stations” connected by a tightrope, a drone-racing course and climbable animal bridge with rewards at their end; a rave site for “nighttime activation”; a Holocaust memorial “for reflection but also private alienation if you want get away from the fun of Bowen Street”; and a shark-infested reimagining of nearby Melbourne City Baths.

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Although, as Innocent sarcastically acknowledged, “not all of this will be possible” to create by next year, it did prompt a rethinking of RMIT’s campus around “thresholds” of entry and how these thresholds might invite its surrounding community in: “Why would someone from outside the university come if they’re not a student? For knowledge, to learn something, or discover something, or experience something.” The discussion that followed focused on how universities might encourage this discovery through playable installations. As game designer Hailey Cooperider put it, “you’re changing people’s default relationship [with Bowen Street] from ‘thoroughfare’ to something to dwell or engage with. And the great thing about play spaces is that they can create that moment of liquidity in people that allows them to shift their relationship.”

For Roberts, these issues spoke to “the future of the university” itself: “on one level, they’ve become more like businesses and there’s often a paywall to knowledge” but at the same time RMIT city campus is “a very public porous space and that makes me think about how you make RMIT’s knowledge equally public. How do you invert the university in this space through the dwelling points, as points of invitation and exchange?” This might happen, one participant suggested, through “easter eggs embedded in the environment itself, like geocaches or QR codes that spark curiosity.” Another noted that universities “tell stories already” and “we can use that wisely” by making people “aware that the university also holds an interest to people that use imaginations.”

Regenerating Place through Indigenous Ways of Being

The second workshop was led by N’arweet Prof Carolyn Briggs AM, Boon Wurrung Senior Elder and Elder in Research at RMIT. She was joined by facilitators Dr Christine Phillips, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and steering group leader of RMIT’s Architecture and Urban Design Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Engagement Committee; and Dr Aramiha Harwood, postdoctoral researcher in the Future Play Lab.

This workshop again asked participants to recreate Bowen Street, although this time based around the campus’s natural landscape and geography before European colonisation – where a waterway once flowed through its centre – while responding to the campus’s present relationship with its surroundings. Innocent suggested that the opening of a new railway station in Carlton, to the north of Bowen Street, could redefine how the northern buildings of the RMIT city campus connect with the main campus. At the south end of campus, meanwhile, there could be stronger connection with the hustle and bustle of Melbourne Central and the State Library, linking them via RMIT to the shops, cafes and museums of Carlton in the north.

In contrast to the wildly fantastical designs the previous workshop produced, this workshop was somewhat more measured and grounded. One participant requested that a Google Maps satellite view of Bowen Street be shown on the screen, and participants then assembled the LEGO baseplates to replicate existing buildings, open spaces and parks – although with Bowen Street reimagined as a river. Instead of people, the campus was predominantly populated with native plants and more-than-human creatures which had largely been driven out by urbanisation, such as turtles, bats, spiders and insects. An outdoor stargazing zone was set up with beds for people to lie down on and observe the night sky, while a separate community space was established for human gathering and sociality.

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In this way, Place or Country could be a pedagogical tool – working as a mnemonic device to help learners remember important advice and/or knowledge from teachers. Perhaps the design of this northern precinct could incorporate these facets of Indigenous ways of being and knowing? Reflecting this, participants created an Indigenous community garden – which could teach knowledge of medicines, herbs and foods – aligned with cosmological and seasonal designs of the garden itself, in one of the enclosed spaces around Building 57. 

The workshop ended with a yarning circle in which N’arweet provided some quiet advice and knowledge of her own experiences around this area of town. At times, when she has needed to be in Carlton, she has felt that the city and the urban landscape – the streets and the built infrastructure – have blocked her travels from the CBD: “my problem was I couldn’t get through. I was trying to constantly weave through a system that blocked my way.” She also felt that the redbrick, working-class exteriors of the RMIT City campus buildings best reflected its working-class origins in the former Working Men’s College, as well as acknowledging the locally accessed clay and materials to make those redbricks.

N’arweet suggested that we take a photo of the final LEGO-made precinct from above, looking down. She said we were making a Map of Country, in our minds and in our imaginations, and it could look like much Aboriginal art that we see in our galleries. This brought home to all of the workshop participants that we were engaged in a Creative project that – while looking into the Future – we honour our Indigenous past. What we are bringing about, through Creative Play, are new ways of imagining and interpreting Place  – with the help of Creative Indigenous Knowledges and Practices. N’arweet concluded, “we just got to unlock all that ancient knowledge in all of us. I think that’s one of the things we’ve forgotten to do. We are entities that are made up of so many different influences, but we exist.”

Dale Leorke is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and a member of the Urban Play Network. Aramiha Harwood is a postdoctoral researcher at RMIT on the Future Play Lab’s Play About Place research project.