GREG TREFRY AND MATTIA ROMEO
Gigaputt: The City is Your Golf Course
Date: Saturday 9.19
Start Time: 4:00pm
Location: Commons gallery, Barney building
Gigaputt uses your iPhone to turn the city into your personal golf course. Two teams will race their way through a course with avenues for fairways, sidewalks for greens and local bars for holes.
We’ve always played in the streets, transforming pieces of the city into pieces of the game, using manhole covers for bases, garbage cans for baskets. Now technology is helping us create new games and playful interactions with the city.
In this session, we’ll play a collaborative game of Gigaputt, an iPhone game designed to let you play golf over real-world maps. Just as golf plays on pastoral fantasies and club bound notions of social interaction, Gigaputt reimagines those fantasies for an urban setting. Instead of fairways this game uses avenues and instead of greens players aim for a series of local bars. Two teams will race to complete holes and be the first team to claim a seat at three different bars around Greenwich Village.
Greg Trefry is the co-founder of Gigantic Mechanic, a game company focused on creating new types of play and game experiences. He is also one of the founders of Come Out & Play an annual festival of street games that runs in public locations across New York City. He served as the festival director for three years. As a game designer he has created a wide array of games from outdoor water gun battles to fashion-themed video games. He teaches regular old video game design and big outdoor game design at New York University and Parsons The New School. He is currently writing a book on casual game design.
Mattia Romeo is a game designer and programmer based in New York City. Prior to founding Gigantic Mechanic with Greg Trefry, Mattia was a Senior Game Designer at Gamelab. As well as traditional forms of games, Mattia designs big games – large-scale games played in real-world spaces. He worked on some of the seminal examples of the genre, including Pac-Manhattan and Conqwest. As part of his interest in big games, Mattia is one of the founders of the Come Out & Play Festival, a yearly festival based in New York dedicated to showcasing games that make innovative use of public space.
