NZ video game designer stunned by numbers playing his games

AWA PRESS MEDIA RELEASE JANUARY 23, 2012

NZ video game designer stunned by numbers playing his games online

When New Zealander Pippin Barr started designing video games and making them available on his website, he looked on it as an interesting exercise, but not one that would attract much attention. Sure enough, only a few friends, family members and colleagues downloaded his first couple of games.

“Even so, it was exhilarating,” Barr, a New Zealander who now lectures at the IT University of Copenhagen, remembers. “The idea that I had made a game, put it out there and some people had bothered to engage with it – that was magic.”

Things began to heat up when his game Safety Instructions was featured on IndieGames.com. Suddenly, online stats showed that more than a thousand people had played it in a single day.

After this things kept getting crazier. Barr’s next game, The Artist Is Present, released on 14 September 2011 was featured on numerous websites, including The Village Voice, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, ARTINFO, Kotaku, kottke.org, and Slate, and was exhibited at Nikolaj Kunsthal, one of the top contemporary art galleries in Copenhagen. There were a couple of days when over 10,000 people played it.

It was, Barr says, “definitely incomprehensible. You can’t really feel it. You just marvel at the bar chart and the numbers as they flow past.”

When he created Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment things really went ballistic. This month over 200,000 unique people have tackled Let’s Play.

“I honestly don’t know what to make of that,” Barr says. “I have no clue where it might go from here, but so long as there’s one person somewhere out there who has a chuckle at something I made then it’s all working according to plan.”
Barr’s entertaining book How to Play a Video Game, was released to excellent reviews by Awa Press in December as part of its Ginger Series. Otago Daily Times’ Shane Gilchrist called it “both an attempt to demystify the world of video games for non-players as well as a thought-provoking, sometimes philosophical read for players keen to know more about the cyber universe with which they are familiar.”
//ENDS

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