Mapping Festival, Geneva, 2026. Floating Point Studio (CH).
What happened
A 360-degree wrap-around screen enclosed the room. On it, a large QR code. Scan it, join the local server, pick an icon — three steps, and within minutes a room of strangers had become a group. A snake moved through the shared visual space; each phone was both a private controller and a public identity.
People who knew each other started discussing each other’s icons. Strangers started watching each other’s tactics. Others put their phones away and stood at the edge, watching it like a performance.
What I actually saw working
Clear rules, immediate feedback, meaningful choice. Textbook game design principles — and Floating Point would almost certainly not describe the work as gamified design.
The threshold is worth naming separately from the experience: scanning a QR code is a very low-cost act of commitment, and it is what converts a bystander into a participant. That is a design decision, whether or not it was made deliberately.
The part I keep returning to
The people at the edge who never took out their phones. They were not participating by any definition the work offers, and they were clearly having an experience. Under meaningful play they do not exist.
Its status in the thesis is unsettled
This was the anchor case for the multi-person direction. Under the direction I am now inclined toward, it becomes a contrast case instead — collective and phone-based against single-player and controller-based. See direction-versions.