New Ideas CityHello Museum

Sesame Street Boxheads, ART BOY SIN, and Sloth Chase

Part of the street program

Come Out & Play is an annual festival of street games that turns New York City and San Francisco into giant playgrounds. We provide a forum for new types of public games and play by bringing together players eager to interact with the world around them and designers producing innovative new games and experiences. For IDEAS CITY, we will present three popular games:

Sesame Street Boxheads
In Sesame Street Boxheads, kids with tablets will control grownups wearing boxes and headsets in a real live video game. Unable to see where they are going, the grownups will listen for audio commands like “turn,” “go forward,” and “grab the cookie!” The kids will use the arrows on the tablets to race Elmo and Cookie Monster to catch the cookie.

ART BOY SIN
Letters will be hung up throughout the event for players to pull down and rearrange into new phrases and street poetry. Particularly great creations are documented with photos, which will be uploaded to Instagram and voted on by other Festival-goers. But like magnetic poetry, street poetry is fleeting…

Climber Beta
“Beta” is rock-climbing jargon that indicates information about a route, such as difficulty, style, and suggested techniques. In the game Climber Beta, which will be played at the IDEAS CITY Festival, there will be “holds” arranged on the ground in bright colors. Choose from a selection of betas that indicate color-sequenced routes, plus additional challenges, and try to top out at the other side of the course. This game can be physically taxing; players are advised to warm up and stretch before playing.