Would Anyone Miss You

Would Anyone Miss You was a live-action interpretation of Hide&Seek‘s digital project, Dreams Of Your Life, made for SXSW.

You can read more about Dreams Of Your Life here: it was a deliberately slow-paced, intensely private experience, which gave us some real challenges when we were asked to feature it at SXSW. SXSW is manic, social, sunny, exuberant. This was a project inspired by the true story of a young women who died alone and forgotten, whose body lay undiscovered in her apartment for nearly 3 years. How could we take that content and have it make sense amid the BBQ blow-outs and beery street-corner dance-offs?

The thing we realised, is that conferences – for all their intense social energy – are actually events about absence and loneliness. Nearly everyone there is away from home. However frenetic the days, most nights – most mornings – are you, alone, in an anonymous hotel room. And that social energy – full of business card swaps and empty compliments – can often be short on real connection. On real conversation.

By designing around those elements we created Would Anyone Miss You, a mobile-web enabled social game. We handed out thousands of sticker sheets that let players christen people they met ‘Your New Best Friend’ ‘Your Secret Rival’ ‘Your Big Gamble’. Then it gave them a question to ask that person – ‘what’s the last photo you took on your phone?’, ‘is there anything in your house you wouldn’t want someone else to find’. Players could then update the game on what they’d learned about the people around them, and the game would build a dynamic assessment of their personality, sending them a series of emails that many players found spookily perceptive about their state of mind. On completing the game, players were invited to write a message to someone they loved, and have their portrait shot by Dreams Of Your Life photographer Lottie Davies with the results shared on this Tumblr.

Videogames and things