about us我們是誰?

We are Taipei is ^(not) a giraffe. We work in urban game design in Taipei city and beyond. We focus on pervasive gaming and location-based experiential design with an emphasis on experimentation and urban discovery.

We design and run play-related events and games using a wide range of strategies, formats, tools and technologies to encourage people to engage with the city through play.
We are interested in surfaces, holes and contours. Maps and map-making. Space-timing. Treasure finding and miracle deployment. Technology-agnosticism, DIY and DIT (do it together). Problem design, problem-making. Imagination.

Play is the main drive in all our projects. Play as process and play as outcome. Prospecting play opportunities. Play as a material. Play as fuel, play as hope, play as glue, play as ritual. Urban play. Trans-reality, trans-species play. Play for the sake of it.

Play can electrify our senses and help us find new perspectives. Urban play can make us rediscover and reimagine our environment. When we play together we can feel the city (and the city can surely feel us too). Little by little, play by play, we, as players, build meaningful connections between places, memories, dreams and feelings.

We got started in street and pervasive game design in the late 2000s. In Taiwan, we ran our first worshop/game hybrid, Outerspace^[1], in Tainan city in 2015 at the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). Since then we have been running many events and games in Taipei and other cities.

We work in self-initiated projects, collaborations and commissions. We have experience creating urban games and events in diverse environments and contexts for people of all ages. Through trial and error—a lot of error—we have learned how to improvise, deal with uncertainty and manage players' expectations to find play opportunities anywhere, using whatever technologies and resources are available or needed.

Every street has a soul and every corner has its own vibes; this is what nurtures our work. But we have to admit that it is players from whom we learn the most, never failing to spot the peculiar among the mundane, effortlessly weaving their own maps and sharing their imagination to reshape the world.

Taipei is a giraffe started soon after we encountered the blob, there was no choice. Once you see it you can't avoid feeling the city constantly breathing, sighing, shivering. The blob is one part of Taipei; the other is, to put it simply, all the things that are not the blob (the non-blob).

How does that work? Think about all the stuff in the city. There are buildings, clouds, temples, ghosts, cats, people, dumplings, etc. There is, of course, some space in between them. Some people like to call that "empty space" or "negative space", some even think it's air (definitely not). This is the blob, the thing that quietly defines all other things.

However, this perspective is rather skewed. From the blob's POV, the non-blob might be just an empty shapeless nothing. Maybe the blob is full of stuff we just can't see.

Taipei contains both the blob and the non-blob but it is a lot more than that. Like a committee of blind people touching the proverbial elephant, Taipei escapes definition. Taipei shifts and flows and it's never still; maybe Taipei is a giraffe, maybe it is something else but in any case Taipei is always nice to us.

Thank you, Taipei.