Neptune's Gachapon
Alia Sheikh, Tom Nixon, Cat Harris, Cat Bell
A phantom undersea egg hunt. A haunting story. An electronics driven large-scale immersive location-aware game of twinned and alternate realities run for Electromagnetic Field Festival in 2022.
Once glorious, then abandoned, then forgotten, Neptune's Undersea Fairground lies dreaming in the deeps. Wanting. Yearning. Carnival music, disconsolate and echoing, still plays from a fairground organ half choked with coral.
The banners have been torn by the currents and the rides taken over by kelp. Tread carefully. There are ghosts here. This phantom fairground swims, shark-like, between realities, bleeding into them, scattering gifts in its wake. None more precious than the guardian's eggs, a baby kraken sleeping in each. Find them. Look after them. Treasure them.
The theme of EMF 2022 was "2022 leagues under the sea". In order to add layers of narrative, curiosity, discovery and play, members of Tortoisebutler created a fantasy alternate reality, twinned with and bleeding into the festival.
A long forgotten undersea carnival drifting phantom-like between worlds, depositing gifts in its wake: artwork and baby electronic kraken eggs, each containing a wearable custom circuit board: a tiny octopus with unique-blink-pattern LED eyes, all set to come "alive" at the exact same moment. Each one named for a mythical guardian of the deep.
Gachapon is onomatopoeic from two sounds, gacha for the hand-cranking action of a toy-vending machine, and pon for the toy capsule landing in the collection tray. Gachapon is used for both the machines themselves and the toys obtained from them.
The basis for the project was the ideas that the toy vending machine at Neptune's Funfair contains a hundred tiny kraken eggs, belonging to the giant Kraken guarding the site.
Players followed a story unfolding in real-time over social media across the weeks prior to the festival as we created the artworks, storyline and props, and over the 3 days of the festival itself.
Alia ran the game live on site, revealing fragments of worldbuilding and lore along with clues to egg locations.
Players searched the festival site, discovering eggs around the installations and venues of the festival; the deep-sea lab venue which hosted music, art and experiments; nestledin The Lagoon amongst the luminous tentacles swaying over the tents &emdash; the emotionally expressive soft-robots of art collective "Airgiants" — in the wilder areas surrounding the main site and under the neon lights of the Night Market. Some players did not find a kraken at all, but instead golden tickets to the carnival, tattoos, pearl bracelets, treasure …
A small community of egg-hunters formed, gifting players with an unexpected sense of exploration and belonging. Theories emerged as to where eggs might appear, and clues and information about egg locations were shared by Kraken owners to those still seeking theirs. We named each kraken and shared their small hopes and dreams, hoping this would encourage people to play along.
This worked far better than we had expected, and baby krakens were eagerly invited into the players festival experience and lives - players quickly invested their krakens with personality and shared with us their future plans as kraken owners.
This was one of Tortoisebutler's most ephemeral works - whilst a small tangible piece of physical art persisted after the initial game, the main outcome was the experience of having briefly been immersed in layers of beautiful alternate reality. Those who did not leave with a kraken still sometimes get in touch and tell us they hope to one day play again, and become guardian to a sea monster of their own.
