razor play

Last night, after treating a few of us to an orgasmic roasted feast at her amazing new pad, my friend Fee lead us down a few dark Darlinghurst alleyways to the East Village hotel. There we got a taste of the new locative art gaming project, Razorhurst.

The deal is that you rock up at the pub and grab a shiny little GPS device, and then run around the streets of Darlinghurst like the Depression-era sly grog runner you've always wished you were. You get to move illegal booze between Darlo's historic bars, snort a bit of cheeky (virtual?) cocaine and have to literally grip your GPS tight and run away from the razor gangsters lurking around every dark corner to stay alive. The game also intigrates some really cool old video footage from a documentary about this lusty, cut throat period in Sydney's history.

There were still a few technical issues when we tried to play last night, so we didn't get very far. But this is a very cool concept and a funky new way to interact with Darlo's already mysterious (and sometimes dangerous) streetscape. Despite the buggy tech fail, I'm still intrigued enough to go and try to play again. After all, half the fun of experimentation is finding out why stuff doesn't work so that the artists can work on making it work better next time.

Razorhurst runs from July 5 to 31, Sunday to Thursday, 5:30pm to 9:30pm.
It's totally FREE. How depression is that.