Imagine this: your phone alarm jolts you awake. After getting dressed, you head out of your home, checking your map app for traffic updates on the way to the nearest subway station. During your commute, you idly scroll through short videos like everyone else, eyes fixed to the screen. After you reach your office, another day unfolds in front of your computer.

This description of a highly tech-integrated urban lifestyle—a reality for many workers in China and around the world—is perhaps not what would usually be considered ideal material for games. But it’s these mundane scenarios, or rather an escape from them, that have attracted the interest of Shanghai-based gaming and events collective [[rect*]]repair (hereafter referred to as “rect repair”). The group, formally founded in 2024, aims to lure participants away from their phones and computers and bring a sense of play back into the real world, forcing urbanites to reengage with their own bodies and heal mental fatigue.

The collective’s three core members, Zhang Tianqi, Joanna Lyu, and Huang Yuemin, come from computer science and game design backgrounds. They were drawn to one another by a common wish to explore how rules, play, and shared experiences can reshape the ways we relate to spaces, communities, and one another. By bringing playful formats into public spaces, they create experiences that are intuitive, open-ended, and co-created in real-time. These participatory environments invite engagement, encourage participants to shape such experiences, and challenge existing boundaries and social systems.

Real-world games

The games created by rect repair generally draw inspiration from traditional games with a fun twist. In May last year, in a grassy field in the coastal city of Ningbo, rect repair organized a “Rock, Paper, Scissors Run,” where two teams, after a round of rock-paper-scissors, sprinted off to play a tag-like game. Amid rekindled childhood memories, the organizers posed a bittersweet question to the participants: “How long has it been since you last played freely like a child?”

For Lyu, co-founder of the collective, these games were not about simple nostalgia or longing for a pre-internet past. On the contrary, they were a direct response to the acceleration of technological change. As the world turns inward and borders tighten, and as digital spaces fill with AI misinformation and polarizing noise, she says this kind of play—real people, together, face to face—feels more necessary than ever.

Lyu likes to incorporate millennial-era elements, such as bulky desktop computers and keyboards, into her event poster designs. “In my work, the early-2000s graphic style isn’t about nostalgia,” she tells TWOC. “It’s about the gap between the futures we imagined and the one we ended up with. People used to picture flying cars, but instead, we got an ever-expanding array of social media.”

Despite the sometimes heady aesthetics, co-founder and game designer Zhang says the original impulse behind organizing public games was simple: they’re fun, and they wanted to play themselves. They figured, why not take two hours to step away from electronic devices, breathe the fresh outdoor air, and play like a child with a group of friends? Now, the team has registered as a game design company and is exploring pathways to commercialization and sustainable operations.

Repairing modern cities

Another aim of rect repair’s reflection-through-play approach is to inspire analysis of modern urban life. Their unconventional name looks to capture this, embodying the group’s wish to deconstruct and rebel against modern urban culture. “In the city, the rectangle is the most common shape. Doors and windows, building facades, streets and urban layouts, even electronic devices like phones and computers, all are rectangular,” Zhang explains. “rect repair aims to mend all these orderly, rigid aspects of the city.”

To this end, the team devised a series of urban exploration and puzzle-solving games from 2024 to 2025, called “Shanghai Encounter”—inspired by Polish game design collective departamentgier’s “Encounter” nighttime treasure hunts. In these games, rect repair encouraged players to look for “treasure” around the city’s ruins and forgotten corners, such as unfinished buildings and a repurposed factory-turned-urban park. Amid the urban development’s relentless pursuit of efficiency, Zhang describes how these ruins, which they call “negative space,” originally an architectural term, exist in limbo. Take an overpass as an example: the bridge’s platform is considered “positive space,” while the unused area beneath is deemed “negative.”

“Our public games aim to redirect people’s attention to the city’s negative spaces,” Zhang explains. “In everyday use of the city, people are often unaware that these spaces even exist. For us, that moment of discovery is at the core of the game’s design.”

“We biked hard along the river in Shanghai, solving puzzles as we went. The mix of physical, mental, and reflex challenges was perfect for me,” says Ouchen Gaoge, a 26-year-old advertising photography director, recalling his experience participating in a “Shanghai Encounter” game in December 2024. “I remember the first puzzle required us to take the subway to a destination. When we arrived, everyone rushed out, and it was overwhelming to see all the shared bikes at the exit disappear in the blink of an eye.”

Ouchen first learned about rect repair through a street tag game, where players find hidden checkpoints and tag others while covering their own tracks. “I often attend more ‘refined’ events, like book launches and exhibitions, but this was my first time participating in something so intense. Though it was in the same neighborhood, the experience was completely different,” says Ouchen. He has participated in four different game events so far, initially as a participant and later volunteering as a photographer and an NPC (non-player character). He hopes to attend future events whenever he can.

Deconstructing a dilemma

While video games typically create standalone worlds within screenspace to immerse players, rect repair’s games often blend in digital elements, take place in the real world, encouraging participants to live in the moment.

The expansion of gamespace from the virtual to the real world has been a growing trend in recent decades, fueled by the rapid development of communication and mobile technologies. Known as pervasive games, these games use real-world locations for players to achieve in-game goals; notable examples include Pokémon GO and Geocaching. According to the 2009 foundational book on the genre, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design, such games encourage players to move through physical spaces embedded with digital content, interact with other players, and explore their environment in unexpected ways, forming an immersive experience.

“The nature of a pervasive game, in all the varieties discussed in this book,” Lyu says, “is to transform the ‘magic circle’ from a barrier into a membrane.” Lyu refers to the game term, which signifies the boundary between the game world and the real world. “Let game and life bleed into one another, so that the game becomes infused with the reality of life, and life becomes charged with the meaning of the game.”

When the virtual world and reality converge, it also offers an opportunity to reflect on the impact of technology. One of rect repair’s recent game projects aims to explore the rise of AI and its side effects. “The Reality Restoration Project, Kyoto” launched last October and was active for five days, inviting local diaspora and Chinese travelers to explore the Japanese city in real life. Using Google Maps, the team constructed an imagined vision of Kyoto in the future, including real streets, historic sites, monuments, and even the weather in the forms of text and graphics. Players are then presented with the premise: “What if in the year 2125, after the Second AI War, artificial intelligence has completely replaced human experiences of real life? How would you repair your memories?” With instructions and NPCs, the three-hour game guides players around the streets, temples, and mountains of Kyoto, while they take special notice of the shops, signs, and even topographical features—clues that can be used to restore the “real,” physical world of Kyoto versus the AI-generated “fake memory.”

The game raises an important question: what happens to history when the very documents that prove its existence, texts, photos, and videos, are manipulated by AI? This is an escalating concern as AI’s ability to generate mixed media content continues to grow. On some level, the game challenges players to confront a new reality: we must increasingly be on guard against—and learn to discern—AI-generated falsehoods in our daily lives. While noting the impact of technology and advocating the return to the real world, rect repair isn’t opposed to technology itself; rather, it actively breathes more life into it.

“We reflect on the ‘high tech, low life’ condition,” Huang Yuemin, the third co-founder, explains. “When I teach people how to design a webpage, for instance, I encourage them to envision it as an ocean or a starry sky, blending technology with sensory experience to inspire creation and imagination.”

Besides real-world games, the team also runs coding workshops, often built around creative themes that challenge the notion of programming as a tedious, solitary pursuit. One tactic they have used is to hold them in parks or bars, and for people who stumbled upon one, they might be forgiven for thinking they had walked into a party. These offbeat events seek to create new forms of public engagement in the digital age.

While rect repair’s events attract far fewer players than China’s major online games, their value lies in their authenticity. Game participant Ouchen finds such games refreshing in big cities like Shanghai. Despite the city’s rich cultural and artistic resources and relatively relaxed atmosphere, people are often preoccupied with work.

“In this city, every minute has economic value, and when you go out, you always need to have a purpose,” says Ouchen, who recalls his hometown in the central-southern province of Hunan, where one could casually call up a friend and spend the day together. When asked what these events mean to him, Ouchen replies, “I just feel that, like in childhood, studying the rules, thinking, running, exploring, and discovering—these things bring me great joy.”