Press on Practice

 

Last weekend, PRACTICE happened. The conference – which I helped plan and organize with the other good folks at the NYU Game Center – brought together board and card game designers, videogame designers, and even the Secretary of the NCAA Rules Committee for a weekend of passionate presentations and debate about game design. But don’t take my word for it. Here is some of the great coverage that we’ve gotten on the conference.

• Adrian Sanders at Kill Screen wrote this great overview of the event.
• On Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander wrote several pieces covering specific sessions, but this piece she wrote on the conference closing is a great place to start.
• Designer and PRACTICE speaker David Sirlin also posted a detailed account of his experiences on his blog.

Thanks to everyone that attended the conference – you are the ones that made it so special. We are already talking about next year’s PRACTICE conference. Hope to see you there!

Filed under: Academic, Media Mentions, NYU Game Center

Recent Media

• I loved this tumbler piece about Indiecade – visual notes from several sessions, including the talk Nathalie and I gave on the Experimental Gameplay Sessions panel.
• This interview from a business journal about the NYU Game Center is a great overview of our curriculum philosophy.
• Here is an article on Joystick Division about the Culture Edition of the Metagame, which is launching TODAY!
• This article from a Turkish daily new site is about the Istanbul festival that is showing the short film PLAY I created with filmmaker David Kaplan.  We’re also showing the film in Israel and Switzerland in the coming months.
• Lastly, an article in Dutch about the Metagame’s recent appearance at the DiGRA conference in Hilversum. Dank u veel!

Filed under: Academic, Media Mentions, NYU Game Center, PLAY, The Metagame

Academic ramblings on tour

I recently keynoted two game studies conferences – Think Design Play, the Digital Games Research Association conference in Hilversum, Netherlands, and F.R.O.G., the Future and Reality of Games conference in Vienna.

At DiGRA, I gave a talk called “In Defense of Beauty” which made an argument to consider games from an aesthetic standpoint. The FROG talk, which I delivered together with Nathalie Pozzi, was called “Spaces of Possibility” and explored the mechanisms by which games create meaning, leveraging architecture as a model for thinking about game design.

One common theme in both talks was the idea of a “Ludic Century” – a recent turn in our culture that gives games a special relevance to literacy. I also want to challenge game scholars to stop instrumenalizing games and instead use research approaches that foreground their role as educators of the public, while also doing justice to the ineffable spirit of play.

I also presented games at both of the conferences. DiGRA featured a conference-long Metagame, in which each of the attendees were given a starter deck and a tournament was held at the closing ceremonies. At FROG, Nathalie and I premiered a “tabletop” version of Sixteen Tons that groups could play at the conference dinner. Nathalie’s graphic design was quite stunning, and perfectly color-matched the wooden game pieces – perhaps we should sell some of them onlne as a limited edition of the game.

I also enjoyed the culture of boardgame bars in Vienna. “Spiel Bar” and “Brot & Spiel” were right around the corner from my hotel.

Filed under: Academic, Sixteen Tons, Talks, The Metagame

Figment – a new card game

I love making games for any occasion. Figment is a game I designed for a book.

When friends and colleagues Thom Bartscherer and Roderick Coover approached me to contribute something to their book Switching Codes, I told them as a game designer I’d rather make a game than write an essay. Switching Codes is a book from the University of Chicago Press about dialogs between technologists, artists, and scholars, and I decided to make a game that literally re-mixes the interdisciplinary discourse of the book.

Figment takes the form of cards that you cut out of the book (or you can download the PDF and rules here if you want to keep your volume intact). Each card has a snippet of text taken from one of the essays in the book, and by playing your cards in combination, you make statements alternately profound and absurd. Players must follow the rules of grammar while also making statements that other players deem as genuinely insightful. The first one to play all their cards wins.

Part Apples to Apples and part Exquisite Corpse, Figment always seems to inspire both deep philosophical conversations as well as hysterical laughing fits. I like the way that Figment intervenes playfully in the rest of the book, using unsuspecting essays as its raw material and encouraging readers to deface the object they just purchased. And the rules of Figment don’t have to be applied just to Switching Codes – with the properly chosen source texts, Figment is a process that could be applied to other documents as well.

I’d love to hear from you if you play the game! Post here on my blog or drop me an email at e @ ericzimmerman.com.

Filed under: Academic, Books, Figment, Games, Writings

GDC 2011 session wrap-up

Another Game Developers Conference come and gone. For those not in the game industry, GDC is the largest annual gathering of the people that make games. This year, more than 18,000 game developers gathered in San Francisco for a week of stimulating sessions, business meetings, and all-hours socializing. In addition to being part of four lectures or panels, I also ran the Metagame – but more about that in my next post.

I was happy with my sessions. Naomi Clark and I gave a lecture on desire, labor, and game design. Developer and game design gadfly Darius Kazemi gave it a wonderfully detailed writeup. Despite the highly theoretical talk, we had a good audience that stayed through the end to ask some tough questions.

Later that afternoon, I moderated a session for the GDC Education Summit on collaboration. We structured the event like the Dating Game, and with appropriately cheesy music clips furnished by Michael Sweet, the result was an entertaining and informative panel. In addition to Michael, Tracy Fullerton, Colleen Macklin, and Matt Weise all shared stories from the front lines of cross-industry collaboration.

Things heated up later in the week when I moderated the annual rant panel with co-host Jason Della Roca. The theme this year was “Social Game Developers rant back,” and our panelists did not disappoint. Along the lines of the theme, Jason and I had prepared a social game for the session. Each person that entered received a plastic “golden coin,” and the player that collected the most coins from other players earned the right to deliver an impromptu mini rant. Between the high-spirited rants and the chaos that resulted from the game, this session was perhaps the most challengingly unpredictable event I have ever had to moderate. But Jason and I managed to keep things under control – just barely – and everyone seemed to have a good time. Here are two pieces on the session from Gamasutra and PC Gamer – each of which garnered its own heated comments. Special thanks to my co-host Jason, as well as panelists Ian Bogost, Brenda Brathwaite, Trip Hawkins, Chris Hecker, Steve Meretzky, Brian Reynolds, Scott Jon Siegel, and Justin Hall, who received the coveted duct tape award for his performance last year.

On the last day of the conference, I hosted the annual Game Design Challenge – still going strong after almost a decade. Jenova Chen returned from his victory last year to face off against John Romero and Jason Rorher – truly an incredible trio of designers. (That’s them in the background of the photo above.) The theme for the challenge was “Bigger than Jesus” and each designer had to present a game that was, in some way, also a religion. Jason won for his game “chain world,” a mod of Minecraft that was to be passed on from player to player on a USB drive. And at the end of his talk, Jason actually did pass on the game to its first player. Leigh Alexander did an excellent writeup of the session for Gamasutra.

Thanks to everyone that attended my sessions, and see you next year!

**UPDATE: Since I posted this, I learned about the article that Ryan Creighton wrote for Gamasutra. Ryan was the audience member that “stole” a bag of coins as a way to win the social game in the Rant session. I loved Ryan’s mini-rant, and I’ll forgive his somewhat self-congratulatory and only slightly inaccurate article. (For example, there were plenty of coins to go around for session audience, despite his action.) But in the end, I was happy to let mischief win. Well played, Ryan!

Filed under: Academic, Media Mentions, Talks