Metagame at PAX East

PAX East, that great gathering of all things geeky, is happening later this week. And I’m happy to report that Metagame decks will be there and on sale.

After the success of the Metagame at GDC (we sold about 350 decks at iam8bit’s booth in the bookstore), we decided we’d be crazy to pass up the opportunity of PAX East. After some hurried emails and tweets, indie media veteran Matt Hawkins hooked us up with Attract Mode, who was sharing a booth with Fangamer – and we worked out a deal for them to sell the game at PAX. We’re happy to be part of the PAX presence for these two gamer ware companies. Look for the Fangamer booth in booth 172 of the PAX East expo floor.

Filed under: Festivals & Exhibitions, Games, The Metagame

The blur that was GDC 2012

The busiest week of my life every year, the Game Developers Conference 2012 was no exception. Even if I wasn’t giving a full slate of talks and panels, and organizing a conference-wide game, I’d still have my schedule full of meetings, conference sessions, and late-night socializing.

Overall, I was happy with my sessions. Richard LeMarchand came out on top of the Game Design Challenge, which this year was “Upgrade Humanity in 60 Seconds or Less” – design a game to improve people’s lives that took a minute or less to play. Constance Steinkhuler, a close friend and the current White House Czar on games, was on hand to deliver the prizes. Here’s a nice writeup on Jason Rorher’s entry – a game that involved tearing US currency into pieces.

The annual Rant Session blazed forward as well, themed on game developer parents holding forth on whatever they wanted. A personal highlight for me was seeing Frank Lantz and his game designer son James rant back to back – surely the start of a game industry dynasty. My own lecture, Let the Games be Games, was a theoretical dive into game design and aesthetics. I was happy with how it came out, but you can view it on the GDC Vault for yourself and let me know what you think.

Lastly, the Metagame returned for year two of massively multiplayer debating about videogames. GDC is surely one of the perfect contexts for the game – and we had more than 3,000 players arguing about games for the week of GDC. Special thanks to our sponsors BBC, Loot Drop, Microsoft, Parsons, and IGDA who made the game happen. And a big acknowledgement to iam8bit, who sold hundreds of Metagame decks and expansion sets in their bookstore booth.

I’m a glutton for punishment, and I have already begun thinking about next year’s conference. It will be the 10th anniversary of the Game Design Challenge, and I only promise that it is going to be a very different session next year… more to come.

Filed under: Games, Local No.12, Media Mentions, Talks, The Metagame

Metagame at GDC 2012

The Metagame is returning to GDC in just a couple weeks. In 2011, the Metagame was born at GDC, where 3,000 players argued and debated videogames between sessions, over lunches and meetings, and at bars and parties at night.

Local No. 12 is running another massively multiplayer Metagame this year, with hopefully even more players. We’ve printed a special set of gold-rimmed cards for use at the conference, and we’re working with the IGDA again to use their headquarters as a home base for the game. So if you attend GDC, pick up your starter deck and play the game.

Thanks to the metagame GDC 2012 sponsors: Loot Drop, BBC, Microsoft, Parons the New School for Design, and IGDA. Full info about the GDC 2012 Metagame can be found here on the Metagame website.

Filed under: Games, Local No.12, The Metagame

The Design of Starry Heavens

(photo: Raymond Yeung)

Mary Couzin, a toy industry diva who runs the popular and eclectic Global Toy News blog, approached me this past fall about writing something about Starry Heavens, the installation I created with Nathalie Pozzi for the MoMA Kill Screen Arcade event in July 2011. I wrote up my thoughts on the design, which she posted here. I thought I’d also post them on my own site for some deeper information about this project. Enjoy!

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Over the last couple of years I have been exploring a new context for making games – museum and gallery installations with architect Nathalie Pozzi. We have done four projects together since 2010, each one a room-sized (or larger) game that doesn’t involve any digital or electronic technology – just physical and social gameplay. Sixteen Tons is a social strategy game where players move very heavy pieces and bribe each other with real-world cash. Cross My Heart and Hope to Die was inspired by the myth of the Minotaur and involves a life-sized labyrinth made out of 20-foot high hanging fabric walls. In Flatlands, players debate the aesthetics of my collection of 200+ gameboards.

What I wanted to talk about today is our most recent project, Starry Heavens, which premiered a couple weeks ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (It was part of ARCADE, an event curated by Kill Screen magazine.) Starry Heavens takes place on a life-sized gameboard of steel disks colored black, white, and gray and connected by white lines. One player – the Ruler – stands at the center of the playfield and calls out a color (black, white or gray). Players can move along a line to that color if they want. Then the ruler says “banish” and a player can touch an adjacent player on the shoulder. If two people touch you – if you get surrounded – you are banished and must leave the game. The players are all trying to overthrow the Ruler, and if you banish two other players and make it to the center, you become the new Ruler.

Filed under: Festivals & Exhibitions, Games, Media Mentions, Starry Heavens

Meet the Brooklyn Game Ensemble

Almost a year ago, I started meeting with local NYC game developers Naomi Clark, Josh DeBonis, Nathalie Pozzi , and Kristopher Schlachter, with the idea of making some kind of indie, experimental game. I had worked with Naomi and Josh at Gamelab (and elsewhere), and Nathalie and I of course work together on our museum games. Josh and Kris had worked together, so we were already a tightly-knit group.

We met several times over the next six months, every few weeks, bouncing around ideas and just exploring open-ended brainstorming. We were all too busy to actually start developing a game, so we had the luxury of these occasional, purely conceptual meetings. Sometime during the early summer last year we settled on the notion of a game inspired by the infinite library of Borges from his short story The Library of Babel. Gradually the idea turned into a paper prototype, then a design spec, and finally into a digital prototype. We’ve taken the functional but somehow also pretentious title of the Brooklyn Game Ensemble.

Since the fall, we have been meeting every week for a full day of production, a kind of slow-mo development cycle that is extremely regular but just not every day. We have been keeping a development blog at the Brooklyn Game Ensemble website, which has more information about the project and our recent advances.

I think this production strategy is paying off. While progress is a bit gradual, the week of time in-between our intensive days of production gives us some cognitive elbow room to think critically about our design and production problems. Many ideas that seem brilliant in the heat of a design session just don’t hold up a week later. The group is very design-heavy (Naomi and I are both game designers, Josh is a designer/programmer, Nathalie has a design background as an architect, and Kris is full of design ideas too) but somehow it’s working.

The game itself is coming along well. A bit of an ugly baby at the moment, but full of promise. Check out the blog for more details.

Filed under: Brooklyn Game Ensemble, Games