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

Boston Globe: The Boardgame Renaissance

Leon Neyfakh from the Boston Globe penned this delightfully enlightened article about the state of boardgames today. It’s clear that Leon is not just a journalist dipping into an exotic nerdy phenomenon, but he’s a passionate player as well. Don’t skim too fast or you’ll miss my quote near the end of the piece.

Filed under: Media Mentions

The loyal opposition to endings in games

I had not heard of the Jace Hall show, but being a glutton for attention, I provided them with a quote when they asked for my thoughts on their selection of the top 50 videogame endings.

My response – perhaps predictably – was that “endings” aren’t something intrinsic to videogames and in fact most of my favorite games don’t have an ending. Here’s the quote from me that they ran:

…traditionally games don’t have endings. Games like Basketball, Chess, and Scrabble are activities meant to be repeated, rather than a series of levels to be beaten or a story to be played through. Many digital games, from Asteroids and Tetris to Street Fighter and Smash Bros to Sim City and Civilization are on this model of games designed for repeated play – and they don’t have endings. I prefer these kinds of games, as they are less premised on a desire to imitate cinema or linear storytelling and they are more focused on games as games -as systems of rules that reward deep and repeated exploration. 

I guess that says it all. I don’t even want to say that games should or should not be something – there is certainly room in the possibility space of game design for games with endings – but it all does strike me as a little bit odd. The game equivalent of early films set on proscenium stage and shot from the auditorium seats.

Let a million flowers wilt.

Filed under: Media Mentions

Metagame update

The Metagame, the collectable card game about videogames I created with Local No. 12, has been steamrolling forward, carrying Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, and I along with it.

Over the winter holidays, we received more shipments of the game, and sold several hundred more decks. A great write-up by Kirk Hamilton in Kotaku, including a video demo of the game, certainly helped things along. (The image above is from the Kotaku piece.)

At the moment, my apartment is shipping central for the Metagame, but if this project continues we’ll probably bump it up a level and use an outside company to ship the decks for us. Sending out hundreds of card decks and posters has not been good for my living quarters.

John and Colleen and I have also been busy working on the next version of the game. Suffice to say that we may have some very cool announcements leading up to the Game Developers conference.

In the meantime, we need to sell decks! Not only so that I can get my living room back, but also because selling our current decks is how we are funding the next version of the game. Visit www.metaga/me and think about getting a Videogame Edition deck – and tell your friends too!

Filed under: Local No.12, Media Mentions, 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