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

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

Indiecade, Mi Amore

Another Indiecade has passed, and another of what is always one of the best game events each year. The magic of Indiecade is that it is actually manages to live up to its name as a *festival*. Not just a conference or an exhibition, attending Indiecade feels like a great weekend with friends, strolling to and from sessions, playing games, and getting a taste of what’s new in independent and experimental games.

I had a busy weekend. Gamestar Mechanic, the game I conceived with Jim Gee and developed with my company Gamelab, was a finalist in the festival. Scott Price, the project lead at E-Line Media, the company that runs Gamestar along with the Institute of Play, presented the game in one of the exhibition galleries and he was happy with the response from the crowd.

I spoke at a couple of the sessions. Nathalie Pozzi and I spoke about our work together on a panel about collaboration, where we premiered a video about our recent project for MoMA, Starry Heavens. Since – compared to a digital game – not many people get to play my gallery work, I’m always happy to share. Perhaps we’ll enter Starry Heavens into Indiecade next year, if we can find the funding to put it on.

I also led Iron Game Designer, a session in which teams of designers compete to create a game in real-time in front of an audience, using a mystery ingredient and a theme that the audience chooses. (The session is inspired by a similar event created by game designer Marc LeBlanc.) I co-hosted the event with Colleen Macklin, and we made a number of innovations this year to the design of the session that helped to kick things up a notch.

For example, instead of pre-defining teams, we only determined team captains. Each captain could pick a co-captain from the audience, and each team also got two random team members from the audience (we drew their names from a hat). That kept the event feeling more inclusive and unpredictable. We also got rid of our “panel of judges,” who never felt essential to the session. The biggest change to Iron Game Designer is that instead of a table full of office supplies – cards, dice, paper, etc – for making game props, we only gave the groups the mystery ingredient – nothing more! We made this decision only a few minutes before the session was about to start, but I am glad we did. The table of supplies always made the session feel too much like an arts & crafts class, and the games that resulted were more elegant as a result. The ingredient, by the way, was bananas, and the theme that the audience picked was The Amish. All of the games were hilarious. In the winning game by Catherine Herdlick’s team, young Amish struggles to emerge from their community of locked arms to reach the forbidden fruit of tasty bananas. For me the biggest thrill was not the (impressive) games that the teams made, the rolling-in-the-aisles laughter of the audience, or the challenge of the game show-style hosting with Colleen, but just that I was able to continue to iterate on the design of the session. I guess that’s why I am a game designer.

One of the final events at Indiecade this year was a Metagame tournament. At the closing party, we gave out starter decks of the game to anyone who wanted to play, and the four who had collected the most cards battled in front of the audience for the championship. Congrats to Miles Nye, who among other techniques drew his cards randomly for the tournament and actually rapped his argument for Parappa the Rapper against his opponent.

See you next year, Indiecade!

Filed under: Festivals & Exhibitions, Gamestar Mechanic, Starry Heavens, Talks, The Metagame

The Metagame rolls on

It’s been a busy summer for Local No. 12, the game collective I run with Colleen Macklin and John Sharp. Our Kickstarter campaign was a runaway success, garnering more than twice the support that we had set out to get. And that’s a good thing, since we’re now spending those funds creating whole new illustrations for each card, as well as turning Local No. 12 into a bona fide company.

 

This summer, a version of the Metagame is being run at Microsoft’s summer internship program, organized by the Microsoft Game Group. And a conference-wide Metagame was run at the Games Learning and Society event in Madison a couple of weeks ago. Big thanks to Constance Steinkuehler and her team for letting us use GLS as a playground. (Incidentally, I also keynoted at GLS – a rant against conventional notions of games and education called “Games are not Good for You.” I plan on publishing it soon.)

 

The Metagame has received blog attention from a number of quarters, but perhaps my favorite media about the game recently is a podcast on A Jumps B Shoots in which Colleen Macklin and I play the game and discuss its history and design. A Jumps B Shoots describe themselves as the “NPR of Videogames” – check them out if you haven’t heard them yet.

Lots is going on in the Metagame world as we prepare new decks for our Kickstarter supporters and for public sale, begin to revamp the game website, playtest new variations of games, and even take the Metagame concept beyond the realm of videogames. Stay tuned.

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

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