Indiecade is coming

Indiecade, that quintessential festival of independent games, is happening in just about a month. And it’s going to be a very busy few days for me.

Two of my games – Interference and Armada d6 – were selected as finalists and will be on exhibit there. Another project I helped design, Local No.12′s Metagame, is an Official Selection and will be available to play throughout the festival. I’m also giving a talk about the act of *being* a game designer and I’ll be interviewing the amazing Bernie DeKoven for one of the keynote sessions.

There are many incredible games being presented this year and it’s an honor being part of the festival. Plus it’s a great excuse to spend a few days in California wandering among the games and talks with other independent developers.

See you in Culver City.

Filed under: Armada d6, Festivals & Exhibitions, Games, Inteference, Local No.12, Talks, The Metagame

Starry Heavens at Playpublik

Starry Heavens, the large-scale game installation I designed with Nathalie Pozzi in 2011, recently had a run in Berlin. You can see a video about the game produced by Asia Dèr here.

We were invited by Invisible Playground, the amazing Berlin-based game collective that organized the Playpublik game festival in Berlin, to mount the game. This was the second time that we were to install the game – the first was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, as part of the Kill Screen ARCADE event. You can find more information about the original Starry Heavens here on my website.

This time around, the game became a collaboration with the team at Invisible Playground and they helped us transform the game in several ways. To begin with, as part of the festival we held a 3-hour playtesting event where players helped us explore new rule variations, resulting in substantial changes to the gameplay.

Filed under: Festivals & Exhibitions, Games, Starry Heavens, Video

Kill Screen: Players getting older

The latest issue of Kill Screen Magazine is out – that brainy journal about game culture – and there’s a small piece with my mug in it. The article is about what will happen to games as players become older, and a few game designers, including Randy Smith, Manveer Heir, and myself, are asked for our opinions on the subject.

Kill Screen frames the article as old age potentially being the “kiss of death” for gamers because of the frailties that accompany older age. The other designers mostly mention things like screens for the vision-impaired and hand-eye coordination issues, but I have a different take on the subject. For me, many real-world games enjoyed by older players, such as Bocce Ball, are already as physically intense as a videogame and I see the issue as more about culture than biology.

Here’s a bit from my response. You can read the rest of my answer in Kill Screen, issue 6.

Videogames do not need to be redesigned for older players. Even the most intense controller-based videogame has fewer physical demands than Shuffleboard. And while videogames don’t offer the same kind of physical exertion, they do offer problem-solving, hand-eye coordination, and social interaction – activities with incredibly valuable cognitive benefits.

 

But ultimately, people don’t play videogames because they are good for you. People play games because of pleasure and culture. They will play games if they are enjoyable, and if they are a part of the culture in which they live. Today we scoff at “old people’s games” like Bridge and Mah Jong – when we’re all senior citizens, the kids will laugh at our old-fashioned games like Starcraft and Angry Birds.

Filed under: Media Mentions, Writings

Discussing the Glass Bead Game on BBC

This year is the 50th anniversary of the death of German novelist Herman Hesse, and to mark the occasion, the BBC created a half-hour radio program about his work. I was interviewed about his book the Glass Bead Game, a story set in a future where a priestly class plays a mysterious game that lets them explore the relationships among disciplines like mathematics, music, and astronomy.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, in part because he keeps the actual rules of the game frustratingly ambiguous in his book. As a game that potentially crossed every other cultural domain, the Glass Bead Game was a big influence on the Metagame, a card game I created with Local No. 12 in which players compare and contrast different forms of art, design, media, and entertainment.

You can listen to the entire BBC program here. I come in about halfway through, around minute 18:00. Among other topics, I discuss how our geek-centric, information-dominated age was presaged in the Glass Bead Game’s society of intellectual scholar-monks. Thanks to producer Alan Hall for tracking me down in Berlin this summer for our very enjoyable interview.

Filed under: Audio, Media Mentions

Judging the Jean Claude Van Jam

Last night at the Eyebeam center for Art and Technology here in New York City I took part in the Jean Claude Van Jam as a judge. The event was a 48-hour game jam in which teams had to create a game inspired by a randomly selected Jean Claude Van Dam film, and I was joined by game designers Greg Trefry and Keita Takahashi to judge the results.

The games had a great sense of humor, and many of them featured unusual hardware input devices, which is impressive for such a short amount of time. The winner, Wrong Bet! was inspired by the film Lionheart and was a social game in which two players competed in a rock-player scissors-style duel while several other players bet real money on them and could influence their actions. You can view all of the games, as well as a video of their final presentations, here on the Jean Claude Van Jam website.

Congratulations to all of the entrants, co-sponsor of the event Babycastles, and organizers Kaho Abe, Ida Benedetto, Ben Johnson, Ramsey Nasser and Matt Parker. The world needs more strange and wonderful game jams.

Filed under: Festivals & Exhibitions, Video