News dump

I’ve been busy traveling and getting ready for the MoMA opening in a few short weeks, so media about my work has piled up a bit. Here are some highlights.

This piece for the Forbes website kindly remembers SiSSYFiGHT 2000, a web game I created in collaboration with Word.com.

An early preview of the Deepak Chopra Kinect game I lead designed for Curious Pictures includes screenshots and videos.

In this Kill Screen Magazine interview about games and art, designer and scholar John Sharp names the work of Nathalie and I as one of his chief examples of game creators working under an art-making rubric.

A Notre Dame blog reports on “Games are not Good for You” – my keynote at the Games, Learning, and Society conference last month.

In Purple Pawn, A thoughtful review of Figment, my new card-game-in-a-book, called “Figment: Irony in a Paperback.”

A featured article in the Macarthur Foundation’s site about digital media and learning focuses on Gamestar Mechanic.

This Australian blog about digital arts references two Local No. 12 games (Backchatter and the Metagame) in a post about playful engagement.

Ayiti, an award-winning game about poverty in Haiti that Gamelab created with Global kids, has been translated into Chinese! Read about it here on the Global Kids website.

BackChatter is OPEN SOURCE!

Now it’s official. Local No.12 – Mike Edwards, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, and me – have made our conference Twitter game BackChatter free and available to the public. Check out this page on the Local No.12 website to access the code on sourceforge, as well as our handbook for running the game and our visual design templates for posters and postcards.

So far, Education Technology conference DevLearn is planning on running the game, following indie game festival Freeplay this summer. You can take BackChatter to your event too. Really. It’s free.

BackChatter: that empty nest feeling

BackChatter, the Twitter-based conference game I created with Local No.12, has had its run at Freeplay, the Austrailia-based independent game festival. In this blog post, John Siesma, who adapted the game to the festival, talks about what did and didn’t work with the game.

It’s a funny feeling seeing your game design taken up by others – like your baby going off to college. Of course all game players partake in some form of open source culture, as they play with the structures of a game, often changing them as they devise home rules, design levels, or engage in other forms of game modding. I’ve actually never been part of a bona fide open source code release before, and I can’t wait to see what others do with the game.

If you’ve got a conference or event that might use a bit of interstitial play to spice things up and get your attendees interacting with each other, now you can put together your own BackChatter game. We’re launching a guidebook for hosting and running the game in the very near future. Keep your eye out for it right here!

BackChatter cuts loose

Experimental game collective Local No.12 (Mike Edwards, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, – and myself) spent last year designing and refining BackChatter over several conferences last year, culminating in the game’s swan song at the Game Developers Conference in March.

What is the game? BackChatter is a Twitter and web game designed for conferences. Players get points for predicting what words will be popular in the Twitter backchannel for the conference they’re attending. You make moves via Twitter, betting on words that you think will show up in Tweets with the conference hashtag.

As we announced at GDC, we have open-sourced the code for the game, which will let you create your own BackChatter game for your event. We are working on documenting the code and creating a game hosting guide, but in the meantime, the game is already being used for other events. Check out John Sietsma’s blog post about using the game code for Freeplay, aMelbourne-based independent game festival.

Stay posted for official BackChatter documentation later this fall. And let me know if you’re thinking about using BackChatter for your event.