Playful: The Morning After
Yesterday’s Playful conference was a lot of fun. The day was packed with a lot of varied talks with no low spots. Here’s a very brief summary of what happened. It’s brief as I don’t take notes at conferences. Not because I don’t believe in it, but because I forget.
- James Wallis spoke about OuLiPo
- Roo rocked out
- Matt Irvine Brown talked about drawing more dots to enable others to join them. His TrumpetHero and Singing Sock Puppets were inspired.
- Adrian Hon gave a very honest account of how gaming can be addictive as well as cause addiction.
- Eric Clough took us through the incredible New York apartment he designed as one big puzzle.
- Chris Delay of Introversion Software demonstrated how procedural content generation can be used to generate entire city-scapes.
- Kars Alfrink did something interesting.
but my brain has ejected it. Sorry Kars, I look forward to rediscovering your talk.He has put a full transcript of his talk online. Thanks Kars! - Alex Fleetwood spoke about his project to combine virtual and real world dramatic experiences
- Tom Armitage went from saying “all games today are multiplayer” to “all games have always been multiplayer”.
- Sandy Spangler from Sony stepped in at the last minute to talk about the history and future of the EyeToy.
- Eric Zimmerman gave a very energetic performance. Again, my brain fails me this morning.
- Matt Biddulph explained how game controllers can easily be tinkered with to provide new and interesting uses
- Iain Tate talked about why the Highscore is a key feature of social gaming.
- Jolyon Webb talked about teeth with some very life-like CG heads
- Kieron Gillen ended the day encouraging us all to plagarise ideas. Why has no-one cloned The Sims yet?
Well done to the guys at Pixel-Lab for putting this together. I look forward to next year.
Tags: playful
November 17th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
If you’d like to refresh your memory, you can now read a full transcript on my blog. Thanks for the nice photo, by the way.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Kars, that’s excellent. When I read Roo’s write-up, the bird squeezing metaphor was enough for my brain to click and bring your talk back to me. But I couldn’t remember enough about the classification of games you mentioned. Thanks to your transcript I can fill in the blanks.
Glad you liked the photo.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Glad to hear the post is helpful, Nick. As an aside, I first heard about the bird holding metaphor while practician traditional Japanese sword fighting. One of my teachers compared holding a sword to holding a bird, etc. When preparing this talk, for some reason the metaphor came back to me. It seemed appropriate.