Miguel Sicart (DK)
Miguel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he does research and teaches on game design, play design, and ethics. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games (The MIT Press, 2009), as well as a number of other articles on values, play, and game design. He has been a speaker at a number of academic and industry events, including the Game Developer’s Conference.
Games Don't Matter
We live in an era obsessed with games. Wherever we look we see badges, points, scores, achievements, leaderboards. We compete in games and in our daily life, and even acts of socializing have become races in search of solitary winners.
In this talk, Miguel Sicart will challenge the idea that games, and game design, matter, that we should look at games as ways of structuring our lives. This talk wants to be a provocative manifesto against games and game design, bringing back what really matters: play, and the people we play with.
Michel Reilhac (FR)
Michel Reilhac is currently Head of Cinema for the French/ German public cultural broadcasting company ARTE France, acquiring about 100 films a year and co-producing each year around 25 independent features worldwide. He has his own production company, Melange, and has directed several documentaries as well as his first feature ‘The Good Old Naughty Days’ in 2002.
In the 90's and early 00's, he has curated and designed several major interactive events and participatory exhibitions using either dance or total darkness to engage the audience in an immersive experience. For the past four years he has been exploring transmedia fiction storytelling as part of Arte France strategy to develop multiplatform programming and production.
Cinematic storytelling meets interactive game play
People from the film and broadcasting industry see how the games industry is progressively appropriating the codes, the visual language and the history of cinema. Cinematics in the games are more and more complex; closer and closer to actual movies and the difference between cinematics and game design is shrinking as the game graphics become a full ‘set’.
What are we doing on our side to rethink the ways we have been telling stories through moving pictures? How can we look at the game culture and see how we can talk to each other, enrich each other with our mutual expertise to create transmedia stories, design experiences for the viewers/participants? What are the new entertainment forms that we can design by mixing storytelling and game play?
Aki Järvinen (FI)
Aki Järvinen is the Creative Director at Digital Chocolate's Helsinki studio in Finland, where he is contributing to the design and development of the company’s games on Facebook and mobile. Järvinen holds written a PhD on academic methods of analyzing games from the perspectives of design and psychology. Aki is also a frequent speaker in industry conferences and a noted blogger on the social games space at http://games4networks.posterous.com
Social Games and New Horizons of Game Design
Social games on Facebook have emerged as the pinnacle of casual gaming to the extent that their gameness has been questioned. In addition, the metrics driven nature of social games development has changed the creative aspects of the craft. The change has been particularly acute regarding the tasks and job descriptions of game designers, who have had to embrace insights from metrics as the new creative challenges. Aki Järvinen will sketch out the new horizon of game design as a creative profession that requires command of such diverse areas as leveraging virality, monetizing with virtual items, and designing fun gameplay features.
Sebastian Deterding (DE)
Sebastian Deterding is a designer and researcher working on user experience, games, persuasive technology, and playful design. He is broadly interested in how code shapes conduct – and how to put that knowledge into practice. When not designing, he is pursuing a PhD on the social contexts and motivational psychology of video games at the Hans Bredow Institute at Hamburg University, Germany. He publishes and speaks internationally at venues such as CHI, Gamescom, reboot, or Google. His work has been covered by The Guardian, the LA Times, The New Scientist, and EDGE Magazine among others.
The Game of Life: Questioning "Gamification"
In 1960, Milton Bradley published ‘The Game of Life’: a capitalist wet dream of a board game, won by the lucky one who retired richest. Today, gamification vendors take Milton Bradley seriously. From losing weight to saving Africa, from watching TV to matching DNA sequences: there’s nothing that couldn’t be made more fun by adding points, badges, and other elements from video games. At least that’s the selling proposition.
But a quick glance at current ‘gamified’ applications shows that they drastically fall short of the promise of games and play. So it's time to step up and ask some serious questions: Can life be a game? Should it? And if so, who is playing whom? This talk walks through some issues of gameful and playful design before delving into the ethics of design – and the lessons games may truly hold for us.
Frank Lantz (US)
Frank Lantz is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Area/Code. He has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Lantz was the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, a developer of online and downloadable games. Frank Lantz is widely credited as one of the founding figures in the field of location-oriented Big Games. His work on the Big Urban Game, ConQwest and PacManhattan is widely cited and has been covered in the New York Times and MTV.
For over 10 years, Frank has taught game design at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the School of Visual Arts, and the New School. He is currently the Director of the newly created NYU Game Center. He often lectures at game conferences, and his writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.
Games as an Aesthetic Form
This talk will explore what it means to consider games an aesthetic form - something akin to literature, music, or film. That this is the most appropriate category within which to place games seems like an emerging consensus. But what does it actually mean? Are only video games an aesthetic form, or do non-digital games also deserve that status? Are the aesthetics of games a hybrid blend of other forms or a distinct form unto themselves? Do they express a new aesthetic fresh-born of the computer age or a primal, fundamental aesthetic that computers have amplified and brought into focus? The talk will examine these and other related questions.
Thomas Vigild (DK)
Thomas Vigild is Game editor for the Danish newspaper Politiken and external game consultant for The Danish Filminstitute. Thomas also works as freelance project manager for Nordic Game Program, as external lecturer at IT-University of Copenhagen in Game Journalism/Marketing and co-founded the first Danish game-based community school ' Vallekilde Game Academy' in 2011.
Furthermore chairman of 'Dansk Spilråd' (The Danish Game Council) and ‘Guldbrikken’ (The Golden Pawn) - a yearly Danish board game award.
CASES
Monstrum - Playgrounds (DK)
Monstrum believes that playground design should be a reflection of the world surrounding us. They see the world as a place full of colour. They meet boys that like pink and girls that likes trees, so why only play on a monkey frame and a sandbox, when you can play in a moon crater, or a submarine, or a giant spider, or an enormous snail or a Trojans horse, or a rocket, or an ant or a princess castle? The visual effect can be indulged from a far, a tall slide, a massive tower or a wave to play on can draw kids in from the street.
Monstrum is headed by Christian Jensen and Ole B. Nielsen. As artists and designers and through their experience with building theatrical set-design at numerous theaters in Copenhagen, they have the knowledge to combine elements where not only physical activities and play evolve, but with a visual story that creates a space where fantasy thrives.
www.monstrum.dk
FunRigger - Elephant Parade (DK)
FunRigger Productions was conceived with the purpose of designing meaningful location-based experiences, and delivering the software technology that brings them to life. The Elephant Parade hosts open air art exhibitions to raise public awareness and support for the cause of elephant conservation: the elephant statues never go unnoticed by the wider public, mass media. www.elephantparade.dk
FunRigger Productions went from being supporters to partners by developing a city-wide location-based game to help people explore and enjoy the parade, and learn a little bit more about the plight of the Asian Elephants. In this session, David Mariner presents the our design philosophy behind a successful location-based experience, plus an understanding of how to mix business and good causes. www.funrigger.com