Schedule
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No Show 2013 schedule coming very soon!
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Opening Keynote – difference, games & classclass and poverty affect how we are able to make games and how we make games. underprivileged authors don't have the money to purchase the tools necessary for traditional modes of game development, and marginalized people (many women, the visibly queer, for example) are filtered out of engineering schools that would train them in the traditional ways of programming games. the widespread adoption of chris klimas's twine as a game-making tool by outsider authors - a free tool that requires no programming - is a response to poverty, and the games that are coming out of this process are dramatical
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Level CriticismPaint is limited by physics of light and mass, and buildings are limited by the physics of materials and load... similarly games are limited by "digital physics", the computational power of today's computers and a developer's ability to feasibly express ideas in a digital mode. I argue that effective games criticism must take technical constraints into consideration, and those same constraints influence the social norms, values, and diversity of developer communities. I also want to model a type of inquiry for other developers to consider -- this idea of "reflective practice", to critically de
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Now That’s Just Bizarre: The Making of “Dominique Pamplemousse”Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!” is a point-and-click adventure game about gender and the economy that features hand-made stop motion puppets constantly bursting into song. Conventional game industry wisdom would have you believe that a game like this shouldn’t exist, but it does, thanks to a nail-biting Indiegogo campaign and a hell of a lot of passion and dedication. In this presentation, you will get a rare inside look into how this weird little game was made, from technical considerations to story inspirations to self-promotional... perspirations? Som
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Taking ARGs Back from Marketing and MuseumsIn the common perception of the game development community, Alternate Reality Games are thought of as marketing ploys and descendant from an ideology of using game-like activities to get people to do real-life things. But this mentality is limited by conventional, bug budget development philosophies that seek to turn players into Pavlovian dogs instead of enriched people. ARGs stand as a good exercise in analyzing the systems of life, therefore tapping into usually dismissed topics like relationships and oppression. This perspective shows play that resists being gamed because the system t
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Prêt-à-jouer and Videogame CoutureThinking videogames through other media can reframe our expectations of what games can do, challenge our design habits, and reconfigure our critical vocabularies. Videogames have long aspired to match cinema, so what if we set aside that lens for a moment and instead think about videogames as dance, fashion, or architecture? We might ask: What does choreographic play look like? What does it mean to dwell in a videogame space? Is there such a thing as videogame couture or prêt-à-jouer—‘off the rack’ games, ready-to-play? What if we forgo our misguided search for the Citizen Kane of videoga
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Fighting Games (But Were Afraid to Ask)In this presentation we will examine one of gaming's most culturally contentious and well-known genres: fighting games. Specifically, this is a historical tour through the genre's humble beginnings, with games like Karateka and Kung-Fu, right up to the current explosion of online-capable, arcade-perfect 2D and 3D battlers. Our goal is to weave together the development of fighting game mechanics -- what are the stylistic and gameplay choices that make a fighting game and how have they developed? -- with the concurrent development of their boisterous and exciting but often highly problemati
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The Call of Duty Approach to Interactive Fiction TutorialsInteractive Fiction (IF) has a somewhat deserved reputation for being hard to get into if you're not already familiar with the medium's conventions. Facing just a blinking cursor with no or few initial instructions, together with often unhelpful error messages, requires more than the usual amount of effort from the player to climb the initial steep slope of the learning curve. Develop
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re: Fuck Videogamesit's the case with many "gamers" and techies in general that so many who have constructed their lives and identities through videogames often have a hard time accepting that there are other valid means of expressing or legitimizing their own emotions outside of technology. the world of technology is, after all, what they know. they want to make personal videogames because they understand how videogames work (having played them a lot) and that they can express deep emotions through play, but they don't have the kind corresponding experience with other forms of art to understand how those w
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Fire in the Hole Artgames are an example of lateral evolution within the colliding environments of art and videogames. Within the game development community there is an emerging dichotomy between formalists, those that make “pure” games, and zinesters, those that make “impure” games. This entire argument is rubbish. Artgames are neither better or worse than videogames. They are merely a sidewise development that goes its own way with little regard for high or low, formalist or informalist. The speaker will focus on how breaking traditional rule-based game spaces disrupts play
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Twine: Confessions of a Deadbeat Project LeaderTwine has recently exploded as a tool for DIY game creation, but it has a long, tangled development history. This talk takes an honest look at this history from the point of view of its original creator, providing both an inside look at everything from early attempts that didn’t quite hit the mark to ongoing work on a browser-based rewrite. This talk will also cover the joys and frustrations of leading a small open source project. In particular, it will discuss the decisions that led to Twine development bogging down and what factors led to the success it h
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