I’ve helped out with the program of this year’s NLGD Festival of Games. If you’re into gaming’s fringe phenomena, then this edition is not to be missed. The conference’s theme is “play global, global play” and will celebrate the impact of gaming beyond the screen. I curated several sessions focused on urban games and alternate [...]
Yesterday evening I was at the Club of Amsterdam. They host events centred around preferred futures. I was invited to speak at an evening about the future of games.1 I thought I’d share what I talked about with you here. I had ten minutes to get my point across. To be honest, I think I [...]
If you were asked to improve your own neighbourhood, what would you change? And how would you go about communicating those changes? Cities are systems, or rather, many systems that interconnect. Like buildings, they can be thought of as having layers, each changing at its own pace. If those layers are loosely coupled, the city [...]
It’s been a while since I finished reading Steven Berlin Johnson’s Emergence. I picked up the book because ever since I started thinking about what IxDs can learn from game design, the concept of emergence kept popping up. Johnson’s book is a pleasant read, an easy-going introduction to the subject. I started and finished it [...]
When the NLGD Foundation invited me to speak at their anual Festival of Games I asked them what they would like me to discuss. “Anything you like,” was what they said, essentially. I decided to submit an abstract dealing with data visualization. I had been paying more and more attention to this field, but was [...]
(Following some recent overly long posts, here’s an attempt to stay under 500 words.) For a while now, I have been lurking on the mailing list of the Alternate Reality Games IGDA SIG. ARGs are games that use the real world as their platform. They usually revolve around a mystery to be unraveled. I find [...]
One of the nicer things about GDC was the huge stack of free magazines I took home with me. Among those was an issue of Edge, the glossy games magazine designed to look good on a coffee table next to the likes of Vogue (or whatever). I was briefly subscribed to Edge, but ended up [...]
(My reading notes are piling up so here’s an attempt to clear out at least a few of them.) Part of the play experience of many digital games is figuring out how the damn thing works in the first place. In Rules of Play on page 210: “[…] as the player plays with FLUID, interaction [...]
‘Metagames’—Richard Garfield’s presentation for the 2000 Game Developers Conference—is in today’s links, but I think it deserves a bit more attention than that. Here are some quotes from the document that stood out for me.1 What a metagame is: “My definition of metagame is broad. It is how a game interfaces with life.” In other [...]
The 2008 Game Developers Conference was a bit of a confusing experience for me. To begin with, I felt out of place. Anytime I introduced myself to someone—”I’m an interaction designer, I work freelance”—I would usually get a blank stare. (Not many independents making a living in the games industry it seems.) At a lot [...]
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