GDC and another interview

This Sat­ur­day I’ll be jump­ing on a plane to San Fran­cis­co. As men­tioned ear­li­er, I’ll be attend­ing the Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence. I have a ses­sion at the GDC Mobile sub-con­fer­ence ele­gant­ly titled “Design­ing a Casu­al Social Gam­ing Expe­ri­ence for Gen­er­a­tion C”. Read more about my ses­sion on the con­fer­ence site. It’ll basi­cal­ly be 1/3 crash course on the social web, 1/3 rant on mobile gam­ing and 1/3 talk about enabling cre­ative expres­sion through games. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll be in SF the full week (fly­ing back the next week­end) so if you hap­pen to be around, and feel like hang­ing out, do drop me a line. (Your best bet is an email to “kars” at this domain or d-ing me on Twit­ter.)

Final­ly, if that isn’t enough self-pro­mo­tion for one post, (I’m risk­ing a mass unsub­scribe here) I was inter­viewed a sec­ond time for the Playy­oo blog. Head over there for some talk about the Game Creator—a tool I designed for them that allows peo­ple to cus­tomise clas­sic games and pub­lish them to mobile:

And then there are the games that are entire­ly per­son­al. They make no sense to you or me, only to the per­son who cre­at­ed it and their friends. For exam­ple, I saw one vari­a­tion of Lunar Lan­der where you need to land a crab on someone’s, let’s say Debbie’s, head. Now, I have no idea who Deb­bie is, but I can imag­ine Deb­bie is a friend or sis­ter of the game’s cre­ator. And it must have been a lot of fun for them to include the pic­ture, and then have an easy way to dis­trib­ute it to their friends.”

I was interviewed for the Playyoo blog

I was interviewed by Playyoo the other day

Most of you will prob­a­bly know I’m involved1 with this new mobile game com­mu­ni­ty called Playy­oo. I haven’t blogged about it here explic­it­ly because most of my con­tri­bu­tions so far are still being devel­oped and will hope­ful­ly hit the inter­net around Decem­ber. I have an excuse to talk about it now though, because recent­ly I was inter­viewed by the peo­ple of Playy­oo for their blog. Read about my thoughts on the role of social­i­ty in (mobile) gam­ing and how that will work in Playy­oo’s meta-game, as well as what I think about casu­al games and the unique game design oppor­tu­ni­ties for mobile.

A quote from the inter­view:

What does the term ‘casu­al game’ mean to you?

‘Casu­al,’ to me, says some­thing about the lev­el of atten­tion and engage­ment that a play­er has (or is required to have) with the game. For me as a design­er, casu­al games pro­vide inter­est­ing chal­lenges. It might seem sim­ple to cre­ate these casu­al games, but they’re actu­al­ly quite tricky to pull off, or pull off well, that is. From a game design per­spec­tive, I think it’s more chal­leng­ing to pull off a high qual­i­ty causal game than yet anoth­er first-per­son shoot­er game. 

Read the rest of the inter­view over at the Playy­oo blog.2

  1. They’ve hired me to do game and inter­ac­tion design. I have been work­ing on mobile games, a game cre­ation tool, and a web-based meta-game. []
  2. Thanks to Alper Çuǧun for the pho­to that’s in the post. []