Talks – Page 2 – Leapfroglog

My GDC Mobile 2008 proposal: accepted!

It doesn’t say so on the site yet, but I am on the program for next year’s GDC Mobile.¹ Yesterday I got the email that my talk — titled Designing a Casual Social Gaming Experience for Generation C — has been accepted. To be honest I was quite surprised. I work in the blurry overlap of the interaction design and game design fields, have no actual game titles under my belt and proposed a weird subject to boot. Who in their right mind would invite me to speak? Of course I am also really excited about this. GDC is the professional event for the games industry so I’m honored to be part of it.²

My talk will be closely related to the things I’ve been working on for Playyoo. I’ll discuss how short-session mobile games and a web based meta-game can interconnect to create a social game experience that allows different levels of player engagement. I’ll look at the ways you can align your game design with the expectations of Generation C: customization & personalization, recombination and connectedness. I might post the extended abstract sometime in the future, for now I’m just wondering: Who else is going to GDC? What would you like to see me discuss?

Update: The conference site has been updated, here’s the description of my session.

Don’t be scared by the big Orc in the header of their site. [↩]
Now I just need to figure out whether traveling to the US twice in one month is a feasible undertaking. [↩]

More than useful — outline of my Interaction 08 talk

A while back I was happy to hear that my submission for Interaction 08 is accepted. This will be the first conference organised by the IxDA. Obviously I’m proud to be part of that. I’ll probably be building my talk a post at a time on this blog, more or less like I did with the one for the Euro IA Summit of this year. If you’re wondering wether it’ll be worth following along, let me outline the argument I made in my submission:

There’s a generation of ‘users’ expecting their digital and physical products to be customizable, personalize-able and re-combinable. These users explore the potential of these 3C products through play. This is why I think it’s worthwhile for interaction designer to get a better understanding of how to design for open-ended play. Obviously, it makes sense to do some shopping around in the theories of our colleagues in game design. Why should designers bother? Playful products have deeply engaged users that can’t stop telling stories about their experiences with them.

The focus of this talk is firmly on designing stories that emerge through play and enabling the retelling of those play experiences.

Like I said, I’ll dive deeper into these topics in the coming period. If you have any views of your own on this — or useful resources that you think I should check out — do let me know.

Update: Today the full conference program was announced and my name is actually on there. The program looks really cool, and I’m really happy to see some talks related to mine in there as well. See you in Savannah!

Slides and video of my Reboot 9.0 talk

So I’ve been busy uploading stuff. The slides to my Reboot 9.0 talk are up at SlideShare. I uploaded a video recorded by Iskander with his N70 to Vimeo. Finally, since SlideShare still doesn’t import the notes that go with the slides in PowerPoint, I’ve also put up a big PDF (almost 50 MB). Please refer to the notes in the PDF for all the Flickr photo credits too.

Slides

Mobile Social Play (Reboot 9.0, 2007), slides with notes Download

Slides also on SlideShare.

Video

Mobile Social Play @ Reboot 9.0 from Kaeru on Vimeo

Notes

There’s a bit too much um-ing and ah-ing for my tastes. I need to do more practice, practice, practice before these things!
This will be the last time I use Darth Vader as the opening slide, I promise.
It’s too bad I didn’t have more time to go into the examples that go with the last part. Next time: less stage setting, more meat.
Still, I had fun. :-) Thanks again to Thomas for having me, and all the cool people at Reboot for going easy on me.

Mobile Social Play — my Reboot 9.0 proposal

I’ve just submitted my proposal for a talk at Reboot 9.0. It’s on the three areas I am most fascinated with at the moment: mobile, social software and gaming/play. After attending this great conference twice it’d be really cool to get the opportunity to present there.¹

Take a look at it and let me know what you think², I’d love to get some feedback up-front so I can maybe work that in there. What do you want to know about this topic?

Curious what this might be like? Take a look at the Pecha Kucha I delivered on mobile gaming for a taste of what’s to come.

If it doesn’t work out I can always turn it into a micro presentation.
If you like it, vote it up!

I’ve submitted an XTech 2007 proposal

Together with Edgar, I’ve submitted a proposal for the upcoming XTech 2007 in Paris, France. The talk we’re aiming for would basically be a largely war stories from our work designing and developing large scale websites that adhere to web standards and accessibility guidelines and are published and managed using an enterprise CMS‘s (such as Tridion, GX, IBM LWWCM or what have you). Not the sexiest of subjects, but one we’re well versed in and can give plenty of practical advice on. Feedback from the review committee is due February 2007. Wish us luck!