Thoughts

Playful‘s own description of itself as “a one-day event all about games and play” doesn’t really do it justice, but I can’t think of a better summation either so I’ll leave it at that one. It was a day of short (twenty minute) talks on a diverse range of subjects without the only real requirements being that a) it’s not a commercial pitch platform and b) it was something to do with “play” based on whatever the speaker takes that term to mean.

The format is a winner for me as essentially the twenty minute requirements limits everyone to making a simple point without a ream of academic argument and research to justify it. It was certainly more about opinions, speculation and thought-provoking ideas than a regular conference and for a sense of participation it pretty much straddles the regular concepts of a conference and unconference.

A couple of themes seemed to emerge, although possibly these are just a result of what I took from the talks and others may have wildly differing opinions:

• Play is voluntary; escapist; a pause from the everyday
• Adding points does not equal gamification

There were more but I think the best way to get a bigger picture is with a rapid-fire overview of how I saw things at the time, as noted in my complimentary Field Notes notebook:

Naomi Alderman talked about the importance of characterisation in games, and in particular the challenge of creating a story that allows a character to change from beginning to end. In particular, how this was actually quite a hard thing to do if the player had free choice and how the game-as-linear-story could work a lot better if the character journey was also made more interesting.

Paul Bennun demonstrated some audio-only games, and showed how the player in flow was just as immersed as with any other game type. Audio Pong is worth watching:

Dan(?) from Made in Me talked through their work in creating open-ended toys and stories.

Bea (aged 9) was interviewed about her thoughts on ethical games and games in general, and made an point about how games aimed at kids could be educational about world events not through changing the game but by themed items e.g. solar panels that characters could put on their igloos.

Nicholas Nova talked through the evolution of game controllers, highlighting some of the successes (Nintendo controllers as the root of so many others) and a few dead ends (Apple’s controller with a touchpad).

Pat Kane talked about humour and comedy as a part of play and how linguistic humour is valuable as a play act that can never be taken away from the individual, no matter what situation they find themselves in.

Richard Hogg made me realise I’m also a contrarian. Contrarians can be identified by their love of things not necessarily because they work well, but because the aim was a high romantic ideal. Contrarians have “escaped the inevitability of liking things just because they’re good”.

Tom Muller showed us some of his comic illustrations and attempts to break out of formulaic commercial cover designs.

Jonathan Smith gave one of the talks of the day about the Lego computer game series. He spoke of how “what I want” vs “what is expected of me” is important in everything, including games, and how being told how to play within a system is often an important constraint even for apparently free play.

John (?) talked through the Spots vs Stripes game competition for Cadbury. James Wallis gave a wide-reaching introduction to his entry Flick Racer which tied it back to the French Revolution, whilst Sally Manning showed how she one-upped her game-designer husband by reaching the final two of the competition with her very first game design: Egg-a-thon.

Roo and Leila from Shift Run Stop did a live-recorded podcast interview with Dominik Diamond, a long-standing figured for games programmes on television (especially 90′s series Gamesmaster), although he’s now living in Nova Scotia dodging coyotes.

Sebastian Deterding, whose previous presentation “Just add points?” is essential viewing, railed against the simplification of the idea that games are simply points and leaderboards in “Gamification and its Discontents“. What he called “the badge measels” is spreading through the internet like a virus, and he drew on Sturgeon’s Law that “90% of everything is crap” i.e. even if you manage to make a game out of something, it doesn’t mean the game will be any good. “Games are not fun because they’re games, games are fun when they’re well-designed.” Game mechanics themselves are not play; they don’t pause our everyday lives.

Margaret Robertson from Hide & Seek then pretended she wasn’t going to be profound about anything and was just going to show us all through the indie game Minecraft. It turned out to be very profound and led us through a play session that involved no rules, no characterisation, no clear aims or goals, and certainly no points or leaderboards. It ended with her setting fire (in the game) to a piece of landscape that she’d crafted to read “game = points” – and had stayed up until 4am doing so. She ended on the recommendation that anyone who does think games = points should also be set fire too. If there’s one talk I hope makes it onto video then this is it.

Bertrand Duplat talked us through some interesting experiments on using iPads and iPhones as extensions of/integrations with paper-based games. Based on the term “Paper as a New Computer Platform” it showed some interesting technology which you can see in action on YouTube.

Alexis Kennedy talked through Echo Bazaar and some of the things they’ve learnt about letting players choose to put their characters (who are pervasive and can’t be saved) through situations of misery. They found that in situations where the player had actively given their character some kind of mental scar, the player was very likely to want to share with their friends through Twitter or Facebook that something bad had happened. However, repetitive misery, with no choice, was generally just seen as a nuisance. He almost tried to make a conclusion and, in a a move that I think should be emulated more often, ended by saying “this presentation doesn’t really have a point; it just sort of tails off”.

Finally Dom Hodge and Dave Haynes ran through some outcomes from music hackdays, including a game of snake where picking up pills resulted in music being composed.

Especially from the relationships between “game”, “gameification”, “play” and “fun”, the day gave me a lot to think about.