Tinker it now!

I (Daniel again) finished last week by speaking at Playful 09, organized by Toby Barnes and Pixel-Lab, which was a bit lighter-hearted than the C&binet Forum. (Although as usual there’s a serious undercurrent in conversations about gaming.)

This one was fun. I’ve been trying for a while to articulate a certain story about the changing role of custom-built hardware in games and game design, and about why it’s important for (some proportion of) games—particularly in the world of mobile and pervasive gaming—to include built-for-purpose hardware (as opposed to software in general-purpose devices like mobile phones). The slide deck for the talk is here (although the transparency on some of the slides got lost in conversion).

Fortunately I spoke early in the day, so I could focus on the speakers for most of the morning and the afternoon. Reviews here, here, here and visually here have good summaries of the individual speakers.

My favorite aspect of the Playful conference is that it hangs about at the edges of games, and speakers go out on a limb to share their enthusiasms. One of my points in my talk (although I think I didn’t get it quite across) was that playing games is, for me, a place to be unabashedly idiosyncratic. I play an eclectic mix of casual games, board games, parlor games, puzzle games, and mindnumbingly grinding RPGs—I’m not necessarily good at all of these games, and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit to some of them. But (according to Caillois at least) one of the fundamental aspects of play is that it is a free and voluntary activity, and I feel free to enjoy embarrassing games that I am bad at.

Similarly (erm, minus the embarrassing and badness part), my favorite speakers at Playful were those who departed from their areas of professional expertise or from what they might have thought we would be interested in, and instead talked about their own idiosyncratic passions. Adaptations between games and movies and between books and games, robots, cricket, the joys of copy&paste in early graphics programs, inviting the internet to visit while you trek across the countryside in a geographical recreation of a century-old book, difference engines, choosing the ‘wrong’ games, collecting and pretending to be a pilot. The talks were best when they waxed enthusiastic.

And threading through it all, the countermelody of serious games and design in relation to social responsibility, which maybe a third of the speakers touched on to some degree. I think there’s a real, practical tension between the voluntary, self-directed nature of play and the goal-oriented nature of designing for specific social ends, and some of the speakers brought up some issues related to this tension. In particular, Molly Range spoke about the games landscape in Sweden, and one of the questions she asked was how serious games designers could measure the long-term effectiveness of these games to achieve external goals, without the game design itself becoming too obviously goal-oriented. (And a corollary to this question, I think, is to ask who is designing games, what are their goals, and do players actually want to (or know that they are supposed to) be influenced through play.)

Overall, the talks reflected a good mix of playfulness, risk, and seriousness, and I walked away with more questions asked than answered. A good day.