FuturePlay 2007 CfP

FuturePlay 2007 conference will be on November 15th-17th in Toronto, Canada. From the website:

The FuturePlay conference focuses on three main themes. The first theme, future game development, addresses academic research and emerging industry trends in the area of game technology and game design. The second theme, future game impacts and applications, includes academic research and emerging industry trends focused on designing games for learning, for gender, for serious purposes, and to impact society. Finally, the third theme, future game talent, is designed to provide a number of industry and academic perspectives on the knowledge, skills, and attitude it takes to excel in the games industry.

The conference call for papers is out and the paper submission deadline is June 30th. I plan to apply with my third (or second, if the NSG network project goes through) paper this year. Let’s see how it works ou, it would seem like the game design/deevlopment process theme is one of the key elements of this conference so I hope I can attend.

Visualization about Visualizations

I spoke about models in game design in the second day of the game design event. A friend of mine sent me a link to a Periodic table of Visualization Methods. It can prove useful when you think about ways to build models about your game design – whether it is thinking about the player-to-player interaction, the internal mechanics of the game and whatnot.

On another note, Arto has made an entry about one game design model (or maybe even a game design pattern?) – the Main Loop Model. Something that you’ve probably unwittingly used if you have designed board games or programmed something like the main player input loop in computer games, but it is always good if you can modelize or patternize your silent knowledge.

GD Event Recap

There was a game design event at our university last weekend as I mentioned before the holidays. For me, the event was a huge success. The main function of the event was give a forum to game designers to present their games, get feedback and be able to playtest the games. This function was fulfilled very well. Many thanks to the main organizers, Arto and Antti and also to everyone who participated.

My experiences of the event was as follows:

• the size of the crowd (about 20) was pretty optimal for a first-time event where there were no routines or set ways
• the mix of role-playing game, board game and computer game people was very good and people were in the most part able to benefit from the mix of genres
• the attendees really made the event the success it was: they provided quality feedback, discussion etc.
• the games that were presented were very interesting: I can envision myself playing most of them again with pleasure