kellee's blog

Alongside the obsessive Jon Mak (http://www.queasygames.com/), and Scandinavian reality games designer Pekko Koskinen, I'll be kicking off the Independent Games Summit in San Francisco this year with our discussion formally called "Scattershots of Play," jokingly referred to as our version of "The View." I'm stoked this year to get my talk out of the way at the beginning of the conference so there's no stress the rest of the week but 10am for indie gamers? Come on!

The talk began as an idea after a lengthy conversation between Jon Mak and Pekko Koskinen at last year's GDC. It was one of those great conversations you tend to have during the week of GDC; you know, starting with a discussion on one game, and then moving to the definitions of interactivity, to comparisons between games and literature, and then somehow wrapping it all up with Street Fighter.

Jon then thought of the Seinfield tv show "...maybe THIS could be the show...." For me, I feel that as a new designer you don't even know where to begin with designing a game, so you often copy off a game you think is fun, instead of evaluating at a deeper level why you think the game is fun and how can you apply that to your own design. Also, for more experienced designers, looking at games through totally different lenses can be really eye opening in troubleshooting a particularly tricky mechanic.

All of this leads to our talk: three developers with three different perspectives, three different backgrounds, who love talking about games and hope to inspire others to see games differently, too. Because there is no magic bullet. There's no answer we have on how to evaluate a game. But we're going to try out some different stuff and see what happens.

The description of the talk:
"When we stop at the words "good" or "better" or "fun" we don't even scratch the surface of what games are... or could be. Looking for "better" games seeks uniformity of value. Yet we need to understand the variety, potentiality of games first, to know where we are going... or could be going."

The GDC page:
http://gdconf.com/conference/igs.htm