Ludicidal Tendencies

The idea of failure as a core part of the design process has come up a lot recently, and I was reminded by another blog post about the rant that I gave at GDC 2006 as part of the IGDA Academic Summit. I realized that I never posted this rant, so thought I would do so now since it seems to have become topical again. Enjoy!

The topic of my rant is ‘failure.’ Obviously, none of us likes to fail. Especially students. Students are terrified of failing. They are so afraid of failing that they often forget that university is the one place where they should fail. Where they are -- or should be -- in an environment that rewards the type of intellectual and artistic risk-taking that leads to failure 99 percent of the time. Because failure is an integral part of exploring new idea spaces.

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I recently went to GDC Europe to speak on a panel with several other female game designers, including our own Kellee Santiago. In planning the panel, we all agreed we didn't want to do yet another typical women in games panel and brainstormed ways we could make it more interesting for ourselves and the audience.

One of the things we decided to do was give ourselves a mini design challenge, to explore whether we as designers really do approach process differently than our male colleagues. For example, would we make a war game with a different emphasis? So we tried it. At the panel, I presented an idea for a war game with a core mechanic of holding hands. Kellee presented ideas for a war game about the emotion of fear. The audience seemed to really enjoy the way we structured the panel, and here is a nice write up about it.

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Alex Pham has a short piece in the LA Times about the upcoming IndieCade festival, which will be October 1-4 in multiple gallery locations across Culver City.

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For anyone interested in serious games, activism in games, learning in games, etc. the 2009 Sixth Annual Games for Change Festival is a must go. This Festival brings together the world’s leading foundations, NGOs, game-makers, academics, and journalists to explore how best to harness this incredibly powerful medium to help address the most critical issues of our day, from poverty, climate change, global conflicts, to human rights.

This year's speakers include:
Sasha Barab, Professor in Learning Sciences, IST, and Cognitive Science, Indiana University
Ian Bogost, CEO of Persuasive Games and author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
Heather Chaplin, journalist (NPR, NYT) and author of Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.
Nick Earl, General Manager of Electronic Arts Redwood Shores Studio
Mary Flanagan, Director of the Tiltfactor Lab
Tracy Fullerton, Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games
Judith Helfand, Independent filmmaker
John Nordlinger, Senior Research Manager, Microsoft
Ian Rowe, former head of Public Affairs at mTV
Katie Salen, Executive Director, Institute of Play; Associate Professor, Design and Technology Department, Parsons The New School for Design
Seth Scheisel, New York Times game critic and technology journalist
Kurt Squire, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Constance Steinkuehler, Assistant Professor Assistant Professor Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
Clive Thompson, Contributor, The New York Times, Wired
Eric Zimmerman, Award-winning game designer, Co-author of The Rules of Play

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Congratulations to all the IMD teams that participated in last week's GDC: Kid the World Saver and The Unfinished Swan were IGF finalists. Ian also presented The Unfinished Swan at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. And, of course, the Reflection team won the IGF Mobile Next Great Mobile Game contest!

Reflection began as an intermediate project and is now being developed further in the advanced projects class. Here's Peter checking out the latest build.

Posted by at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)