GDCNext: Playing with ‘game’

I’ll be speaking at GDCNext on this, in the future of gaming track.

Playing with ‘Game’

Raph Koster  |  Designer, Independent

Location: Room 515 B

Date: Tuesday, November 05

Time: 11:15am-12:15pm

Track:Future of Gaming

Discipline:Programming & Architecture

Never mind the future – the present of games is quickly carrying us well beyond the classic understandings of what a game is. We’ve got gamified restaurants, psychological self-help tools, immersive narrative experiences, quasi-gambling experiences, political statements and more. Along the way, we’re seeing conflicts between subcultures in our audience, and within our development community as well. Players get mad when a title isn’t what they expected. Developers watch the encroachment of business practices they dislike. Designers try to apply the tools of one genre to another, and find they don’t always work. Is “game” even a thing? And if it is, in what ways do these varied approaches relate to one another? In this lecture, we’ll take a look at a craft-centric approach to the question: what do we make, who do we make it for, and how can we best make what we want?

Takeaway

Attendees will learn about a framework for thinking about varied types of interactive experiences and the four types of problems that make for compelling play. They will also take away practical design checklists and techniques for these different approaches: top five tips for narrative experiences, ludic experiences, coercive experiences and so on.

This isn’t the same thing as the blog post of the same name — though some of that material will be the first few minutes. Instead, it’s an attempt to synthesize understandings coming from different quarters about what games can be and what they can mean, and how they can be and mean. I am sure that there will likely be some stuff in there to annoy people from every faction! 🙂

Most importantly, though, I want to focus back in on craft. Craft seems like it is often the forgotten root of all these approaches. Whether you are trying to make games that are personal, pure experience, narratively centered, systemically driven, emergent, linear, abstract, or Dadaist, there is always the how underlying it all. And “how” is interesting, because there’s what works for you the creator, and what works for a given audience, and in a very real sense, as creators we don’t get to quarrel with what the audience likes or accepts. It is always up to them whether to listen to what we have to say.

So this talk is going to be about how as much as I can make it… about the raw tools that might help a designer in their goal of making either a polished AAA experience or a raw emotional outpouring.

Hope to see you there!