Teaching to Fish: Sweden Game Conference

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Sep 192015
 

Slide15I had a great time in Sweden, despite the fact that there did not seem to be a canonical way to pronounce the city was in (Skövde — sort of hghuheffdduh-ish, but depending where I was in the country, it was also hgheffduh, hghuffda, and a few others).

The talk I gave, put together after some rather late nights with boardgames and beer (well, hard cider in my case), was called “Teaching to Fish.” It had to work as a joint keynote for both the Sweden Game Conference, which was a typical industry conference, and the smaller VS-Games conference for serious games academics.

I ended up doing a bit on game grammar, but focusing more on the fact that given the breadth of the field, it is important that practitioners know what sort of thing they are making, and use the right tools for the job. And that they take their field seriously, study the relevant literature from both games and the countless other disciplines that interact with and impinge upon games.

A lot of the audience was students; I was told afterwards multiple times over that I might have scared half of them right out of the course of study. I was asked two questions at the end, and one of them was “so, since learning all that is impossible, what then?” more or less, to which I answered “it’s not impossible, I did it.” That was followed by a question from Rami Ismail basically designed to force me to prove it, asking me to list of some relevant books; so I gave title and author recommendations for each of the fields in the slides — more like twenty than the requested five. 🙂

Besides Rami, I also got see old friend Lee Sheldon and Mike Sellers, and make many new ones. I learned a lot about the Nordic LARP scene, which is utterly fascinating. Tommy Palm (formerly King, now doing VR) and Ben Cousins and David Goldfarb (now at new studio The Outsiders) were kind enough to host me for meals on the last day as I attempted to sightsee Stockholm on foot. Twelve miles, one blister, and I had managed to walk most of the core of the city in the rain, visiting museums, tourist traps, and sites from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Slides for the talk are here. It was filmed, and I imagine that at some point I may get a link to that to share it with you. For now, you will have to make do with a parable about fish with a couple of bad puns. Well, one REALLY bad pun, a few middling ones, and one fairly decent one.

  13 Responses to “Teaching to Fish: Sweden Game Conference”

  1. Ernest Adams says:
    September 19, 2015 at 5:24 pm

    I’ve been going there for over ten years. I still can’t pronounce it. Fortunately, they don’t care.

  2. Sebastian Bularca says:
    September 20, 2015 at 3:12 pm

    Hi,

    Thanks for talk Raph. My photos from the conference, including your talk, can be found here – http://gsp.sebastianbularca.com/Sweden%20Game%20Conference%20-%20Coverage/index.html

    We will let you know when the video will be up.

  3. Daniel Ström says:
    September 21, 2015 at 12:56 am

    Thanks for a great talk! And don’t worry about the pronounceation, like Ernest said nobody expects you to get it right. Maybe if you come here every years for 20 years or something.

  4. Gamer Supply Drop says:
    September 22, 2015 at 2:35 am

    This seemed like great fun, I’ll be honest!

  5. 9/21/15 – Ten second interesting, Learning to fish, a Prototyping mindset, Focal point and Compass UI Design | Game Design Digest says:
    September 22, 2015 at 4:58 am

    […] Teaching to Fish : Sweden Game Conference : Raph’s Website […]

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