GameCamp and Tabletop talks now up

I have posted up the two talks I delivered last month. Sorry for the delay, but I caught something while at the first event, and have only shaken it right around… now, believe it or not. Four weeks of intermittent fever, coughing vehemently, and generally feeling unable to do much of anything.

One, entitled “Tabletop Game Grammar,” was a talk at the inaugural Tabletop Network event, a game design conference centered specifically on tabletop games. It was held at the lovely Snowbird ski resort, at a high elevation (we went up to the peak after the event, it was around 11,000ft high). This talk is centered on applications of game grammar to boardgame design, including a working through of how the addition of new resources creates the different variants of poker.

I had a great time at this conference. I don’t really attend boardgame events other than local design workshops and the occasional local UnPub event, and I lack a regular gaming group here at home. I also don’t play a hundred games a year, like many of my friends do — they all seem to have a far wider range of references than I do when discussing boardgame design! But I’ve been doing a lot of tabletop design over the past few years, and finding that many of the lessons from the game grammar work and from years of doing videogame design definitely apply across the boundary. I took several prototypes with me, and now have hopes that some of them may actually be published someday. It was great to make new friends such as Isaac Shalev, designer of Seikatsu among other games (he had a great prototype of a game about running a tour bus company in Israel), and to catch up with old friends such as Jose Zagal, Jeff Ward, Geoff Engelstein, Soren Johnson, Scott Rogers (who had a new game out!, and of course the organizer of it all, Tim Fowers.

I was at home for about three days, then departed for France! It was my first time there, and I got to spend a lovely day and a half walking all over Paris (around 12 miles in a day… I kept humming this song under my breath the whole time). Then it was off to Lille to give a keynote at GameCamp.fr titled “From 1 to n: Multiplayer Game Design.” This talk was an overview of multiplayer game design patterns, mashing up material from my older talks on social mechanics and the newer work on the Trust Spectrum.

My old friend Thomas Bidaux was there too, and helped me navigate far more French than I was quite comfortable with. I actually did give an opening paragraph of my talk in French, but I am incredibly rusty and have lost most of my vocabulary (though apparently my accent is still decent). I got to hang out a bit with Noah Falstein and Cassandra Khaw, but illness kept me from doing quite as much as I had hoped.

It’s really unfortunate that the tradeoff for all this wonderful travel was a month of illness. 🙁