tobestobs / collective / tags / games

Tagged with “games” (7) activity chart

  1. Making Friends: On Toys and Toymaking

    Toys are not idle knick-knacks: they allow us to explore otherwise impossible terrain; fire the imagination; provide sparks for structured play. They do not just entertain and delight; they stimulate and inspire. And always, they remind us of the value - and values - to be found in abstract play.

    Toymaking is not an idle habit. Toys are a fertile ground for creators to work in. They offer a playful space to experiment and explore. They are a safe ground to experiment with new techniques, skills, or ideas. Though they emerge from no particular purpose, they expose purpose and meaning through their making. Toymaking ranges from making realistic simulations of life to producing highly abstract playthings. And everyone who makes things - out of paper, wood, metal, plastic, or code - has something to gain from making them.

    Trying to draw a thread through what, it turns out, has been a lifetime first shaped by toymaking, and then spent making toys in idle moments, Tom will take in (amongst other things) woodwork, Markov chains, state-machines and fiddle-sticks, to examine the values of toys and toymaking to 21st-century creators.

    http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/armitage/

    Tom Armitage is a game designer at Hide & Seek. He’s also a hacker in the true sense of the word, wrangling code to create a Twitter account for Tower Bridge and print out eight years of links.

    He writes on his blog Infovore (and elsewhere) about code and play. You should read it. It’s excellent.

    He also talks about games, technology and social software.

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct 8 months ago

  2. Pixels, People, and Play

    Seb is known for large scale installations and events that bring people together using technology, like his interactive digital fireworks, glowstick voting, and PixelPhones - a system that connects all the smart phones together, turning each member of the audience into a single pixel of a huge pulsating display.

    Hardware and software is evolving so fast that creative coders can barely keep up, and we’ve just scratched the surface of what depth sensors, projectors and smart phones are capable of.

    In this down to earth session, Seb will explore how technology can create huge interactive playful events and encourage a sense of community rather than everyone having a private experience with their own screens.

    http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/lee-delisle/

    There’s a good chance that you’ve seen Seb before: he travels the world spreading his infectious enthusiasm for coding and teaching others how to join in the fun. He’s one of those technology-agnostic creators. He used to do a lot of work in Flash. These days he’s more likely to be using JavaScript or Processing or Corona or whatever cutting-edge technology has currently got him all excited.

    Lest you think that Seb dabbles only in the realm of pixels, he has been known to use the physical world as his canvas too, making digital fireworks and projections with Processing.

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct 8 months ago

  3. Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place

    The games industry has cracked it: the holy grail of stickiness. Games’ inherent playfulness has built Pong from a bedroom coder’s conundrum into a multi-billion dollar industry. But ask a game designer about the human-computer interaction or the user interface design in their AAA title, and they’ll think you’ve gone mad.

    Is successful playful design a magic art kept within game development studio cabals, or is it something that people on the outside can apply - to great returns - to their social media?

    http://2008.dconstruct.org/podcast/

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct one year ago

  4. Reality is Plenty

    Lately, Augmented Reality (AR) has come to stand for the highest and deepest form of synthesis between the digital and physical worlds. Slavin will outline an argument for rethinking what really augments reality and what the benefits are, as well as the costs.

    Rather than considering AR as a technology, we will consider the goals we have for it, and how those are best addressed. Along the way, we’ll look at the history and future of seeing, with a series of stories, most of which are mostly true.

    AR may be where all this goes. But how it gets there, and where there is, is up for debate. This is intended to serve to start or end that debate, or at a minimum, to bring the conference to a close by pointing at the future, perhaps in the wrong direction.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kevin-slavin

    Kevin Slavin is the Managing Director and co-Founder of area/code. He has worked in corporate communications for technology-based clients for 13 years, including IBM, Compaq, Dell, TiVo, Time/Warner Cable, Microsoft, Wild Tangent and Qwest Wireless.

    Slavin has lectured at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Parsons School of Design, and has written for various publications on games and game culture. His work has received honors from the AIGA, the One Show, and the Art Directors Club, and he has exhibited internationally, including the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst.

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct one year ago

  5. The Transformers

    When you think of a city, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most likely it is the stuff that it is made up of: its streets and buildings, its parks and squares. But what sets a city apart, aside from its architecture, is how all that stuff is put to use. A city’s nightlife, a city’s cuisine, a city’s culture. In other words, what people make of the space they live in when they are at play.

    Play isn’t limited to the ‘soft side’ of urbanism. In fact, it turns out a building isn’t some prefixed structure capable of doing one thing only. Adaptation and reuse continuously transform what a city’s architecture is for, often from the bottom up. In this way, a city’s people shape their homes as well, quite literally.

    What is at work in this process of city transformation, is nothing less than play. In cities, just as in games, people and the space they inhabit shape each other. Thus, in our Western cities, where reuse is overtaking construction of new space, we are all becoming architects.

    In this session Kars looks at how game culture and play shape the urban fabric, how we might design systems that improve people’s capacity to do so, and how you yourself, through play, can transform the city you call home.

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/kars-alfrink

    Kars Alfrink is ‘Chief Agent’ of Hubbub, a networked design studio for applied pervasive games. Hubbub works with organizations to create games that take place in public space, engage people physically, and are socially relevant. Amongst other things, these games are used to encourage good citizenship and to facilitate cultural participation.

    Besides this, Kars teaches at the Utrecht School of the Arts, where he mentors students who are pursuing a Master of Arts in Interaction Design or Game Design & Development. He is also the initiator and co organizer of ‘This Happened’ — Utrecht,a series of lectures dedicated to the stories behind interaction design.

    In his spare time, Kars practices a traditional Japanese martial art, and tries to keep up with geek culture.

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct one year ago

  6. The Full Stack of Entertainment: Storytelling, Play and Code

    Forget transmedia. Forget alternate and augmented realities. Forget multimedia magazines, tablets, phones and puzzling QR codes. Our challenge lies in figuring out the full-stack of entertainment, designed from the bottom right to the very top: for phones, physical objects—part of the Internet of things or otherwise—tablets and conventional computing devices, where art, code and design mesh together perfectly with directorial vision.

    These teams producing our next generation of entertainment are right at the heart of Steve Jobs’ placing of Apple at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. Where did they come from, how are they evolving entertainment and how are they making storytelling, play, code and technology sing?

    http://2011.dconstruct.org/conference/dan-hon

    Dan Hon is a Creative Director at Wieden Kennedy in Portland, OR, where he works on the intersection between storytelling, games, play and code. A former lawyer, he’s worked for Mind Candy helping to build their first product, Perplex City, and co-founded Six to Start, an award-winning entertainment production company in 2007. He’s most known for being passionately for, and against, ARGs. He does not play World of Warcraft anymore.

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct one year ago

  7. Loving Your Player With Juicy Feedback

    The games we love also love us back — mostly, by reflecting our successes and failures in delicious ways. This talk will explore the concept of feedback in game design, using examples drawn from both personal & professional experience. We’ll examine a variety of feedback mechanisms (good and bad), and discuss how lessons drawn from these examples can be applied to any user experience.

    http://2009.dconstruct.org/schedule/robinhunicke/

    Robin is a Game Designer and Producer who specializes in new IP aimed at reaching new players. Her titles include MySims and Steven Spielberg’s BAFTA award-winning BOOM BLOX franchise — both made for Nintendo Wii. She recently joined thatgamecompany, whose recent Playstation Network releases Flow and Flower are celebrated for their beauty, whimsy and zen-like economy of action.

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    —Huffduffed by dConstruct 3 years ago