Journal.
Getting Playful
When Robin Hunicke started speaking at dConstruct in September, she began by asking how many of her fellow game designers were in the crowd, and very few hands went up. Her point being that we’re often at conferences talking only to ourselves.
Pixel-Labs’ Toby Barnes has clearly been worrying about the apparent lack of conversation between games designers and their web counterparts too and Playful ’09 at Conway Hall is his response, creating a day of cross-disciplinary frolicking.
Playful isn’t just a very good idea, it’s very well executed and Toby and the Pixel Labs team deserve huge credit for making it happen. From the impressive list of speakers to the packed lunch, it was thoughtfully and generously put together and really good value too. As with any conference, it had its mix of hit and miss, but the hit significantly outweighed the miss. Playful was consistently interesting, challenged its audience and in doing so, provided more than enough food for thoughts to inspire designers of all hues.
Photography credit: Toby Barnes, Playful programme poster by Rex Crowle.
As you’ll see from the running order above, Playful packed a lot in, but didn’t suffer from it. I’ve picked out just a few of the speakers, the ones that said the stuff that resonated most for me.
Rex Crowle has to get a mention, not so much for what he said, but the spirit in which he said it. His hugely inventive presentation really captured the spirit of ‘fun’ in play that ran through the day. And you really can’t ever get enough people presenting with overhead projectors at conferences. A very welcome break from the Helvetica monotony.
Kareem Ettouney is art director at Media Molecule and, in a slide — and quite possibly note — free presentation, had a lot of good things to say about ways of working and the collaborative process. Key amongst them was the importance he placed on having pet projects as a means of self-expression (something I can really identify with) . It’s these projects, he argued, that give you objectivity outside of the day-to-day work. There’s always a reason not to do them, he said, but ‘I don’t have time’ just isn’t good enough. Without these outlets for creative expression outside of the normal working routine, you end up with ‘jaded, angry people’. His other main line centred on the need to move away from what described as ‘the Da Vinci model’ of a single creative visionary handing off the menial stuff to pupils – the talent, he said, is simply too great these days for that to be workable: people become frustrated, resentful and the work suffers from not making the most of those talents. Instead, he said, creative fulfilment really can come out of collaboration, and sharing in the creativity of others. It was great to see an art director with the confidence and lack of ego to let go and trust in others.
Katy Lindemann focused her talk on ‘fun drives change’. She had some great examples, and here’s one of them, TheFunTheory.com changing behaviour through fun.
But another of Katy’s examples left me a little frustrated. A robot that enabled messages to be delivered direct at Westminster was a great piece of engineering, and an imaginative way of involving the disaffected or disinterested, but for me, the difference wasn’t drawn between ‘response’ and ‘impact’. So, in the Westminster example, some really touching examples of messages from children were shown, but no sense of whether MPs even saw them, let alone acted upon them. If the data is there, I really would love to see it.
I was really looking forward to hearing Russell Davies, having heard The Divine Miss N rave about him, and wasn’t let down. Russell was fabulous in a talk that concentrated on a much neglected aspect of game-playing: pretending. It’s not just games, but a whole manner of everyday products, that use pretending as part of their appeal. Breitling’s excruciating ‘I am a fighter pilot’ nonsense being a watch-through-your-fingers example. Russell was one of a few speakers to reference foursquare as a game, interesting to see how much interest there is in it at the moment, though I was a little surprised to be one of relatively few using it amongst the crowd at Playful.
And lastly, Simon Oliver at HandCircus spoke about the need for simplicity over complexity. Fun, he said, lies in making complex things easy to do. He powerfully illustrated the problem with a collection of images of games controllers over the years, from joystick and single button, to the Playstation and Xbox’s complex and – as he pointed out – rather intimidating controllers today. Hope is at hand however, literally.
The iPhone, he said, was doing much to bring simplicity back. Anyone who has a small child can testify to this – they just ‘get’ the touch screen, learn how to interact with it. Simon’s slide might have stated that 3 year olds are playing iPhone games, but he can half that based on my own experience. I was taken too, by Simon’s points about using prototyping to discover fun and playfulness.
That’s just my highlights – I know others will have taken very different things from the experience. There was a lot to get interested in from Playful. It was — appropriately — fun.
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