December 4, 2007 – AaKoo’s Game Lab

Happy Discipline at Future Play 2007, Toronto

After discussing, tossing and turning, analysing, wiriting, preaching and presenting GameSpace views of casual in several different occasions, we finally made it as a paper called “Casual Games Discussion“. The paper was presented at Future Play conference, Toronto, where we also presented a poster on “Creativity Techniques in Game Design”.

The conference itself was quite fine, except for scheduling. There was no proper time slots for discussion and some keynotes were scheduled as “lunch keynotes” (poor Espen, for example). Organiser really did not want us speak to each others and socialise. As some of the “official” supporters (which name I cannot recollect) phrased game studies as a “happy discipline”, I started to think, if we were nonetheless mistaken as “listening discipline” from the “ADHD discipline” that I would find more descriptive…

Our Gamelab was rather well represented: Frans Mäyrä gave a keynote at Saturday, Jaakko Stenros paper presentation about pervasive games on Thursday and me and Janne Paavilainen about casual games on Friday. Because of the schedule (or other possible reasons that we also acknowledge), we did not manage to get any comments. Poster presentation on “Creativity Techniques in Game Design” was much more discussive success. That was my first academical poster (ever) and I enjoyd it much more than the traditional presentations, I have to say. Only thing that I did not got was that posters were not set all through the conference, instead of few hours (after that we had to remove them). I did not even have time to check posters of others.

Ok, I could say more: there is some stuff about karaoke, sushi, Scandinavian bunch backed with one American, sugar, margaritas, brownies, smokey salt, missing a stop on the subway, and couple of things alike. But to keep it short I end this post here and give you some pictorial material (much more you can find with a search word “futureplay2007” at Flickr, check also Jenny Brusk writing about the presentations of the conference).

NGC 07: Games, Rock and Party!

The University of Oulu and Elvi project organised a game conference in Oulu, titled as Northern Game Conference (NGC) last November. The two-day event included presentations from speakers such as Ernest Adams, Chris McDonough, Erik Robertson and Ilari Kuittinen. Speaches emphasising different parts of game development provided interesting take-outs for GameSpace project as well.

The conference was organized in a very professional manner. The stage looked like a talk-show setting and speakers walked in with their own theme music (Isn’t that cool!?). For example, Ernest Adams was introduced with the Hurriganes tune Get on and Tony Manninen with Guns N’ Roses tune Welcome to the jungle. The whole event was also streamed online.

But even more important: the Thursday party was excellent! We were provided with different sets of entertainment including, booze (of course), rock band playing retro game tunes and Pacman performance. This all happened as a private party in a nice and famous Oulu bar called 45 Special. I have to say that I enjoyed the party, the people and the whole event into the extent that I am really looking forward to the next year. Next time, however, i hope to see also broader “Northern” aspect, not only Oulu game industry. Isn’t the whole Finland north enough? 😉

Compiling the package for GameSpace idea generation study

We initiated our game idea generation study in October by pre-interviewing game designers and alike staff from our industry partner companies. Before the period of travelling between Tampere and Helsinki, interviewing people and presenting the package, I had to finish the final touches on the package. It was important to give the package a touch and feel of a real product to increase the appeal for use and to reduce the threshold for use, so I worked on a coherent visual layout with all the six techniques, instruction book, feedback cards and even the bag itself. The polishing phase took more time than I was expecting and the last piece, the instruction book, was actually delivered to press after staying up from 1pm to 1pm next day. Still a lot of typos and other mistakes were left in the book. One can do only so much.

The Package includes 1001 Game Ideas book, GameSpace feedback cards, materials for five techniques (one technique, Mecano, is only with instructions): VNA, MorF, GameSeekers, GameBoard and PieceBox. Also one commercial technique (Thinkpak) was included into the package.

Check out the contents of the package:

And the introduction slides: