I was hardly at the Games for Change conference this year, largely because my sweetie, Karen Sideman, was one of the organizers, and had to be there pretty much for the duration, so I was tasked with getting Simona to and from school, and taking care of her in the evenings.
So this report isn't comprehensive by any means, but snippets of my experiences.
On Wednesday, I was among the judges of the Games for Change 101 pitches. "G4C 101" was essentially a day-long intensive workshop, aimed primarily at people from not-for-profits, to educate them about creating, distributing, and promoting games with social messages; at the end, they broke into groups and worked to come up with a pitch for a game idea. The "judges" wandered about and offered advice to different groups. Each group was given six minutes to pitch the judges, and we then voted on the "best".
John Sharp and I adopted a group working on an environmentally-related title; we thought the concept was excellent, and as the pitches began, John said to me, "We win." We didn't; the idea was good, but the pitch was not. The winner was an idea for a Flash game portraying the problems of waste water treatment during rainstorms, implemented as a time-management title; it was the best -defined- and presented game idea, but by no means the one capable of producing the greatest impact. One possible flaw of this framework: the presenters were mainly non-game people, and the judges primarily game geeks. Naturally, they gravitated to the clearest game conception, rather than the most potentially impactful idea.
On Thursday, the highlight was the "Iron G4C Designer," a takeoff on Iron Chef, of course. Three teams, each wearing headbands of a different color, were asked to design a game on a topic chosen by the audience (in this case, torture), using a "secret ingredient" supplied by the emcees (Karen Sideman and Eric Zimmerman), in this case a t-shirt.
The team led by Brenda Brathwaite chose to try to get across the humiliation of torture by dressing three non-volunteers (Jesper Juul, Mary Flanagan, and myself) in t-shirts, and asking the audience to submit humiliating statements by email, then writing those statements on the t-shirts. Thus, I was shortly standing before the audience wearing a t-shirt saying "I am a big geek poser" (true, sadly). The magic of the Magic Circle protected me, however, and I didn't feel particularly humiliated.
The middle team tried to do somethingorother with a torture victim in a t-shirt and interrogators with scissors, which didn't seem to make a lot of sense, and the third team, led by Frank Lantz, came up with euphemisms for torture techniques (e.g., waterboarding is "water massage for relaxation and open information exchange"). The judges selected them as winners of the challenge.
All good fun, but a fairly incoherent experiment, IMO.
Following was a tedious panel by industry suits on the subject of "Money and Meaning," which, as is typical for panels by industry suits, tended toward the anodyne and upbeat. Sort of "money comes from lots of places! It's all good! All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds!" You know the drill.
The last bit of the day was an "expo" at which a slew of social action games were displayed, some of which I'll be reviewing over the next week or two. At the same time, attendees played a conference game called "Card Sharp," designed by Karen and Eric Z, which involved asking questions of people, collecting business cards for those who answered positively, and putting stickers on the back. By this time, I was on my bike downtown to pick up Simona, however.
On Friday, I didn't clock in until after noon, at which point Frank Lantz and Karen were talking about non-game but game-like stuff of interest and potential starting points for advocacy games (including, oddly enough, 4Chan and the fiction of Terry Pratchett). Following them was Lucy Bradshaw of Maxis, once the industry's most creative studio and now a mechanism for EA to exploit and extend three of its brands, who said obvious things (gamers aren't geeks anymore! games have something to do with play! etc.) at great and upbeat length, which was for me enormously tedious but may have had some utility for the bulk of the audience.
While I was not there, the Knight News Game Award was given to Play the News (more of a prediction market than an actual game, but developed by Impact Games of Peacemaker fame). A "lifetime achievement award" was granted to Gonzalo Frasca's September 12th. Honorable mentions to Tempest in Crescent City and Budget Maze.
