Digital Shoreditch 2012 Gaming Talks

Digital Shoreditch is a yearly festival to celebrate creative technology and digital enterprise. This year it will run from 21st May to 2nd June. Also, it’s in Shoreditch.

Sessions are proposed and voted upon by whichever members of the public happen to car enough to click the vote box. Games are represented well with fourteen different sessions currently up for public vote.. Got any interest in gesture-recognition gaming? Or learning if game design is an art, science or secret? Or interested in that dirty word, “gamification”? Head over to the gaming section and vote for your favourite sessions.

Here’s what I thought were the most interesting proposals:

FireFlies – Pollie Barden. “A tagging game that explores temporal memory, and exploits the balance of collaboration and competition.
The action takes place at night. Your first strategic move is the clothing you wear.
Players, wearing Flashing LED badges will compete to see who can steal the most badges from other players.”

Drawing is at the Heart of Game Development – Michael Powell. “It seems counter-intuitive, but traditional drawing skills are ever more important for the games industry, despite the increasing technology. Without drawing, the games industry will not flourish.”

The publishers are dead?! Lessons from digital game distribution – Joost Rietveld. “In this talk I will report on the lessons learned from working with and studying an independent games developer that faced the fundamental choice of self-publishing its content vs. contracting a publisher for marketing and promotion activities. We hear voices from the indie community that the publisher is dead, but is this really the case?”

Game Design: Art, Science, or Secret? – Chris Lowthorpe. “We’re all gamers now. As the full realization of what games can achieve dawns, this sessions asks what is game design? Is it an art or a science? Is there a perfect process, or processes? Should we share our design knowledge in the interests of innovation? Using real-world design examples this talk goes in search of making game experiences better, by design.”

Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement Through Game Design Thinking – Dustin DiTommaso “Over the last year, the practice of gamification has exploded, fueled by marketing hype, media curiosity and spirited debate. While much of the discussion has revolved around extrinsic reward mechanisms as a panacea for customer loyalty and engagement, the most important and effective motivational dynamics of games have been left on the table.”

See the full list of proposals in the Digital Shoreditch gaming section.