Week 242

We have been pur­su­ing a project now offi­cial­ly called KEGANI with a friend in New York for the past cou­ple of weeks. We hope to share a bit more about that but with­out giv­ing too much away: we have set our­selves a brief to use our type of game design to tack­le a spe­cif­ic social issue.

I spent most of the week work­ing on AJI and we did a review of what we believe to be the final sprint for the app. We can then final­ly sub­mit it to the app store and reveal some­thing that you can actu­al­ly play with.

We have two work­shops over at CIID’s Sum­mer School pro­gram about play and cre­ativ­i­ty which we think are going to be both very valu­able and fun for those inter­est­ed in these themes. One uses ‘Free to Play’ as a way to think about sys­tems and get into game design. The oth­er is an explo­ration to see what kind of new and unin­tend­ed uses we can get out of “slide­ware” to fur­ther cre­ativ­i­ty and learn about design.

Then at the end of the week Kars was off to Copen­hagen to teach at Miguel Sicart’s play­ful design course. Kars also dropped by CIID to talk about our work­shops there and he caught a screen­ing of work from the exper­i­men­tal imag­ing course giv­en there by Matt Cot­tam and Timo Arnall. From what I gath­er he then had a great time spend­ing his birth­day week­end there as well. We are both rather fond of Copen­hagen and wel­come any oppor­tu­ni­ty to visit.

Mean­while in Berlin the A MAZE inde­pen­dent games fes­ti­val hap­pened as a part of Games Week Berlin. Thorsten and Loren­zo can be proud of their biggest edi­tion yet. It seems to have turned into the go-to event for inde­pen­dent games mak­ers in Europe. Lots of friends from the Nether­lands and beyond were over and I man­aged to attend a cou­ple of talks on Thurs­day morning.