I’m buried in putting Freeplay together and haven’t really found time to blog, which is a shame because this year has been fascinating for games locally and there’s lots to be said. Luckily, other people have said interesting things which means I can just link to them 🙂
Appearances
Writing roundup and upcoming events…
Emerging from Freeplay, things haven’t particularly slowed down – and digging through my submissions, it looks I missed a few things too.
Upcoming Events…Part 2
At the very real risk of overexposure, I’ll be speaking about my usual mix of games, writing, and Freeplay related stuff at:
The ATOM Screen Futures conference on Sunday 10th July, 12:00 – 1:00
Teaching games and games literacy
While videogames sit firmly in the limelight, there is a whole world of games out there that are more accessible, more easily read, and which teach tangible skills that can feed into digital games and interactive development.
Drawing from a recent Department of Education and Early Chidhood Development research project into teaching games and games literacy, this session will look at games and design from physical and pervasive games, board games, improvisation, experimentation, and design exercises with the aim of separating out the creative skills from the technical and providing a base to support greater games literacy in the classroom – whether or not the final outcome is a digital game or something else.
Monash University’s Computer Games Boot Camp on Thursday July 14th talking about writing for games and indie development.
The next TEDxMelbourne event on the evening of Tuesday July 19th talking about Gaming and Innovation.
VITTA‘s annual ICT Week event at BMW Edge on Wednesday July 27th talking about the changing shape of the industry and what that means for students & careers.
IGDA Brisbane Game On
Recently, I was invited up to Brisbane by their IGDA chapter to speak at one of their Monthly Game On events. It was a pretty open invitation so what I decided to focus on was extending some of the thoughts that I’ve had here about industry, culture, and how the words we use restrict our ability to properly think about things.
Here’s the video. A full copy of the talk – which isn’t really a transcript, but it’s what I wrote to say amidst a flurry of other deadlines – is beneath the fold.
Upcoming events…
Flurry of activity before I disappear into a Freeplay wrangling flurry.
I’ll be running a session at the Emerging Writers’ Festival as part of their Business of Being a Writer Masterclass on Process and Organisation. This event has sold out (hurrah), but there are still tickets available for their myriad other events.
I’ll also be running on of their TwitterFEST sessions on play and the creative process, building on and discussing my piece in The Reader that you can read online here.
Through Freeplay, we’ve also organised a few playful storytelling things with them. Head over to the event on their website or Freeplay to learn more.
Early June, I’ll be up in Brisbane to talk at the IGDA / Creative Industry Precinct’s Game On program. There isn’t much detail on the site, but this is what I’ll be talking about:
The words we use to describe the space we work in – development, industry, culture, community – all describe structures built, either deliberately or as a byproduct of other processes, by people. In the face of a shifting industrial landscape, how can we build new structures that might better reflect how we’d like to live and work, what would the values of such a community look like, and what does it mean to connect with a wider creative, critical, and artistic culture? This year’s Freeplay will explore these ideas – along with many others – but before it does, co-director Paul Callaghan will talk about some of the history and philosophy behind Freeplay, what to expect from this year’s event, and what to think about into 2012 and beyond.
After that, I’m going to be at the Continuum Speculative Fiction and Pop Culture Convention talking games and storytelling. Look out for the launch of their full program here.
And lastly, I’ll be running a workshop with ExpressMedia on Innovative Storytelling as part of their Big Splash series.
The Emerging Writers’ Festival…(& podcasts, interviews, and reviews…)
The Emerging Writers’ Festival just launched their program, so it’s time for the obligatory spruiking blog-post.
I’m running a 2-hour writing for games workshop with Express Media on May 22nd from 2-4. Details here. I’m going to cover the key similarities and differences between games & more traditional media and how to approach the process of games writing.
I’ll also be on the panel ‘Never Surrender’ on May 29th at 1:45.
Never surrender
Writing isn’t all about success stories! Join our writers as they speak candidly about rejection, creative risk-taking and projects that took ten years from creation to publication. Why do they stick with it, and is it all worth it in the end?
With — Paul Callaghan, Elizabeth Campbell, Sean Condon and Dee White. Hosted by Simonne Michelle-Wells.
And 20 minutes before the program launch, I was interviewed for the Arts Alive program about my experiences with the festival and why I think it’s a Good Thing(tm). (Summary: Writers > Readers for inspiration!)
Thanks to Lisa Dempster, I was at last month’s Format Festival in Adelaide talking about writing & technology on the Non-Paper Publishing panel. One of the other speakers, Estelle Tang, recently interviewed me about games writing for the Kill Your Darlings podcast. You can listen to it here.
And lastly, I reviewed The Pleasures of Computer Gaming for RMIT‘s Second Nature Journal. You can read that review here.
NSC Footage
Jessica Citizen and Kingsley Foreman from Games On Net came along to the National Screenwriters’ Conference, taped our presentations & discussions, and wrote an article about it.
You can find the article here, footage of me talking here, and footage from the panel discussion with Jim Shomos & Joe Velikovsky here.