Last stop was the Eurogamer Expo in London. I won’t go into a highlights list as I’m sure the diagram above does a good enough job of summing this up. I’ll admit that I’ve been a light weight this week and was on game/play overload at this point so I’m sure the expo wasn’t just the incomprehensible brown blur of boys, bombs, boobs, blood and guns that I remember.

But what I do remember was the Indie Games Arcade upstairs, providing an eclectic respite and creative safe haven featuring titles such as Joe Danger, Time Fcku, Fig. 8. You can read about more of the games featured and the Indie arcade here (I’m particularly sad I didn’t get to see the responses elicited by the Happening Game, but David’s write up goes some way to consolling this)

Again its a shame that so much was overlapping last week, but on the plus side running up and down the country (okay so only from Nottingham to London) to events made it feel like the country was buzzing with excitement and love for games and I only hope this feeling lasts.

And on the 3rd day Marie uprooted from the Midlands and journeyed down to London for Playful 09. And it was good.

Highlights (in order of how legible my notes where)

+ Free red liquorish rope at registration

+ Kareem from Media Molecule talking in regards to managing a creative business/team by incorporating ideas of ownership, responsibility and encouraging personal projects.

+ Robin Burkinshaw talking about the history of Alice and Kev

+ @stml calculating the odds of Christ’s resurrection at 96 billion to 1, then going on to present his analogue matchbox computer that takes on players at noughts and crosses.

+ Learning via Russell Davis that the world’s largest model railway is in Hamburg (I <3 model villages & railways)

+ @rexbox ’s retro projector presentation  (took me back to sitting at the front of assemblies at primary school and having to move the hymm sheets up and down  and usually back to front).

+ The way the lights reflected on the balloons at the end of the day creating evil smiles. Can’t find a photo to adequately demonstrate this so here is a doodle I did during the day.

Combined cooing over Steph Thirion’s games mod workshop and layer tennis over the past few weeks got me thinking about a project I’m looking into running that sits halfway between the two.

Currently lacking in a catchy title, the basic gist is a chain processed game/interactive art. Starting with an original (but basic) games code in Processing- this would then be passed along a chain of X people who would each make X number of changes to the code before passing it onto the next person and so on until it gets to the end and we’re left with some weird mutilated but (potentially) beautiful evolution of interactive art/ game.

Of course there are a lot of variables/ issues I need to work through before moving ahead (such as what happens if the code breaks, how many people to pass it through, what constitutes a change etc…) , and it was great to be able to talk through the idea and issues with some of the guys form FizzPOP on Weds eve who pointed out two main things,

1) Why just send the code through a linear chain, and instead allow it to branch out (e.g. one person passes on the code to two people and so on)- this way if the code breaks it doesn’t matter too much as it will naturally continue along another branch- (such a simple and good idea that I’m hitting myself for not thinking of it)

2) The original code Thirion used for his workshop was  ‘over engineered’ to provide it with the hooks that allowed non coders to adapt and change the game: e.g. you didn’t need to write the code to create multiple balls as it was always there waiting to be adapted’. This point was quite a hard one for me, as it left me with two options,

a) If the code is over engineered, then by doing so I’m potentially enforcing limits on the designs evolution – and also limiting the projects scope.

b) but if I don’t, then how accessible would the code be to those with little to no coding experience (and yes I do want to include these people within the chain).

hmmm well a little pondering on the way home allowed me to justify route a- because in creating any game a designer already enforces the limits of what a player can do- and this could also apply if I considered the processes of adapting the code as a game within itself. But also by spreading out when people with and without coding experience interact with the code then someone with experience might actually add new hooks/ code that we hadn’t even been considered at the beginning and those with no experience can move forward and evolve the code using these.

Does all this make sense? Well it does in my head, which for the time being is what matters. But I’m hoping to do some testing of this over the coming weeks with help from the people at FizzPOP (fingers crossed). But if you have any thoughts, interest then please drop me a line- and if you are s**t hot with Processing and might be able to help code the starting ‘game’ then I’d be super interested in hearing from you.