Is three months long enough to feel nostalgic about something? Probably not, but we’ve been feeling a bit of it while going through the videos we took from the side of the stage on the day. How come it’s took so long? Well, The camera we filmed it on didn’t want to export to our computers, so we had to find another camera. Then there were wires and file format issues, and editing software backwards compatibility issues. We’re not a video editing company, thankfully.
So it’s now that I can say we’ve got some videos up on our Vimeo group. It’s actually been quite useful editing the videos so late on because we’ve just started officially planning Playful 2009. In actual fact we’ve been planing it in our individual heads since the minute the last one finished, but now we’re sharing those ideas. We’ve been thinking about what was good, what was really good, what we’d change and what we wouldn’t. We’ve put together a sponsor pack, and to do so looked through everything people said about the day on Twitter and blogs. Again, distance is a good thing, and reading all that stuff again gave us more and more ideas.
We’re in the process of putting together a questionnaire to ensure that this year will be not ‘just as good’ but ‘way way better’.
“Way?”
“Way!”
Until that questionnaire though, here’s some videos. We hope that, if you weren’t there, you’ll get as much out of them as we got from seeing the talks on the day and that you’ll join us later this year for Playful:Game Design London ‘09.
Iain Tait emailed us to tell us about this great event in Brighton on Wednesday December 10th (8pm-10pm) - £5 App Meet
A meet-up for programmers, web developers and designers to discuss and showcase their “£5 apps” - lightweight software created by one or two people who take a simple idea and run with it.
For the first talk Aleks Krotoski will be talking about Spaceship (http://www.toastkid.com/Spaceship.html) a “text adventure built by the collective hivemind of The Guardian gamesblog’s community”.
Then there’ll be several demos (along the lines of previous DemoCamps), but with a gaming theme. If you’ve got a game (or something game-like) you’ve built that you’d like to demo and talk about for 5-10 minutes mail the organisers at demo AT fivepoundapp DOT com.
We here at Pixel-Lab are hoping to come down, but it is a long way for us (all the way from Derby and Nottingham). The night is being sponsored by mobile design agency Ribot, a team of splendid chaps who I actually want to have a chat about what they’re doing with gestural interfaces on the Android platform and whether they might have anything to say at Playful ‘09…
Roo Reynolds has done a full write up of the day here. At this rate, you should be able to combine all of these threads together and construct a near perfect reconstruction of Playful ‘08 in your head.
Yes. Yes you can. While working on ‘other things’ we’re also trying to keep track of all the post-Playful chatter/blogging/uploading etc. So far the feedback all over the web has been wonderfully positive. Sadly, I could only find one reference to people being really polite. So, thanks to Twitter’s evidence, the One-Behindmanship award of the day goes to Roo Reynolds.
Of course, it would be too ungentlemanly to accept an award, and stalemate would have to be overcome at the stairs to the stage. So here is a video of Roo rocking Playful with Controller Mate/MacBook/Rock Band Guitar Controller/Wah-Wah pedal:
We’ve sent out personal thankyous by e-mail but we’d still like to publicly shout ‘Ta Very Much’ to all of the speakers from the day. We had the fear, to be sure to be sure, about technology and timings and ‘the order of things’…but our fears proved to be unfounded. Everyone who spoke was so nice and funny and interesting and clever that we could have gone to play darts and it still would have worked out fine. But then we’d have missed a SHED load of inspirational stuff. My Christmas list has doubled in size thanks to Matt Biddulph alone.
Flickr Uploader is working it’s socks off with all the pictures from Playful as I write. Check the Playful Flickr Group to see what it looked like, and start thinking about what you’d like to see next year. We are.
P.S. We’ve had some lovely e-mails from people saying how much they enjoyed Playful. If you have any feedback you’d like to share, send us an e-mail, or pop us a comment on this post or any that follow.
Earlier today we were trying to think of a good game to play at Playful next Friday. Something with a competitive element, but where no-one dies. So it is with great politeness that we present to you One Behindmanship, a game invented by none other than Pixel-Lab’s very own David Hayward.
Instructions will be provided on the day to all who attend, but readers of the Playful Blog can get valuable points on their entrance to the building, or even the tube.
