Ah.  A week to go. The to-do list that sits on my shoulder is slowly being ticked off, meaning that Playful 2012 is getting more and more real. That’s exciting, but always a tiny bit terrifying. For me, hopefully not for you.

Here’s a bunch of stuff to know for Next Friday:

LINEUP & SCHEDULE.

There’s a good amount of you and Conway Hall’s registration area is quite small, so don’t leave it until 09:58 to sign in. Help us all out and get in a bit earlier. There’s coffee and that to soften the blow.

09am+
Registration

9:50
Josie Long — Introduction & welcome

10 — 11
Mark Sorrell, Hide & Seek — Computer Games (Not Video Games)
Anab Jain, Superflux  — Faerie Stories for the 21st Century
Hannah Donovan, This Is My Jam — Digital Craft

Coffee break

11:30 — 12.30
Einar Sneve Martinussen, VOY/ AHO — Means of Production
Siobhan Reddy, Media Molecule — Learnings from New Ideas
Simon Cutts, Coracle — Playing with form

12:30 — 1:40
Lunch

1:40 — 2:40
Bennett Foddy — No Pain, No Game: Confusion & Frustration in game design
Aron, Rob, Oli (TechsQuad) — v.01: sound, animation, interaction, narrative and joysticks
Holly Gramazio, Hide & Seek — Clapping Games

Tea break

3:10 — 4:10
Mint Foundry & Alice Taylor, Makie — Toys With Purpose
Tom Ewing, Brainjuicer — The Thinking Behind Decisions
Annette Mees & Ian Williamson, Coney — Making A Talk

This starts off firm and gets looser as the day goes on. We’ll do our best to keep time in order and get to the pub for half four, but you know what these things can be like — everything is subject to change.

SOME THINGS PEOPLE ASK

How do I get there?
Conway Hall is at 25, Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL. The nearest tube is Holborn, two minutes away.

Do I need to bring anything?
You were sent a PDF ticket when you bought one, have that to hand (as print out or on your phone) and it’ll be fine.  Multiple bookings on the same order get sorted out smoothly, so don’t fret.

You can bring your favourite mug for maximum refreshment satisfaction, otherwise, a pen, a pad and your brain are all you need bring.

I actually can’t make it any more. Can someone use my ticket?
That’s a bit of a bummer. You can pass it on to a friend, or let us know via email or twitter and we’ll try to hook you up with someone who can.

What’s the connectivity/wifi like?
It’s getting better, but still pretty sketchy. All that stuff’s a bit distracting if you’re trying to listen to people anyway.

Do you have an Official Hashtag of the Playful Conference 2012™?
Yes, we do. We endorse the use of #playful12 to aggregate your opinions, links and insights garnered from the day across the key social network platforms.

That’s it for now. See you next week, all cheery and forgiving.

Hello, there.

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks, with everyone celebrating all the sports and batshit crazy competitions (Omnium! Tron Fencing! Modern Pentathlon!) of an amazing Olympic games. We’re all sad to see it leave, back to arguing about hobnobs and whether Tom Hardy was doing a Victor Meldrew impression in T’Dark Knight Rises.

To keep our high of good-feeling going, we are excited to fanfare the entrance of a few new speakers waving tiny flags and snapping audience photos on a disposable Kodak camera:

BENNETT FODDY
Bennett is as close as you can get to the Two Face of indie games. By day, he is Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at Oxford University (Ethics of the New Biosciences, since you ask); by night, he is the creator of brilliantly infuriating conceptual games such as QWOP, GIRP and new unicorn fun – CLOP. Games that make you question your ability to actually do anything at all, but laugh all the way through it. Bennett will be talking about how confusion and frustration are core parts of videogame design.

HOLLY GRAMAZIO
Holly designs games. Big games in big spaces, like parks and the city. Stuff that makes you run around and play daft. She will be talking about the long tradition of clapping games — from high-fives to playgrounds and even snazzy tech-enabled ones. You may even learn how to play one, too.

ANAB JAIN
Anab Jain is founder and director of Superflux, a proper whizzing, forward-facing design practice. Anab will be bringing her thoughts from the interaction end of playfulness to the day, and we look forward to finding out exactly what.

TechsQUAD
Rob, Aron and Oli are a collection of technicians with mixed  backgrounds in photography, set design, sound engineering, projection and tea drinking. Based inside Derby’s QUAD Art & Film Centre they will be performing a spiel about ”v.01″ – a combination of sound, animation, interaction, narrative and joysticks.

We are still cajoling and jostling  some more gems, whom we hope to be able to announce fairly soon too. There’s just a handful of tickets left, so it’s probably worth you putting your mouse on this URL and fulfilling your wishes.

As the sun finally sets on an Indian Summer and the cold wind starts to whisper on our whiskers, Playful is only a couple of weeks away.  Now is a good time to warm you with the finalised line-up for this years talking and pointing extravaganza.

Our newest and last additions to an already wonderful line-up are Louise Downe, Emil Ovemar and Pat Cadigan. Some more about them, then:

Louise Downe

Louise Downe is a service designer at Seren, previously at the Tate where she made some pretty playful things including games and interactive installations. From her experiences making mobile and interactive things, she’ll be looking at the role lies and lying have in UX design.

Emil Ovemar

Emil is co-founder and producer at Toca Boca. Coming from an old media world, Emil now makes the finest interactive kids toys going, based on pretending and playful interactions. Emil will be talking about developing Toca Boca and a new approach to Making Things.

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan doesn’t need much of an introduction. She is the ‘Queen of Cyberpunk’, sci-fi author and a leading high-scorer in Chromaroma. We think Pat will be talking about distributed identity, but we’ll wait and see.

Get down to Conway Hall for 9:30ish, bring your favourite mug and then sit back for a line-up that goes a bit like this:

9:50 Toby Barnes — Hello
10:00 Al Robertson — Sci fi as a genre of play
10:20 Matt Sheret — Time Lords, frothing and Dungeon Master
10:40 Georgina Voss — Consent and negotiation in playful and interactive events
11:00 LAYER ILLUSTRATION
11:10 Break
11:30 Sami Niëmela — Cyborgs & superpowers
11:50 Louise Downe — Lies in UX design
12:10 Paul Rissen — MMORPG & linked data
12:30 Brendan Dawes — Playing properly: Interactive design and physical product.
12:50 LAYER ILLUSTRATION
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Marcus Brown — Stories & the middle-age future
14:20 Pat Cadigan — Identity
14:40 Emil Overmar — Designing toys
15:00 LAYER ILLUSTRATION FINAL
15:20 Break
15:40 Richard LeMarchand
15:50 Chris O’Shea — The near future of play on screens and portable devices
16:10 Mills™ Wonka & Neil “Paris Hair” McFarland — Whale Trail™ & game design
16:30 WRAP UP & POINT TO PUB

Sadly, but completely understandably, Anna Pickard will be over in Vancouver launching a game, so won’t be able to take the stage this year.