Completing another round of speaker acquisitions, we are pretty stoked to announce that the following excellence will be performing a talk at Playful this year:
Richard is a Lead Game Designer at Naughty Dog over in sun-drenched California. He is currently up all night and wired all day working on one of the most eagerly-awaited console games of the year — Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Richard is particularly interested in storytelling action games and how narrative, aesthetics and gameplay can keep a player’s attention, whilst making them feel in control. We’re not sure what he’ll be talking about yet, but it will be awesome and you’ll just have to trust us.
Mills™ is King of Succailure™ and CHIEF WONKA™ of the rather brilliant digital design studio ustwo™. Ustwo are responsible for all sorts of mobile app goodies including the .™ series of games, Mouth Off, Nursery Rhyme Story Time, Granimator and shedloads more. Mills™ will be talking about making Whale Trail™ – a wonderfully designed, playable and heart warming iOS game – from the ground-up. ’Ground-up’ being the operative phrase because, in theory, ustwo™ have never actually made a game before.
Anna is a writer. Anna may also be seen as a full-time LARPer: she pretends to be other things for a living. Her current main roles are as the voice of Bertrum Thumbcat on twitter – star of Cravendale’s “cat with thumbs” – and objects like rocks and trees and peat bogs in the MMORPG Glitch. Anna will be talking about what it’s like to write as these playful characters, but also the ways in which people are so happy to engage with things they know aren’t real.
Paul works at the BBC as an Information Architect. This is as a result of a life-long obsession with a time-travelling Doctor and his various companions. Paul’s current work focusses around the Semantic Web, and particularly the development of the BBC’s Mythology Engine. During his talk at Playful, Paul will be applying his thinking about the Semantic Web and linked data to the world of games, in particular Mario, MMORPGs and making it all a bit more fun.
We are down to the final pool of tickets, so don’t be sad on October 21st, get one.
