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.
