What Happened? [Part 3]

21. Nicholas ‘Feltron’ Felton sent us a message in the early hours of Friday morning with the terrible news that his place had been grounded (he was flying in from New York especially, you see). There was a resounding “bugger” from all of us as he’d been on our list since before Playful ‘08. His Feltron Annual Report get more incredible every year, and we were looking forward to ‘getting off’ on graphs, and laughing. As a consolation prize, Nicholas has been kind enough to upload his presentation for us all to enjoy. Enjoy (zip). Enjoy (PDF).

22. So we moved Rex up to where Nicholas was supposed to be. He didn’t mind. And we presented him with a cake, which made him very happy. Rex did all the drawing for this year’s Playful ‘09 and we wanted to show him how much we love him for it. We also got him an OHP so he could draw his presentation, live. Probably the most original and funny I’ve seen, Rex talked about his love of drawing, and how it doesn’t matter if your drawings look weird. He also talked of selling his flock of sheep to buy an Amiga and getting into game design. If ther was ever one talk I wish I’d got a video of, it was this one. For an inkling of what it all looked like, look at the top of this blog post or go here for more pictures.

23. “Indie game creators live in a world of love,” says Simon Oliver – a man with a smile on his face, and the man behind one of the loveliest, simplest and addictive iPhone games: Rolando. Simon delivered a really refreshing take on game development, about not worrying about GAME DESIGN too much, but mucking around and experimenting and prototyping until you find THE FUN in the idea, and develop that.

24. Tim Wright went on a big adventure, and made me want to go on one myself. He picked out parts of his journey following the route of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped, mapping his journey on the web with GPS, a flip camera, and an iPhone. My favourite bits were the random bits – like the guy who turned up to follow the journey, and ended up riding across a lake in a boat owned by the landlord of a pub, the same pub where, in the book, the protagonist rides across the lake in a boat owned by the landlord. At least, that’s how I remembered it. Tim showed a picture of the guy looking so unbelievably chuffed in a way you don’t see everyday. Marvellous.

25. This is Chris O’Shea’s project called Out Of Bounds. Chris showed us some of his interactive digital art projects, which were duly wowed at by everyone who’d ever wanted e-ray specs. There’s a link here between Russell’s Power Of Pretending and Out Of Bounds. You know it’s not really real, but how big is the part of you that wishes it was?

26. A queue of people wanting to take balloons to the pub with them, and one person wanting a bunch for her Hallowe’en party. Cutting them off and handing them out, I felt like a clown at a party.

27. Going to the pub is always good at the end of a long day where your limbs hurt and your brain is full. Especially when you can talk to the people you only had chance to say a quick “Hello” to while running around a conference. I discovered Budvar ‘Half & Half’, which helps me skip over the inevitable “Oooh, shall I go for Premium or Dark Czech lager?” part of my evening.

And that’s it, I think. My Playful in 27 points. Here are some more folks talking about what they got from the day:

Libby Davy
Suw Charman-Anderson
Roo Reynolds
Leila Johnston
Lawrence Chiles

Also, it’s just occured to me that it would be impossible to recount EVERYTHING that was good that people said on stage, so instead I’m gathering up all the presentations and will find a way to present them on here very nicely…

This entry was posted by Richard Birkin, on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.