We’re being supported by a bunch of right incredible folks this year, I’ll tell yer. Each one is doing their own little bit to help make Playful ‘09 bigger, better, and healthier than last year. On the subject of health, let’s talk lunch…

At Playful ‘09 we’ll be doing something like last year – good wholesome cobs in a good wholesome bag courtesy of the tremendous Wooley’s. However, whereas last year it was a mad grab n’ dash for the biggest flapjack, this year when you arrive you’ll get a Playful Lunch Pass courtesy of our newest chums at Playgroup. This little beauty will win you a grand Wooley’s luncheon at the tuc-shop. Woo!

Here’s a little info on the folks who’ll be sponsoring this year’s grub:

Playgroup – Creativity through Play

Play helps change perspectives, remove barriers and allows new ways of thinking.

We use play to understand, develop ideas and to generate ingenious creative solutions.

Our expertise includes brand and business innovation strategy, user experience, social media, games, and brand experiences.

We work with clients including; Mercedes-Benz, Unilever, ITV, WWF, BT, Sony and the Norwegian Design Council.

And our awards shelf is brimming:

• FWA Site of the Day – Robin Hood Showdown
• FWA Site of the Day – ITV Demons: The Game
• Webby Peoples Voice: GI Jonny – Integrated campaign to drive HIV Awareness for BBC
• DBA Design Effectiveness Award for BT Business: Internal Communications Category
• 3 Golden Horizon Awards for ITV Demons: The Game

Splendid! Now I’m hungry…

We’ve been working a lot on Playful ‘09 of late, and got a bit over-excited waiting for it to happen, so we’ve elbowed our way in to London Digital Week and created a mini-event (in time and scale of course, never scope) called EAT YOUR GAMES…

Of course, when we say “elbowed our way in” we mean “been invited to”. We’re playful but we’re not bullies. Anyway, the event is on Friday 25th September, will last ONE HOUR, is FREE (put your purse away love) and it’s at Shoreditch Town Hall in London. It starts at 17:00 and finishes at 18:00, and in between will be a talk about digital distribution and the rise of indie development (amongst other things) from Beatnik Games, Hello Games, and Kerb Games.

If you’re a game developer, gamer, digital agency, distributor, or someone who just likes going to things because it’s better than getting rained on, go here to reserve a seat. There’s stuff happening on either side of Eat Your Games as well, so check the London Digital Week Events Timetable to see if there’s anything that tickles your fancy.

We’re running a little competition as well. There’s a free ticket to Playful ‘09 (30th October 2009) for the person who can identify whose beaming bearded smile we’ve used in the Eat Your Games banner featured in this blog post. E-mail your answer to info@thisisplayful.com. First one to get it wins.

Follow us on Twitter for twitter based updates.

www.twitter.com/thisisplayful

Buy tickets here for Playful ‘09, Friday 30th October, Conway Hall, London.

Well that was a shocker. The early bird tickets went in just under 48 hours.
So we are releasing the first 100 full price tickets from tomorrow.

woo hoo.

Early Bird tickets are now on sale. Get them while they are hot.

Buy tickets here for Playful ‘09, Friday 30th October, Conway Hall, London.
 

Playful is a one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. It’s a conference for architects, artists, designers, developers, geeks, gurus, gamers, tinkerers, thinkerers, bloggers, joggers, and philosophers. We look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We want people walking away talking about the nature of games…what they mean to different people inside, on the periphery, outside or miles away from the industry.

Be among the first to know about Playful ‘09 news by keeping up with us on the Playful Blog. Buy tickets here for Playful ‘09, Friday 30th October, Conway Hall, London.

“Whether you were tech-savvy or not, it was an inspiring day.”
- Michelle Bower, Bowerbird Illustrations

“Playful ‘08 was a gas: like Russell Davies’ Interesting crashed head-first into a crowd of games-heads. There were many fantastic talks. Lots of hardware hacking, lots of technology stuff, lots of game theory and ideas, and some completely out of the blue truly awesome, tears-in-eyes stuff.”
- James Wallis, Spaaace

Hot damn. I wish I could go to this…but I’m on holiday, and everyone else is busy. We got this e-mail from Alex Fleetwood last week, so we’ll pass the news on in case you hadn’t heard about it:

“It gives me great pleasure to invite you to the 3rd Hide&Seek Weekender, which is going to be happening at the Clore Ballroom, Southbank Centre, July 31 – August 2.

Personal highlights include Moveyhouse, a ‘recreation’ of a 1969 Claes Oldenburg happening by Andy Field, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a game of competitive and extravagant boasting by James Wallis, and Scoop! an experience which puts you in the shoes of a struggling cable news crew with a licence to improvise. Scoop! is the result of the Playmakers project, a process devised with NESTA & film-maker Ivo Gormley to create a new game for this year’s Weekender.

The full programme is online at HideandSeekFest.co.uk. A huge congrats to Sandpit programmer Holly Gramazio for pulling it all together.

This year’s Weekender is populated entirely with work developed or playtested in the Sandpit, our thriving network of artists, makers & designers who come together every month at cultural venues around London. About fifty bits of work were developed, playtested and refined at the Sandpit over the last year. The conversation has started to take place online as well – at ludocity.org. It’s a unique environment; one which fosters rapid development of new ideas, and encourages everyone – no matter what their background – to get creative. Many of my favourite games of the last year have been devised by people who attended Sandpits as players and were inspired to create their own.

With the support of Arts Council England, we’re then taking a ‘best-of’ programme on tour around the UK. Audiences from Edinburgh, Cardiff, Stratford, Brighton, Bristol, Liverpool, Southend, Nottingham, Sheffield & Newcastle will be introduced to the Sandpit experience; and we’re already building relationships with local artists and extending our network.

So I hope you’ll come down to the Southbank Centre at some point over the weekend, to take part in some of the social games and playful experiences that the community have devised. There’s no Hide&Speak seminar day or VIP event this year – we’ve focused all of our resources on the community – so just come down, soak up the atmosphere and say hi!”

(CC image by ZeHawk via Flickr.)

We can hardly believe our luck. Little Big Planet designer/Knights of Now creator/Mr. Sim animator/filthy marzipan loving Rex Box has remixed the Playful ‘08 graphics (originally created for us by the lovely folk at Poke) ready for Playful ‘09. You can see the first fruits of his efforts in the new website header, and there’ll be more to come in the poster very soon.

Not only that, but Rex is also coming down on the day to talk about STUFF. We’re not entirely sure what STUFF yet, but it may involve knights, sack boys, or how Media Molecule couldn’t defeat Pixel-Lab at the Guardian Games Quiz in Brighton last week…

Grabbed this photo from Flickr (CC credit to Jim Linwood) where it said, quite rightly, that Conway Hall is “a landmark of London’s intellectual, political and cultural life.”

It’s a fantastic building, and a perfect home for Playful. So we’ve booked it again, for Friday October 30th 2009. The ladies who run it are lovely. Hopefully the Wi-Fi will be a bit better this year…

Is three months long enough to feel nostalgic about something? Probably not, but we’ve been feeling a bit of it whilst going through the videos from Playful ‘08. How come it’s taken 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 ‘09. In actual fact we’ve been planing it in our heads since the minute Playful ‘08 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 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 are 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 ‘09.

James Wallis @ Playful:Game Design London 2008 from Richard Birkin on Vimeo.

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.

• Sign-up on upcoming

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…