Keynoting EVA 2013 in Argentina

 Posted by (Visited 5959 times)  Game talk
Sep 192013
 

evalogoI am off to Argentina this November, to speak at EVA 2013, put on by ADVA, the Argentine Game Developers Association. I fly back just in time to get to GDCNext immediately after — won’t even stop at home. It should be an exhausting week of travel.

This is the talk I’ll be giving:

El mundo de sistemas

La definición clásica de “juego” siempre ha involucrado la noción de un “sistema” – un sistema mecánico, de retos y oponentes y matemática. Hoy en día vemos más y más juegos que son informados por nociones muy diferentes: la poesía del narrativo, el “duende” de la experiencia. Esto sucede a la misma vez que el mundo nos está revelando sistemas de todas clases, y las grandes corporaciones nos están metiendo en más sistemas diseñadas para mantenernos clientes. Es un mundo informado por los juegos – así que nos toca a nosotros, los diseñadores de juegos, entender el rol de nuestra obra, cuando a decir verdad tenemos poco entendimiento de los sistemas que nosotros mismos hemos creado. En esta charla hablaré de mis experiencias creando sistemas de juegos los cuales yo mismo no entendía, las responsabilidades que solamente los juegos pueden tomar, y del futuro en el cual fuimos nosotros los jugadores y diseñadores de juegos quienes educaron a la niñez.

The systemic world

The classic definition of “game” has always involved the notion of “a system” — a mechanical system, of challenges and opponents and math. These days we see more and more games that are informed by very different concepts: the poetry of narrative, the “duende” of experiences. This is happening just as the world is revealing to us all sorts of systems, and the big corporations are embedding us in more systems designed to keep us consumers of their products. It is a world shaped by games — and so it falls to us, the game designers, to understand the role our work plays, when we honestly don’t have a good grasp of the systems we ourselves have created. In this lecture I’ll talk about my experiences creating game systems that I myself didn’t understand, the responsibilities that only games can shoulder, and of the coming future in which it was we, the players and game designers, who educated the world’s children.

And yes, I am going to do it in Spanish… I need the practice. 🙂

I have never been to Argentina, so it will be nice to add another country to the map. I (perhaps naively) expect grass-fed parrillada for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 🙂

  One Response to “Keynoting EVA 2013 in Argentina”

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.