The dutch Festival of Games this 2009 had quite some interesting keynotes. Here are the highlights of the most interesting keynotes and what I learned from these… and others!

NOTE: I haven’t been to all presentations because most of them run simultaneously, therefore I might have missed some interesting ones… Hmpf!

Evert Hoogendoorn – Exploring games as Performance
During this presentation, Evert told us about his vision of games: games are not only about fun, games are about aesthetics, about exploration, curiosity, social needs, etc. Players can even be your game, where the behavior of a player can be seen as the input. What this means is that theater performances can also be games, and what Evert shows us next are some examples of performances as games: an hotel where people book a room that has a roof with a mirror in which you can see other people, looking at you and staring at other people, with no idea of who is an actor, with people climbing over the walls going from room to room… Or another example where a few players go out to the streets and try to connect two objects with people, holding hands, where random people from the streets have to close the line in order to get those objects connected.

These examples show that performances can be a game. Evert ends by saying that analyzing human behavior can learn us how to create these aesthetics and make fantastic performances; as games!

Jeremy Bernstein – Procedural Rhetoric
Although the name of his presentation is rather unknown and confusing (it refers to games as persuasive coded models with a set of potential outcomes), the point he was making in his presentation was rather clear: mechanics can create emotions. He talked about Battlestar Galactica, the board game, which had mechanics that created strong emotions for him and the people he played with. With mechanics like lack of resources, not knowing who your ally or enemy is, being in the minority AND having to sacrifice human lives even though there are already so few of them, the game created feelings such as despair and paranoia. In Left4Dead, mechanics such as lack of ammo and lack of health and being able to give these resources to each other created a feeling of dependency. In Dead Space, a player needs to pull his weapon before he can shoot, and because Dead Space is a horror game and enemies can surprise you any second, you keep your gun constantly pulled and this results in a player feeling more tension than any other shooter. Other examples Jeremy named included mechanics that created feelings such as hope, pressure, fear, etc.

He ended his presentation by asking us, “Can we create mechanics that make us feel Love? Joy? Etc.” and we all knew his answer was ‘YES!’, but how, that remains the question…

Jonathan Samel Baskin – From Branded Games to Games as Brand
Jonathan began his presentation with his view of brands and advergames. Brands are broken: people don’t believe in the lies and stereotypes brands are trying to tell us and advergames aren’t going to help that because they tell us the same story with the same low persuasion. So why not brands as games? No manuals – games to learn how to use their products. No more static profiles – more interactivity between brand information and its users. A brand as a game easily has a story that makes the users think of the brand and let the brand make sense, e.g. a tie with a blue label costs more than a tie with a red label. Games can make people loyal, e.g. ‘collect Douwe Egberts points for rewards’. Gamers can make people learn about terms and rules that so far almost nobody is reading, e.g. games can let people understand differences in insurances, for example.

Jonathan ends by almost begging us to pick this up, because “Tomorrow’s brands will be games!”

Elan Lee – Playing with Reality
Elan starts by stating games are like a magnet: they can pull, push or charge people. When you consider these three things in your game design, you can create games that would appeal to almost anyone. The following movie explains what Elan means exactly with pull, push and charge.

The rest of his presentation is mainly about his successful games and how they eventually worked out. The only design tip he gave was that rewarding players randomly and in public is the best reward you can give your player. During the question round, Elan admitted that not all of his games and experiments worked, but for game designers it is all about not giving up. Charging people is mainly done by making a catching game in which people have the space to be creative but also giving you input on things that did not work in your game. You never know where your game ends.

Elan ends with showing us his favorite video on the entire Internet. This is a metaphor for how we game designers should never stop trying.

…and the rest

One thing I noticed at the Festival of Games 09 was the developers trend of finding and making new input devises to expand the gaming market. Small game companies such as Soepel, Monobanda, Monodomo and Fourcelabs showed new ways of interacting with their systems. Other keynotes such as Adrian Hon’s keynote about stories in games were highly biased and not very informative, Adrian saying that people don’t know what good stories are and mixing stories and interaction is hard (oh really?). He did have some good points of how to improve the stories in our games: not letting the technical barrier influence your story, not letting the players make the story (because it’s (almost) never going to be ‘the best’), getting the interface out of the way to let the player focus more, etc.

A more scientific keynote was about what causes eye strain. The conclusion was that you can reduce eye strain by using colors that appear a lot in nature, use less busy images (images with a high spacial frequency), avoid flickering, do not use high contrast and avoid repetitive patterns. What was also interesting was the research about text and readability, where the speaker showed us that some fonts read much faster than others because of the amount of vertical space they use, and that text with a colored filter is read 25% faster because of the contrast between the characters and the background. Game designers can use this information and apply it to their games to make the eyes less busy and let the experience of the game be more the way you want it.

A few keynotes were about the game industry, but they all concluded something like this: The game industry is changing and it’s audience is growing rapidly. The companies that are already big are going to get bigger and there are going to be even more smaller companies then ever before. If your company has a good business model and you have a small core team, your company is totally going to rock!

Japan also sent some people to the Netherlands, with a guy from the latest Naruto development team explaining why his game was so awesome and how well they though of everything and stuff… In Japanese. And 70% of their team are artists. And a very friendly guy from a university in Japan where they train their students to be production slaves. And yeah, ‘design’ is not what they study there, it’s just art or programming.

And then there was this guy from Jagex, saying something like ‘we’re just doing stuff and we’ll see how it all works out for us‘. And some guys from Little Chicken actually hacking some game during their presentation, screaming for better ways to protect our flash games.

And the project fair and career fair… Some universities still don’t know how to make good games… That IPhone app built in 15 weeks? (Whahahahahaha)

And I got free lunch every day. How awesome!

I had a fantastic time and it was definitely worth the investment! See you at FoG2010!