Where: Filmhuset, Gothersgade 55 – Bio Asta (in the basement)
When: November 17th 16.30-18.30
Why: Because you are remembered for the rules you break.
Program:
16.30-17.10: Thomas Grip: Evoking Emotions and achieving success by breaking all the rules
17.10-17.30: Lau Korsgaard: Designing social and physical games by breaking the rules
17.30-17.50: Mingling
17.50-18.30: Debate
18.30: More mingling – and beer!
Evoking Emotions and achieving success by breaking all the rules
When creating Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a series of unconventional design choices were made. The game is recognized as being incredibly tense and immersive, yet it breaks many traditional rules of game design. Frictional Games ended up removing fail-states and much of the challenge, all traditionally key devices in a horror title.
This talk will explore these seemingly strange choices, how they came about and how they resulted in a far better experience.
It will also discuss how this kind of thinking extends beyond horror development to other genres as well.
About Thomas Grip (Frictional Games, Sweden):
Thomas Grip has been working as an indie horror developer for over 10 years. He co-founded the independent studio Frictional Games in 2007 and has since then developed four commercial games; three games in the Penumbra series and most recently Amnesia: The Dark Descent, all which have gotten critical acclaim for evoking strong emotions. His primary roles in these productions have been as designer, art director and programmer.
His studio’s latest project, Amnesia, have achieved an especially great success. It is hailed as one of the best horror games ever and have as of today sold almost half a million copies, a vast amount for a small indie company without any financial or promotional back-up.
Designing social and physical games by breaking the rules
Since when did ‘social’ mean a primarily solitary experience clicking cows and crops? – and when did ‘party’ mean two guys with plastic guitars and eyes fixated on the TV screen?
Have social games and party games made us more social and given us better parties? – Or are we designing us down the wrong paths? Lau Korsgaard will showcase some of the award winning work done in Copenhagen Game Collective towards making digital games where player look at, touch and interact directly with each other. The talk shares an attitude and vision behind multiplayer game design that are contrary to and against much conventional ‘game design wisdom’ but might prove important to both mainstream as well as experimental game developers interesting in exploring the ‘social’ aspect of games.
About Lau Korsgaard (Copenhagen Game Collective and KnapNok Games, Denmark)
Lau Korsgaard is co-founder of Copenhagen Game Collective, a multi-gender, multi-national, non-profit game design collective based in Copenhagen. He has been involved in several of the collectives’ experimental games such as Dark Room Sex Game and B.U.T.T.O.N. and showcased games at festivals like Come out and Play, IndieCade and Independent Games Festival. As his day job, Lau tries to make a living as game designer in the independent game studio KnapNok Games exploring new genres of social, physical party games.
About SpilBar:
SpilBar is a bimonthly event, where everyone in or close to the computer games industry can meet and mingle. The meetings always start with a talk and end with a drink.
SpilBar is initiated by Kristine Ploug from DADIU and Thomas Vigild from The Danish Game Council (Dansk Spilråd). SpilBar is organized in collaboration with IGDA, Unge Spiludviklere, Spilordningen, and Computerspilzonen.
Everybody is welcome and no sign-up needed.