Designing a Game Design Event
I was asked to write some kind of a ‘making of’ about the recent game design event, but the truth is there isn’t much to write. I’d say that most important thing was to realize that there is a need for such an event. Game Design best done alone or in small groups for most of the time, yet its crucial to get out once in a while and tell some one about what you’ve been doing. Feedback is extremely important in any design and in games even more so.
So the basic idea was ‘gather somewhere, talk about your games, get comments and give comments’. Luckily we also had the possibility to do some play testing, which was both interesting and seemed to benefit many of the designers. Since play testing is vital for the design process but rather hard to organize (especially if you want to test the game with some one you don’t already know), I found it to be a more important part of the event than I had previously anticipated.
Ok, back to the topic. What I actually had to do was pretty much writing posts and emails, some bureaucracy to get the place booked, and writing the code for the registration. Which I actually managed to botch: since most of the field were left as 45 characters long, many of the fields were not complete. Fortunately it didn’t seem to cause any serious problems at the event.
I was told after the event that we should have informed more widely. I totally agree, but the problem was - and it still largely is - that there isn’t a good place for such information. I think we got the roleplaying scene pretty much covered, the board game community is a bit more vague (although I’d think most board game designers read the forum of the Finnish Board Game Society) and the computer game scene either too industry-oriented or scattered.
So one of the topics discussed was creating more contacts between different types of game designers (and like myself, many are not interested in only one type of a game) and this something I’d like to push forward. What it’d take is a forum geared towards game design in general and some good quality content to attract a steady user base.
Other than the forementioned writing emails and informing, the event mostly set itself up - the main thing were the participants’ games afterall.