Day 2 - in which I gave my talk, learned about Ingress and about Project Tango, and met old friends at the View.
Josh McCoy was kind enough to come earlier to the conference in the morning so that I could practice the talk with him one last time before giving it. When done, we went to listen to Gillian and Jane who were giving a run-through of how one can make sure to be inclusive and allow for diversity when teaching games. It was a great talk, both practically showing how one can go about it, and reasoning about it.
My talk was about how to use AI based Game Design in teaching [Description of talk]. I have put resources connected to the talk, as well as the slides, on a Google site: [Computational Expression 5 ECTS]. It felt particularly nice to be able to show examples of games made by my excellent students.
In the afternoon I saw two talks that in retrospect were some of the more interesting this time around at GDC. John Hanke gave a talk on the alternate reality game (ARG) Ingress, showing how it is now played in more than 200 countries. It was interesting to see how they cleverly assembled various streams of narratives through different channels, and to se that now, finally, it seems like ARGs are becoming massive.
There was a similar notion of 'Finally' when Noah Fahlstein presented project Tango and other AR and VT technologies in his talk on Transmogrified Realities. It appears that we can look to develop things for VR that can actually be presentable to users within the next five year period. I signed up for the Project Tango dev kit. It felt wonderful to be able to do so, that I now will have a kind of life where I can carve out time to play with new technologies. I would like to just make a simple experiment: populate our house with huge sleeping cats. One can only see them through a device, but once seen, one knows that they are there, and one can nap in proximity.
In the evening I checked out the Maltese Falcon display at John's Grill, which is close to the hotel where I am staying. Dashiell Hammet did some of the writing of the famous novel right there. Later in the evening I met a large group of friends. Some of them played a board game about quilts. They earned buttons.
