Archive
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop
For two decades, developers took unfinished prototypes to a room at the Game Developers Conference and showed them to their peers. Braid, World of Goo, Portal and Journey were all seen there before anyone could buy them. This domain hosted the workshop’s site, and this page keeps the record of it.
What the workshop was
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop – later run under the names Experimental Gameplay Sessions and Experimental Game Workshop – was an annual session at the Game Developers Conference. Its format was simple and unusual for a professional conference: developers brought prototypes that were rough, unfinished and sometimes barely working, demonstrated them live in a few minutes each, and let a room full of other developers react.
Nothing shown there was a product. There were no trailers, no release dates, and frequently no plan to release anything at all. The point was the idea underneath – a mechanic nobody had tried, a control scheme that should not have worked, a structure that broke a genre’s rules. Sessions were organised loosely by theme rather than by studio or platform, so a student project sat next to work from an established designer.
GDC described it as showcasing games that defy conventions and traditions in search of new genres and ideas, with the stated aim of igniting the imagination of other game makers. That is an unusual thing for an industry conference to make room for, and it is why the session outlasted most of what ran alongside it. GDC marked the workshop’s twentieth anniversary in 2022.
What came out of it
The workshop’s reputation rests on how many of its prototypes turned into games that changed what the medium looked like. A partial list of titles that were shown there before release:
Others shown over the years include Storyteller, Untitled Goose Game, The Witness, What the Golf?, Card Shark and Today I Die. Many more were never finished, which was always part of the point.
The session existed because a prototype shown early to the right room teaches its maker more than another six months of polishing alone would.
The premise the workshop ran onThis domain
experimental-gameplay.org carried the workshop’s public site through the 2000s: the annual calls for submissions, the lists of what had been shown, and the notes organisers posted afterwards. Links to those pages are still scattered across games press, university course sites and developer blogs from that period, which is how most people arrive here.
Those old yearly pages no longer exist as separate documents. Requests for them now resolve to this page, so the links keep working and the record stays in one place rather than behind an archive lookup.
- 2000s The domain hosts the workshop site – submission calls, session line-ups and post-event write-ups, year by year.
- 2022 GDC marks twenty years of the workshop, by then running as the Experimental Game Workshop Showcase.
- 2026 The domain reopens as EXG Gaming, a Minecraft publication. The workshop record stays here at /impact and is linked from the site footer.
Why a Minecraft site kept this page
Minecraft has a feature called Experimental Gameplay. In world creation it appears as the Experiments toggles: switches that turn on features Mojang has built but not finished, with a warning that they may change, break your world, or never ship at all. Players who enable them are doing the same thing the workshop audience did – looking at something unfinished and reporting back on whether the idea holds up.
That is the whole reason this site exists under this name. We cover a game that develops in public, on a domain that belonged to the session built around showing work in public. Keeping the workshop record here is not a formality – it is the part of the domain’s history that explains the rest of it.
The same idea, in Minecraft
The modern equivalent is a switch in the world creation screen. Turning it on puts a warning in front of you first, and the world it creates carries an Experimental tag from then on – because the features behind that switch are unfinished code that can crash, break world generation, or be dropped in a later release. Mojang documents the current behaviour in its support article on the experimental features toggle.
What matters here is not the menu path but the bargain: the feedback Mojang gets from players running unfinished features is what decides whether a feature ships at all. That is the same bargain the workshop asked of its audience twenty years earlier. For the step-by-step version – both editions, both new and existing worlds – see our guide to Experimental Gameplay in Minecraft.
Further reading on the workshop
We have written up the sessions preserved above, and the projects that came out of them, in more detail. These pieces sit in this site’s blog rather than in the archive itself, so the record here stays as it was published.
- The Experimental Gameplay Workshop explainedWhat the session is, how it runs, and the games it showed first
- Braid at the 2006 sessionThe full 2006 line-up, including flOw and a Guitar Hero freestyle prototype
- flOw to JourneyJenova Chen’s student work and the studio it became
- Seven days, one person, one themeThe Carnegie Mellon project behind Tower of Goo and World of Goo
- Narbacular Drop to PortalHow a DigiPen student prototype became a Valve release
- The 2011 session revisitedMaquette, Loop Raccord, Opera Omnia and a live game of Ninja
- The 2015 sessionThumper, Parable of the Polygons and the presentation that stopped the room
- The 2018 line-upBaba Is You, Untitled Goose Game and Noita on the same bill
- The 2019 line-upFourteen entries, from edible games to Hypnospace Outlaw
- Twenty years onWhere experimental design went after the session stopped being the only venue
Corrections and additions
This page is a summary written from public records, not an official workshop document. If you presented at the workshop, organised it, or have material from it – session lists, photographs, slides – we would rather host an accurate record than a tidy one. Send anything you have and we will correct or expand this page and credit the source.
Email [email protected].
Session archive
Posts published on this domain while the workshop was running here – session announcements, line-ups and recaps. Reproduced from the site’s own archive.
2019
EGW took place at GDC 2019
The faculty thanked everyone who submitted and everyone who queued – attendees started lining up an hour and a half before the doors opened. The full recording went up as the GDC 2019 Experimental Gameplay Workshop session on the GDC Vault. The full line-up for the year:
- A collection of edible games and a cookbook by Jennifer Sandercock
- Lucky Me by Mohannad Al-Khatib – be the last person alive in a world where everyone copies your actions
- Lucifer Within Us by Kitfox Games – reconstruct a crime by combining testimonies into a single timeline
- Misshapen by Nicolas Saraintaris and Nicolas Recabarren – distort enemy bodies to slow them down and build living structures from the result
- Carto by Sunhead Games – a tile-placement adventure where you explore the land you just placed
- Sloppy Forgeries by Jonah Warren – players race to copy a painting as fast and as accurately as they can
- Eloquence by Gerben Grave, Job Talle, Samma van Klaarbergen, Thomas Jager and Leroy Freeth – language puzzles played as a friendly alien
- Nerve Damage by Dennis Carr and Corey Bertelsen – a first person shooter built to provoke panic and discomfort while staying playable
- Plusminus by Veera Hokkanen, Thomas Holmes, Hannu Koivuranta, Antti Sandberg, Helena Sorva and Juuso Toikka – generate magnetic fields and change the magnetic properties of objects to survive
- Hostile User Interface by Shawn Liu and Ian Schreiber – a maze game whose controls trick you into hitting Windows hotkeys
- What the Golf? by Triband – a physics golf parody where every hole is a different kind of golf
- You Busy? by Trynn and Christopher Sosa – about the channels people and information pass through to get work done
- Picture Processing by Frank DeMarco – a puzzle game about restoring glitched 8-bit games
- Hypnospace Outlaw by Tendershoot, Michael Lasch and ThatWhichIs Media – being an internet censor in the nineties
Get ready for the EGW 2019
The seventeenth annual session was announced for Friday 22 March, 1:30 to 3:30 pm. The preview teased five of the questions the line-up would ask: a tile-placement adventure built on discovery (Carto), language puzzles (Eloquence), ROM hacking as a mechanic (Picture Processing), reconstructing a crime from testimony (Lucifer Within Us), and generating magnetic fields to survive (Plusminus).
Call for Proposals 2019
Submissions opened for the 2019 session with a deadline of 1 November 2018. The call restated what the workshop counted as experimental gameplay, and what it did not.
- Mechanics that create unexpected experiences or feelings (Gravitation, Passage, The Marriage)
- Generative games where the world changes with player choice (Spelunky, flOw)
- Emergent systems that produce surprising situations (ROM CHECK FAIL, Portal)
- Interactive storytelling that changes finely rather than at branch points (Facade)
- Novel interfaces – language processing, image recognition, gesture, new hardware (Guitar Hero, RENGA)
- New kinds of multiplayer interaction (Journey)
- New content, art, audio or plot, unless it changes the core gameplay
- Hybrids of existing genres, unless the result is more than the sum of its parts
- Technical innovation, business models or distribution on their own
Only playable prototypes were accepted, at any stage of development, as long as the experimental part could be played. Submissions did not have to be fun – the idea behind them had to be clear. Of the hundred-plus submissions received each year, fifteen to twenty were selected, and presenters who demoed in person received a speaker pass for the conference.
2018
EGW 2018 roundup
The room filled past capacity and screens went up outside for the overflow. The whole thing was recorded and published as the GDC 2018 Experimental Gameplay Workshop session. The line-up in order:
- Baba Is You by Hempuli – a puzzle game whose rules are blocks you can push around. It went on to win the Independent Games Festival awards for design and best student game
- Untitled Goose Game by House House – mechanics built to produce annoyance, with you as the goose
- Everything is Going to be OK by Nathalie Lawhead – vignettes setting irrational optimism against difficult situations
- Noita by Petri Purho (Kloonigames) – an action roguelite simulating every pixel
- TimeWatch by Lucas Wall and Balthazar Auger (NGD Studios) – a shooter about time travel and causality
- Feng Shui by Saul Gonzales and David Marull (LudopiaNet) – a puzzle game built on Feng Shui rules. The creators could not attend from Venezuela after their visas were denied, and sent a video instead
- Luna prototypes by Brad Fotsch and Robin Hunicke (Funomena) – how the core experience was built around audio and VR, and what they learned doing it
- Freeways by Justin Smith (Captain Games) – draw road networks and watch the traffic emerge
- La Tabla by Chaim Gingold and Luke Iannini – giving life to physical objects on a table
Warming up for EGW 2018
The sixteenth session was set for Friday 23 March, 1:30 to 3:30 pm. The preview posed four of the year’s questions: simulating every pixel in an action roguelite (Noita), using mechanics to express hopeless optimism while everything falls apart (Everything is Going to be OK), a stealth game where you are an infuriating goose (Untitled Goose Game), and bringing physical objects on a table to life (La Tabla).
2018 Call for Participation
Submissions for the 2018 session closed on 31 December 2017. Developers outside the US were asked to submit early so the organisers had time to help with visas and invitation letters – a recurring problem for a session that drew work from everywhere.
2016
2016 session video
The recording of the 2016 session went up on the GDC Vault. That year’s selection mixed early VR work with prototypes and finished games.
Recording: GDC Vault
2015
2015 recap
The 2015 session featured Thumper, Parable of the Polygons and Earth Primer, along with a run of novel-controller games including Line Wobbler, SoundSelf and Curiouser and Curiouser. The hall stayed open two hours after the demos so people could play the prototypes themselves, and the GDC 2015 session recording covers the run in full.
The moment people remembered was the presentation by the team behind That Dragon, Cancer, then screening a documentary about their work. The post-mortem on making it left the room in tears and ended in a standing ovation – by the organisers’ own account, one of the most affecting things in the session’s thirteen-year history.
2014
EGW 2014 – another success
A short thank-you to the developers who presented, to everyone who submitted, and to the GDC audio-visual staff who got a room full of unfinished, unusual hardware working. Several of the year’s presenters also picked up nominations and awards at that year’s IGF.
2014 call for proposals opens January 1
Submissions for the 2014 session opened on 1 January and closed on 1 February. The session itself was scheduled for Friday 21 March 2014, 2:30 to 4:30 pm.
2013
2013 session announced
The 2013 session took room 2014 on Friday 29 March, 2:30 to 4:30 pm. Submissions hit their highest count yet that year – more than 130, from a wide spread of countries and approaches.
As always the focus was on process rather than product: where an idea came from, how it was prototyped, how progress was judged, and when the right move was to walk away and start again. The line-up ranged from veteran designers to first-time independents, covering sound and physics prototypes, new takes on multiplayer and exploration, and narrative AI. A set of physical-digital hybrids built around unusual controllers and play pieces stayed out to be played after the session ended. Rock Paper Shotgun’s write-up of the 2013 workshop gives an outside account of the same afternoon.
2012
GDC 2012: Hardware-tastic!
The year’s write-up opened with a thank-you to the GDC audio-visual staff. With so many different kinds of games on the bill – several of them built around alternative audio and visual mechanics – the organisers spent several evenings in the hall setting up and testing hardware before the session could run.
Gamasutra’s coverage compared the session to a high fashion show and listed every prototype shown. The organisers’ favourite image from the event was the shot of the whole line-up on stage together. They doubted they could pull off another show on the scale of the 2012 bill, then left the door open anyway.
2011
IndieCade 2011
IndieCade’s Festival of Independent Games hosted a special Experimental Gameplay session that year. Where the GDC session runs on rapid-fire demos, the IndieCade version gave creators room for a longer conversation about process and inspiration. This one brought together several experimental duos to talk about how collaboration shapes their work.
- Eric Zimmerman and Nathalie Pozzi – their collaboration Starry Heavens, alongside other projects made for festivals and museums, and how Nathalie’s background in architecture both complements and challenges Eric’s approach to game design
- Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn (Tale of Tales) – joining over Skype to introduce CnCnTrC, an in-progress experiment about intimacy that each of them built half of separately before combining the parts
- Heather Kelley and Damien DiFede – a long-running partnership from the Kokoromi collective through the Body Heat project, plus Heather’s museum installations and her work with DareDroid
- Damien DiFede and Matt Piersall – demonstrating Noddables, an iPad jam-session and DJ toy that later became Cosmic DJ
The discussion ran through authorship, communication, critique and the joy of mutual discovery, and the organisers said they wanted to keep exploring new ways of discussing and demonstrating experimental work.
Packed House at GDC 2011
Another year at capacity – the organisers apologised to anyone turned away after the room was declared full. The creators and games shown:
- Maquette by Hanford Lemoore – a puzzle game where the world you stand in is also visible as a miniature model; place a key in the model and a key-shaped bridge appears in the full-scale world around you
- The Sense of Connectedness by Michael Brough – memory, thought, emotion and the passage of time, first released as part of a “masquerade” in which four designers released each other’s games
- Loop Raccord by Nicolai Troshinsky – splice segments of video into one fluid action across panels, with rhythms that turn musical and hypnotic; later a Nuovo Award nominee, an IndieCade finalist and an iPad release
- Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle – manipulate what happened before to “explain” a given end state, writing new histories in the process; demonstrated at the session by Daniel Benmergui
- Mantra by Agustin Perez Fernandez – move the mouse in a clockwise circle while pulsing sound and streaming visuals push you towards a meditative state of non-attention
- Inside a Star-Filled Sky by Jason Rohrer – a recursive tactical shooter where you descend into the creatures you meet to fight inside them, or transcend to the level above for new powers
- The Abrupt Goodbye by Andy Schatz – his own experiments in user-generated content, alongside Farbs’ wiki-based game Playpen, with Farbs joining for a Q&A on the potential and frustration of user-generated play
For the first time the workshop also included a live game: USC students Mihir Sheth and Asher Vollmer led the audience in an impromptu round of Ninja, and rules for it and for Andy Nealen’s Grow 21 were handed out to encourage experimentation away from the screen. Gamasutra published a summary of the session.
Experiments, twenty years on
If you came here for the workshop, the part of Minecraft closest to it is the snapshot cycle – unfinished features, shipped early, kept or dropped based on what players find.