We have decided to cancel the Experimental Gameplay Workshop this year. It was a hard decision to make, but we think it’s for the best. This year, the EGW’s slot at the Game Developers Conference will be replaced by The Nuovo Sessions, which focuses on the finalists, runners-up and honorable mentions for the IGF’s Nuovo Award.

The organizers would like to extend a collective & heartfelt thanks to everyone who submitted to the workshop this year. There were several good, thoughtful experiments in this year’s submissions.

However, after reviewing these submissions and evaluating other non-submitted games for potential invitation to the workshop, we still did not have enough material for a full high-quality session. We debated this and came to two conclusions:

1) We value the time of our attendees; our method has always been to show the maximum amount of goodness in the minimum time. So we do not like the idea of adding filler, or padding the presentations, to fill the time slot.

2) We want to change the nature of the workshop and submissions process so that we can better support thoughtful, high-quality gameplay experiements in today’s environment, which is very different from the situation when we started nine years ago.

Finally – none of the games we would have shown in this year’s session are going to go away; we’re saving them for next year’s session.

In the meantime, we will use this web site to showcase interesting games and to establish an evergreen, year-round submissions process. Thus, we are opening the call for the 2011 workshop now – and will be posting to this site throughout the year.

While we will miss you all this March, we look forward to seeing you next year – and blowing you away with 2 hours of high-quality gameplay experimentation. Please submit your experiments so we can get started!

2010 Call for Participation

The EGW is an annual gathering of innovation-minded game developers, hosted at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The conference presentation features many different kinds of games, including prototype and student demos (Flower, PB Winterbottom), shipped products (Katamari Damacy, Portal, World of Goo), and Indie Games (Braid, Today I Die).  There’s always a bit of lecturing and discussion as well.

If you’re pushing the boundaries of traditional gameplay, we encourage you to submit your work using the entry form below.  The submission deadline is Tuesday, January 26, 2010.

Purpose

Our goals are to:

• Showcase experimental, creative, non-traditional designs and ideas;
• Publicize the process of gameplay experimentation;
• Strengthen the community of experimental game developers;
• Advance game design as a craft and art form.

Experimentation involves risk, and our industry is risk-averse.  But to remain healthy, we need to embrace risk, learn from our successes – and more importantly – from our failures.

We strive to support risk-taking and to provide channels for communicating the results. We aim to legitimize and popularize gameplay-oriented research and development.

What Is Experimental Gameplay?

The boundaries of experimental gameplay are hard to delineate.  To illustrate the workshop’s philosophy, the best we can do is to give examples of what we consider inside (and outside) of our domain.  We often present games that feature:

• Games that create new or unexpected play experiences, or otherwise promote unique feelings within players.
• Generative games, where the gameplay or world is dynamically generated based on choices the player makes.
• Emergent gameplay, where game systems interact to provide evolving situations. Simulation or physics-based gameplay are examples of this.
• NPC Gameplay, where interactions with & between non-player-characters influences the characters in a meaningful way.
• Interactive storytelling, where the plot or dialog changes in a fine-grained manner (as opposed to discrete “branching points”).
• Innovative user interfaces — natural language processing, image recognition, gestural control, new hardware devices…
• Novel multiplayer interactions — online, at the same machine, with wireless devices, using image recognition, etc.

The workshop does not deal with:

• Novel content, narrative, settings, character designs, artwork, audio, or plots (unless they affect the core gameplay in a major way).
• New hybrids of already-existing genres (unless the resulting gameplay is unexpectedly more than the sum of the parts).
• Purely technical innovation, experimental business models or distribution mechanisms, or games for under-served audiences (unless the gameplay itself is experimental).

The above guidelines are vague and incomplete, as new and experimental things will by definition fall outside existing preconceptions. Don’t hesitate to contact the workshop organizers with questions. You may also wish to see what was presented during previous workshops.

The Cost of Experimentation

We recognize that not all experiments are successful; designers learn from failure as well as success. There is no requirement that submitted gameplay experiments be “fun” (”fun” being one definition of “successful gameplay”), but they should be interesting.

There are no constraints on game budgets, team size, on whether the game has a publisher or has been published already, or on the target platform. Submissions do not have to be finished games, but having a playable demo is important. It is possible that a submission could be accepted without a running game as illustration, but this would be an exceptional case.

To submit for the workshop, please fill out this submission form. Proposals are accepted at the sole discretion of the judges.

Tell us about your game

To give us a good idea of what your game is like, please fill out this form, and email it to workshop2010@number-none.com. As a spam-prevention measure, you may be sent a follow-up email, which you must reply to in order for your submission to be received.

We look forward to reviewing your submission!

1. Name of Game
2. Description of Game (300 words or less).
3. Explanation of how the core gameplay is experimental (30 words or less).
4. Current phase of completion / Expected phase of completion at workshop time.
   • Please be descriptive of the level of functionality present in the game; don’t simply give a number indicating time remaining or percentage complete.
5. Give more detail on the gameplay experiment you are performing (take as much space as you need for this).
   • Why is this experiment important?
   • What does it bring to games that is not already ubiquitous?
6. How will you know whether the experiment is a success?  What problems and limitations might arise?  What do these limitations mean for future incarnations of this kind of gameplay?
7. URL for Additional Info (downloads / info files / movies / etc.)
8. Special Notes:
   • Does your presentation require any unusual equipment or preparations?
   • Is there anything you feel needs to be said that was not covered in this entry form?

We will create an archive, but in the meantime: here are write-ups on Destructoid , the Onion, and Grumpy Tech Guy.

We promise to update this page before GDC 2010.

Check out roBin’s write-up and photos – and this Gamasutra coverage of the event.

Here is a writeup – more to come as we update the archives!

Here is the Gamasutra coverage, and the archived page for 2006

Here is a write-up of the event, and the archived page for 2005

Here is a writeup of the demonstrations, photos from the jam, and the archived page for 2004

Here is the archived  page for 2003