EGW 2010: Call for Participation

Posted by roBin - 12/11/09 at 05:11:21 pm

Experimental Gameplay Workshop

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.

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