Tale of Tales Game Design Symposium

There are many conferences and trade fairs in the games industry but there is none that focusses solely on the design of games. And whenever the topic is addressed, it seems that commerce (in the industry) or definition (in academic circles) become the center of any discussion. This symposium, however, will focus on the art and craft of making games.
Though ambitious, it will not be a large event. A one day symposium with a maximum of 140 partcipants should garantee a nice environment for a good exchange of ideas. The format of the conference will be panel discussions preceeded by short presentations with limited time for questions-and-answers during the event but with an informal meeting/party after.
The symposium will take place on the 20th of April, 2004. Location of the event will be the Nieuwpoorttheater in Gent, Belgium.

This symposium concludes the two year research project into the design of digital games by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. During this research project, they not only played a lot of games, but also designed a game of their own. The thoughts gathered on the web forum that accompanied this project form the basis of this symposium.

The symposium will center around two topics in particular:
(game<->play) + (game<->art).

As game technology improves at a staggering rate, two directions are starting to become more and more apparent in game design. On the one side there is the "hard core" game designers who root their work in traditional analog games like sports and board games. And on the other, the "mature" designers who are starting to develop games as alternatives to books and movies. The first group is interested in the game as a system of rules that drives competition . The second is focussed on offering the user opportunities for play, often within a deeper narrative context. Currently these two paths are intertwined and very often the game prevents one for playing. We hope to address this conflict and sketch some outlines of the direction in which game design might evolve and how to get there.

In the game industry, art is often a matter of quantity, not quality and it usually means the amount of pretty models and textures that the budget will allow developers to put in. In general, game developers do not see the design and certainly not the programming of games as art. Nevertheless, there are many moments in many games that offer significantly deep "art experiences".
Meanwhile, the traditional world of fine arts is starting to develop an interest in games. Most often this is expressed in a more or less parodic form as a game modification of or level for an existing game. Very rarely do artists attempt to make a real game. It is still considered to be not elevated enough for the museum or simply too much work for any poor artist to get involved with. Despite the lack of technical knowledge and courage, some of the work that comes out of this group offers at least another way of thinking about game design.
Curiously, these two groups do not seem to know of each others existance. The game developers are too busy to know anything about anything but their games and the artists consider the game industry to be part of the evil military-economic complex that is making us all eat meat. We would like to confront these two groups with each other on the conference in the hope that they can learn from each other.

Ernest Adams, Greg Coomer, Matteo Bittanti, Rachel Tempest and Edwin Carels have confirmed to present at the symposium.

Ernest Adams is a game designer and critical columnist. His Designer's Notebook series of columns, published on Gamasutra is an authoritative body of work on game design. Currently he seems to be very pre-occupied with the fact that game design is often a result of what the designers have not done rather than of conscious decisions.

Greg Coomer is a graphic designer at Valve Software. Valve Software is the developer of the action shooter game Half Life and it's well known multi-player mod Counterstrike. Despite of the typical violent nature of a game like Half Life, Greg Coomer has succeeded in giving the game an air of elegance with minimalist graphics and a spectacled main character modeled partly in his image. He got involved with Valve wanting to make a game of his own, a game very different from Half Life but sadly never published.

Edwin Carels is a curator and writer mainly concerned with film and video and professor at Sint-Lukas College in Brussels. We want him to talk about the history of cinema as there are many parallels that can be drawn between the early film industry and the current game industry in terms of artistic appreciation.

Matteo Bittanti is a researcher into the social and cultural impact of video games and a strong advocate of serious criticism of games as artistic expression. He recently started the publication of a series of books entitled "Ludologica. Videogames d´autore" with each book dedicated to one game and its designer/author.

Rachel Tempest will come and talk about the collection of art games presented on the Selectparks web site.

We are also trying to get at least one Japanese designer (from Ico -Fumito Ueda- or Silent Hill -Masahiro Ito or Akira Yamaoka) as the Japanese games industry is fascinatingly isolated and the few games that do come through are often pearls of design. We have been invited by Konami to go to Tokyo to interview the Silent Hill team. If we can get the funding for that, we will probably present a video of that interview at the symposium.
Richard Evans of Lionhead has withdrawn his confirmation. We are now looking for another representative of Lionhead because we think this is one of the few Western game companies that understands the potential of games. And we would like to have Anne-Marie Schleiner who has been involved with many projects researching the links between games, art and eroticism (Velvet Strike, Anime Noire, Snow Blossom House). Bill Viola has been contacted as well because of his ambitions to make a video game, but we have not received an answer from him yet.

F0.am will design the stage set in which the symposium will take place. They are best known for their work with wearable architecture, haptic environments and augmented reality.

Futurefarmers will design the website for the event which will include the proceedings and transcripts of the panels after the event.

The party in the evening after the symposium will be co-organised with dorkbot-gent. So you can expect some people doing strange things with electricity.

The Belgian Chapter of the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) might be willing to coproduce the event in some way. They can help us contact some people from the industry.

The Belgian IAK (Initiatief Audiovisuele Kunsten) is also showing interest. They may be able to help us with the organisation of the event.

Gent was habitat of the Counts of Flanders in the Middle Ages. It is an attractive place for foreigners to visit and it is not as saturated with new media related events as Amsterdam or London, which we hope will increase the concentration and focus during the symposium. Also, the city has a giant university and two art schools, so there is bound to be some interest from that direction.

During the 80s and 90s Nieuwpoorttheater has been an important trend setter in innovative forms of theater and performance arts. But as these experiments became mainstream, Nieuwpoorttheater has gone "underground" again. As a result, they have developed a keen interest in digital creative processes. They might be coproducing the event as well as offer the venue.