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Gotland Game Conference 2018
Recordings are online!
All* the presentations and the Award Ceremony are finally available on our YouTube-channel. Even better – if you prefer reading you can click through these links to find a) a description and the video for each talk and b) our live twitter coverage of each talk. Highly recommended!
- Platform Pressures and Perils by Chris Franklin
- From Porn to Love: Games’ Growing Up! by Doris C. Rusch
- Vulvas on the Tablet: Cunt Touch This by Sabine Harrer
- Human Rights and Virtual Worlds by Richard A Bartle
- Grief-Based Game Design by Sabine Harrer
- Interrogating Empathy: Alternative Models of (Queer) Feeling in Games
The Awards Ceremony
Best 1st Year Project: Pump The Frog
Best 2nd Year Project: Somnium
Best 3rd Year Project: Penny’s Farm
Pwnage: Pump The Frog
Cha-Ching!: Pump The Frog
Innovation Award: Grave Call
Students’ Choice: Penny’s Farm
Almedalen Library Award: Pump The Frog
Alumni of The Year: Pernilla Sparrhult and Joakim Andreason
Bighuge THANKS to all of our speakers, faculty and students for making the GGC such a great experience this year!
* (all presentations but one: Adam Mayes’ “M for Mature” unfortunately had technical issues, and the recording was unrecoverable.)
Day 2 in pictures
The second day of the Gotland Game Conference is split in two; with the first part being another day of games and insightful lectures, and the second part being the epic award ceremony and party in the evening. To avoid completely swamping this post, we’re putting only a few photos here and sharing the full set on Facebook. There’s also a lot of activity on the Instagram tag – #GGConf2017.
Recordings of all the talks will be available on our YouTube-channel later this summer, but you don’t need to wait to see the Award Ceremony – just keep scrolling. 🙂
The Awards Ceremony
Best 1st Year Project: Pump The Frog
Best 2nd Year Project: Somnium
Best 3rd Year Project: Penny’s Farm
Pwnage: Pump The Frog
Cha-Ching!: Pump The Frog
Innovation Award: Grave Call
Students’ Choice: Penny’s Farm
Almedalen Library Award: Pump The Frog
Alumni of The Year: Pernilla Sparrhult and Joakim Andreason
Bighuge THANKS to all of our speakers, faculty and students for making the GGC such a great experience this year! Please head on over to the facebook gallery and help us tag everyone. 🙂
Day 1 in pictures
Just a brief update with few pics from the first day of #GGConf2017! It’s been such a blast!
Join us again tomorrow, Tuesday, for:
09:00 – Human Rights in Virtual Worlds
10:00 – Designing games as an expression of grief
11:00 – followed by three hours of games on the show floor (11:00-14:00)!
14:00 – After the final talk by Bonnie Ruberg (14-15) there are just a two more hours to try the games before the show floor is shut down for this year (17:00, sharp)!
See you there!
Errant Signal, live at the GGC!
YouTube, as a maturing platform, has given us some amazing things! We have channels exploring games culture and social politics, cultural reflection by way of car reviews, games industry consumer rights, sexplanations – all kinds of wonderful, insightful and important content, and we are massive fans of the medium!
A couple of years back we had Super Bunnyhop over to lend his heavy research and journalistic style to the conference. This year we’re bringing in another department favorite with Chris Franklin of Errant Signal-fame. We’ve been following his channel religiously for ~4 years now, and if you haven’t yet discovered his blend of academic insight and accessible presentation, allow us to introduce you by shining a spotlight on a few of his many insightful video essays!
The Debate That Never Took Place (ludology vs. narrative
Ludography of Blendo Games
Or how about some in-depth game analysis?
If you haven’t added Errant Signal as a regular to your subscriptions, then you’ve missed gems like these! His work is exactly the type of thing we aim at with these conferences: taking something of great interest/importance and deep diving – feet first! His ease of style belies his academic rigor and makes his material essential viewing.
But don’t take our word for it, come and see him yourself, on the big stage at Wisby Strand! In Platform Pressures and Perils Chris will lead us through “a meandering chat about how computers shape the games they run”, starting 10:00 on Monday 29/5.
We hope to see you there!
Introducing: Doris Rusch
Doris C. Rusch is an assistant professor of game design in the College of Computing and Digital Media’s School of Design where she founded the Play 4 Change lab. Rusch’s work is focused on the theory and practice of creating games that model the “human experience” and focus on mental health issues. Her expertise as a game designer opened her eyes to a new theory, which she discussed in this TED-talk titled, “Why Game Designers are Better Lovers.”
Doris is giving an entirely new talk at the Gotland Game Conference, on Monday at 14:00. Don’t miss it!
Check the game trailers out!
Our students are game designers, but making a game is not enough. You must also be able to show it off, to reach an audience, to pitch it. If a screenshot says a thousand words, and a GIF a million, a video can be an entire Library of Congress! And thus, we force them to create short video trailers for everything they make.
We just published a Youtube-playlist with all of the games for 2017! These will all be available for you to play on the show floor next week! So check the trailers out, leave a friendly comment to the creators and then come meet them and play the games on mon-tue next week – 29-30 May!
“Cunt Touch This!”, our sixth and final talk is in place
This talk will touch a particularly hot subject: The vulva. And by extension it will let us consider topics like pleasure, shame and embarrassment in gaming.
“you never win ‘over’ the Cunt. You win for it.”
While games fetishise “fun” they still have a problem embracing subjects like intimacy, sex and pleasure as possible variants of it. Using the case of Cunt Touch This, a vulva-based tablet colouring game designed as a tribute to Tee Corinne’s iconic Cunt Coloring Book, Sabine Harrer will introduce the mechanics of the game and explore some of the “cuntroversial” responses it received.
For a quick taste of what’s in store, we highly recommend this interview by Jess Joho over at Kill Screen – A new game aims to reclaim one of our most taboo words – in which both Sabine and the ever amazing Andrea Hasselager reflect on their work in a flurry of cunt puns. 😀
Sabine is presenting Vulvas on the Tablet: Cunt Touch This at 15:00 on Tuesday 29/5. Sign up for a free visitors pass and come listen!
Behind the scenes
A peek behind the curtains on a Saturday; our 1st year students hard at work building their games for the GGC Show Floor. Only 15 days to go!
It might be weekend-work, but it’s not in vain; there are well over 300 people currently signed up to come and playtest! Make sure you have a ticket too. The Visitors Pass is the cheapest option (pay what you want) and is good for the entire conference – play games, listen to lectures, the award show and the party!
See you there!
