The 2018 Indie Soapbox

[Music] okay hello everyone um wow that's just amazing so many people here it's incredible I'm super excited to be here my name is Jana peek I'm a computer scientist and game developer from Australis because my is from excellent you might know and I've heard I was very nervous about this talk but someone told me I just need to inspire people with my talk in any soapbox and do a lot of forensic and then I'm gonna be fine um so I tried to do both um and I would like to start with my backstory so I think every one of us noticed a moment when you I don't know you you're out of motivation you're not inspired anymore and I had this face also a couple of years ago and I was stuck I was stuck and I didn't have any inspiration and I was dark not only in developing games but also in playing games so I played games all the time from the same shop

from the same developer I played those games from the same platform and I thought okay I'm stuck awesome playing games how can I develop any new game games and I really tried to find new game mechanics but playing always the same game it doesn't make any sense for that um so I thought I should try out something totally new get out of my comfort zone try games which I would never play in other circumstances and I thought getting out of this comfort zone would eventually help me learning and getting me my inspiration back again and so I wanted to combine it with something which I really like and I love to travel I'm one of those crazy backpacking persons trying to see all the countries and I would always buy a Travel Guide and if you look at the Travel Guide you might get a list of things you should do in this country monuments you should visit food you should try movies you should watch everything to get the whole

experience for his country but you never get experience for games you should play but I believe that our games are cultural goods as well and people should think of this and should add those to travel I believe our games are fantastic for that they should be relevant and that's why I tried to start a project which I call a year playing the world and I tried to find and play games from all all the different countries of the world which are roughly 200 so I tried to find an approach developers and can win debate community people from the countries and would ask him almost the same question if there's one game I should develop I should play develop in your country which one should it be ask it yourself as well it's quite an interesting question pretty challenging and I got a list full of inspirational games and I was inspired by my immense by strong characters were really cool stories and by fancy mechanics but most

interesting it wasn't the games with the fancy mechanics which inspired me most it was games which were relevant to the culture or to the countries of the tree or to the regions and I want to give you some ideas for inspirations how they also create really interesting games that way so maybe create a game with cultural relevance like that the did in the game a year walk as Swedish game rather use Swedish traditions which the thought through this game or tell personal stories relevant to your region like Abdullah did in the game pass out he actually tells the story how he how he escaped the Syrian war in 2014 and he makes it even more personal it's a very dramatic story by adding YouTube style comments to that or something more fun find and spread local fun stories local

gems local stories which are only known this reason I am reaching so for example this guy the game is Cal called noodle 3 in German dumpling 4 in English and there was a Bavarian man who was really upset about no esta yup crafts were making very close to his house this was 1967 and he decided to fight back by throwing dumplings [Music] but looking at those games I also found a lot of issues and problems and one really big issue I think we are developing games in a wrong way because we are not treating our games in a cultural good way we don't think of them as something which should be also preserved in ten years or hundred years some of the games I was trying to play we're not in playable after one year anymore and now think of all the in controllers were having right now the engines we are using what will the controllers of the future look like

can we play our games in ten years still and if it's cultural good we need to think of ways of the solve this problem so develop ukm games with more care for the future and please find inspiration by my list of the games from different countries on my website thank you [Applause] Thank You Joanna hang on one sec you're just too fast dating alright please welcome Davy Harris hi there my name is Davy reiden I was the creator of the Stanley parable the

beginner's guide and absolutely a true crime story featuring Keanu Reeves today I want to talk just a little bit about some of the game design questions that I've been on my mind lately and some of the goals that I'm shooting for one of the ways that I really like to work is by setting myself these very impossible sounding goals and then figuring out how I can actually pull it off so I don't necessarily have answers to these questions just yet but I thought I'd put them to you and see what you think so I've been thinking a lot about why people continue playing a game after they've started this is if we are assuming that the game is at least somewhat fun or interesting on a core mechanical level and if so why does a person want to put an hour after hour on this one game as opposed to playing a different game or doing something else with their life entirely basically what creates their engagement and for the purpose of this talk I'm really only talking about single player games socializing and competition in multiplayer games are sort of like their whole own separate motivators so after a

lot of thought here's my personal interpretation just mine of why why people continue playing a game distilled into three extremely broad categories one is to become better or to optimize it's the enjoyable feeling that you are better now at the game than you were when you started playing number two is to make progress watching your number go up or gaining more items or more stuff and number three is to see more content because we like the story we like the characters we like the world and we want to continue to see more of it so to me these three things sum up what like 99.9% of games out there today are doing to create engagement with their players and this is really cool and we know that this is effective on some level and it can be a lot of fun and we all like games like this so the question that I've been grappling with a lot lately is how could you make a game that is engaging and compelling and that does not at its core rely on any of

these three things to make you interested and by the way that's like I'm not saying like none of them but like like what could you do to not have them be the core and then bring in other things and then bring these things in later on once there isn't like another core I think one of the things with these three things is with these three points is that they all rely on something outside the act of play itself to be interesting with the first you're imagining a better a future version of yourself who is better at the game with the second you're imagining a future where your number is bigger with the third you're imagining how cool it'll be to see the rest of the story so in a way they're all future motivated and I would love to explore play that is engaging and compelling in this very moment without that reliance on the future in order to provide the value I think that if I say this right off the bat a lot of people would say that sounds like a toy and yes this is typically how we think

of toys is as a device that has no function except to the intrinsic act of play but usually we draw a kind of ideological line between a toy and a video game and we think of a game as having like a point or a context that elevates it above the act of just play itself so the weird goal that I'm setting for myself is to create a game that is intrinsically fun to play and that has the kind of context that would make us say this is a video game but that does not at its core rely on any of these three things to be compelling and like I said I I think that they can still be there but like could they be something other than the like so land and direct reason why you would want to continue playing at all so for example what would a game be like that offered you interesting choices but you can't actually get better at making those choices or or you can't make more optimised choices what about a game where you're growing or making progress in an interesting way but where the future outcomes are obscured enough that as a

player you can't ever concretely see what specifically this progress will lead to what about a game that has a story but you don't need to see every piece of content to get the story say there are 10 hours of Story content but if you only play one hour you've gotten just as valid of an experience as someone who plays the full ten all of these sound a little bit counterintuitive in the modern design culture but that's why I'm really excited the bizarre an impossible sounding goal that I've set for myself is to try to create a game that does all of these things I don't have a good answer yet as to how exactly to do that but here are a few games that I look to as inspiration desert golfing is fun to play you can get better there's a score there's new content but the game never explicitly rewards you for any of it the score doesn't mean anything many people never see the new content and if you play it for hours it's because you're genuinely enjoying being in this world and whacking a golf ball around everything is a vast simulation that has an actual like point of view about the

world and lots of content to explore but you can stop playing it pretty much any time and you've had just as valid of an experience as someone who's seen every piece of content in the game that go atsume is sort of like this if you haven't seen this it's the mobile game where you leave out treats for cats and at random times like cats will show up it's fun to see new cats but there is kind of an incentive to make more money and like collect the cats so it's not a perfect example but this is really a descendant of Tamagotchi which had no particular winds-day except to feel connected with a tiny thing in your pocket and to treat it you know with however you're feeling at the time it's engaging it's compelling and it doesn't rely on future outcomes to be fun alright that's all I got thanks everyone [Applause] Thank You Davey all right next slide please welcome Clarence hello

everyone I'm Clarice Aaron co-founder and creative director at silver stream media and I want get devs to see their games as spaces for change healing and contemplation to that end I would like to talk to discuss with you today an underutilized but extremely on-trend narrative approach and that is to embrace the occult to open yourselves and your game to the dangerous a rational world of magical thinking just a little bit specifically though I'm talking about divination divination is an ancient and widely diverse form of magic involving the use of an object or objects to gain answers to questions often for the purpose of preparing for the future now if that sounds to you

just a little bit like a simulation or a game you're already getting the idea now let's take a step back for a second because I think one of the reasons why more and more people are flocking to magic as an aesthetic as an identity and as a sincere part of their lives is that magic is a customizable but ultimately shared cultural metaphor that focuses on the experience a speck saw a situation rather than the technicalities so let's talk about tarot for a second as an example of divination now depending on your perspective Tarot might seem like a mystical tool or a bunch of delusional nonsense but I think of Tarot as a game one whose purpose is shifted over time from gambling in an entertainment towards contemplation and transformation now video games have been exploring divinatory cards since the 80s and some

games have just copy straight up others have used it as a theme or a narrative framework shout out to a game that I had the privilege of working on called where the water tastes like wine but how do you design for divination first you have to understand that we're designing four distinct separate moments separate from the mundane world but also from the regular flow of your game so guide lines one and two here helped create that sense of separation your divinatory tool or focus objects should be special and stand out from the rest of the interactable things in your game as far as creating a special space I have some good news you're already do a you've already got two somewhat covered you want to invite and invoke a state of playfulness creativity and receptiveness and games are already excellent at this number three you want to put complex and interlocking systems and ordering structures clearly on display but here's the kicker these systems don't actually need to work or have any meaning the

mere suggestion of deep underlying logic is often enough to send our brains into an interpretive pattern recognizing overdrive number four and five are fairly self-explanatory you're trying to create visual hooks for a player to find inspiration and hang their own personal narrative upon number six introduce randomness because this takes advantage of apathy Neah which is the human tendency to seek out and find patterns and significance in random information number seven ask open-ended questions stick to broad common subjects at least to the start that'll help your players warm up you can also make it clear to your players that there's no wrong answer and that is up to them to decide how they perceive the moment if you're curious about how to deal with an obstinate or nihilistic player maybe check out a game I worked on college hikers and see how it responds to you being a stick in the mud you might also want to detach your divinatory moment

from your games other mechanics I'm a min/max er personally so I have trouble getting into a free association mindset if I'm worried about messing up my stats and the final to mix and match any of these rules experiment borrow others or distill your own generally the more you use the more hooks you have and the wider success rate you'll have amongst your audience but use what works for you so what are some benefits to bringing a dividend tour a moment or two into your game well for starters it's affirming a game its creators and its players are not adversaries though it sometimes can feel that way divinatory moments underscore the trust you're putting in your player that acknowledges that we are all co-creators in the final experience that Trust is empowering and it's potentially quite transformative I would wager that we've all had deeply meaningful experiences with a video game before it's probably why most of us are here right now and I

found that by opening a game up to rather offering your player an opportunity to make a game be about what they need it to be about in that moment is a great way to increase the chance of your game having that meaningful transformative effect on others which feels sweet when it happens best of all this is pretty scope efficient because any meetings or player interpretations can be mediated by abstract symbols you and your game don't have to anticipate fully or understand that a player is dealing with the loss of their great uncle Billy for example in order to build upon it or acknowledge it now I didn't mean to stumble into magic and the occult when I joined games I definitely didn't but over the years I've had a great deal of fun and success experimenting with these techniques and I hope you will use

these arcane secrets wisely thank you [Applause] [Music] Thank You klaris all right next up please welcome Danny [Applause] hiya hi I'm Danny bear now ski composer and game designer I wrote the music for by name Isaac super meatboy Canabalt and crypt of the necrodancer now I'm doing music and game design with brace yourself games I was gonna give an adorable talk but how game design is like the Britney Spears on toxic but it's gonna have to wait cuz I had a experience recently they hit

me pretty hard so you liked us a few weeks ago I was hospitalized for nine days with severe cellulitis you don't need to know a detail it was easily but it was most painful week my whole life helped felt pain sharper than what I've ever known flaws well it wasn't great but the experience gave me some clarity on something that I felt compelled to talk about instead of Britney Spears maybe someday I'll give that talk though it was gonna be awesome lip-syncing dance moves little boom mic anyway let me back up a little bit though last seven or eight years I've stuff suffered from chronic pain few years back I was diagnosed with lupus it's an immune system disease recently I was undiagnosed lupus a diagnosed connective tissue disorder if you've ever dealt with immune disease you know these things are very hard to nail down I definitely have fibromyalgia which essentially means my body is super good at feeling pain long story short I'm in some kind of pain every day all day here's some fun facts about debilitating

pain maybe that's a little melodramatic but I totally feel like this guy's saying and based on NIH statistics I'm not alone pain affects more Americans than diabetes heart disease and cancer combined one in four Americans have chronic pain this is the Wang Baker pain scale it's a way to communicate and track pain on the left to someone with no pain at all on the right is the worst pain you've ever felt honestly none of these people look like they're any kind of mood I would ever want to be in who wants to be in number zero but you might not be familiar with this because 75% of you and probably never experience chronic pain that blows my mind I can't speak for others but the best day I can hope for is about it too which is a lot better there used to be but it's still there pain is constantly vying for my attention it's constantly barking at me sometimes you can tune it out sometimes it's just piling on other stresses you

got going on so like a lot like when you get a skill in a game that reserves a portion of your mana bar yeah we play games I know you have a lower reserve of energy to just spend on tasks there's another permutation that it's like you may have heard of called spoon theory you can google that to give them more information essentially it's a way to impart to health you know otherwise healthy people what daily life is like for people with diseases that don't go away so what does this have to do with video games trying to play video games in the hospital made very clear at some UI and gameplay concepts very clearly stand out as being bad for people with pain problems it also struck into some design decisions that are good for people with pain problems kind of correspond with just good game feel good UI design so here's some thoughts on making it more accessible hard to close windows tiny add windows on iOS are the worst

I didn't think that was gonna be a blood line but when everything hurts fine motor control is more difficult isn't to say you should remove or smooth over anything that needs fine motor control but you could certainly limit tiny X's on mobile touchy screens and stuff if you think about it though you kind of already know about painful UI design these video ads are designed to be painful because it makes them harder to ignore there's a good reason the X is as far away from your thumb as possible so just think about that power you have to cause people pain even if it's just a little bit a little bit slow opening menus unskipable cutscenesthat's pin e crazy animation on the menu looked so cool but trust me when I say that long menu animations and unskipable cutscenesthat's nice open I have limited

time till my body gives out and I want to play your game I accidentally closed the app once usability problems I don't know requiring buttons to be held down to do things I don't mean to bash in on destiny specifically but it's the most prominent example I could think of I understand many game mechanics require you to hold a button down I'm willing to play through that when it's required by gameplay but when every inch of your skin hurts your finger joints are cranking it's just another UI hurdle that reminds me my body don't work so good in its inconsistent escape toggle buttons when you have to press I to get to the inventory escape to get out but escape doesn't always get you out when the key presses are all over the place and not consistent these repetitive motions get gnarly real quick I would like to conclude by telling you a little

bit about my grandma Darlene this was last year my wedding we put her into VR bottom of the ocean in space took it over hometown in Illinois she hadn't seen in 60 years in Google Earth VR it was quite a challenge to help her interact with things it would have been much easier for us if there were external controls I could help with one-handed operation modes grandma she passed away last month and she had even expressed interest in playing stardew valley if she wasn't in so much pain and I try to think about how easy that would have been for her with her painful hands and controller interactions what could have been done to give her a chance to play I think there's so many people out there who want to play our games but they can't because of UI quirk or hasty UI decision if we could just try and be cognizant of that when we design maybe it might open our game up to a wider audience and make it easier for our existing audience to enjoy them thank you [Applause]

Thank You Danny all right yeah please welcome a trio [Applause] there it is hi I'm Andrew Wallach I'm an in the paint game developer I'm most well known for having once made one new game every week for an entire year as well as being the creator and organizer of train jam an annual game jam that is on a train it goes from Chicago to San Francisco every year I oftentimes describe my life as a series of tweets that I took too seriously which sounds silly and overly simplistic but it has this weird little element of truth to it to explain what I mean I'm going to show my two favorite examples this is a tweet

I made in 2015 I was watching games done quick which is a super great charity stream it's a week-long thing where a bunch of speedrunners get together and they speedrun games they raise money it's super amazing if you've never watched it I would highly recommend it I was watching it was great and I was like man I really want to do with this but slow that be super fun it was just a totally flipping tweet then my good friend Teddy deef took me slightly seriously and then we picked the weekend and long story short we made a website and a twitch channel and now we've raised over 43,000 dollars for charity over three years [Applause] it's called square Bowl it happens over Super Bowl weekend every year that's that and then this one is my personal favorite so I took a train ride once from Boston to Chicago Chicago to Seattle and then Seattle to Vancouver it was a really long train ride it was really fun and about halfway through the first day I tweeted with a lot of typos twelve hours in and being on a train is awesome thinking of organizing an Indy

train next year just keep picking up and ease across the u.s. two months later don't get derailed go do you see all aboard the train jam and that was the first string jam which then four months later was this it was 60 people I'd crammed on a train we made some games the next year was 120 people I'd try to put on a train the next year it was raining suede to take this photo inside but this is 200 people who went on a train this was the first year that we needed have a drone to take the group photo this is this was 300 people it's also the first year I'd rented out an entire train and then most recently this was this year three hundred and forty people which now brings our grand total of participants to over a thousand people in over twelve thousand miles or 19 thousand kilometers traveled across those five years that I've learned to embrace over the years you know follow these random things that just sort of sparked my interest because as you can

tell I've never really known what I wanted to do with my life I once knew somebody who knew what they wanted to do with their life he had this plan and you know he picked a job career when he was like six years old every decision he made in his life was towards that life goal and you know what I was at 26 years later he is now doing that thing he wanted to be when he was six and what I wanted to be when I was six was a mailbox so like not a mail carrier not a post office worker like I wanted to be a mailbox I was a nosey child I wanted to read letters I figured that would be legal so yeah I've spent a lot of time making plans and breaking them you know if you'd asked me five years ago what I'd be doing right now I'd probably say something like living in a suburb with like a kid or something and maybe a small business on the side I don't know it definitely probably wouldn't have said on stage at GDC giving a talk you know after I've just written across the country on a train that I rented for the Freak for the fifth year in a row bringing you know hundreds of people together on a train making a game to GDC oh also in those five years you know I got married

and moved to another country and you know I run a charity stream and I've been invited to speak at places you know and I like know the people that I've looked up to for years in my industry and like that's not like a big old brag that's like all these things pretty much 80% of them probably weren't even on my realm of things that I thought I could even possibly be achieving you know cuz there was a long period in my life where you know this was my life plan you know I had a had a goal and I go towards that goal and you know whatever you know I don't really think about it I was just like this is what I have to do this is what a normal human does I'm gonna do that normal human thing and I knew deep down that I wasn't really happy I was super unsatisfied but I figured that's just how being an adult was gonna work for me you know whatever I just don't be unhappy forever that's fine you know there's other people out there who were happy with what they do so I should just figure out how to deal with it and I wasn't really until I started exposing myself to you know other people and experiences and places and conferences and cultures and everything that I started sort of examining my life plan and being like oh you know I discovered which parts in my life I could throw

away which person I liked which parts I wanted to keep which parts you know weren't working and everything and I started viewing all of my plans more fluid and you know sort of allowing myself to get swept away by the things that I wanted to do you know but weren't part of the plan and all that kind of good stuff and you know that's when I find and started feeling happy and I was you know excited with the people I was associating with and the stuff that I was doing away my life was moving you know and that's not times I say you know it's not like I'm not ever unsatisfied you know but that's a normal human kind of unsatisfied that we all sort of feel we're all weird and complicated but the point I want to make is that it wasn't me throwing my life plans out the window and turning into a person that's all like fluid and undefined and that's not the part that made me happy the part that made me happy was the fact that I learned to examine the trajectory of my life and adjust to new interests and experiences that made me happier you know if you have a plan you end up exactly where you're going cool that's great if you have a plan and you discard it and you make a new plan and then you sort of like turn that around and do all sorts of other things that's also great to the point is to check in with yourself and take

from small chunks of time and try your hardest to see that you're still heading towards the direction that you want to be doing you know heading and make adjustments if you can and you want to that's sort of all I really wanted to say [Applause] possum Thank You Adriel okay please welcome Justin so hi my name is Justin mom co-founder of subset games this is Val Fantasy Tactics it is one of my all-time favorite games in it your units can learn a ton of abilities from a variety of classes and eventually make your ideal fighting squad here is one type of skill within the game the support abilities however when I play the game this is all that I see today I'm going to be talking about a mental flaw that I have which I will be calling

min maxing so this skill is called JP boost it increases the class experience points gained by 50% whenever I play I feel I have no choice but to use this skill on every single character no matter how much useful know how no matter how useful the other skills are how much I don't want to use this go I'm helpless against my need to reduce grinding and optimize my time for me the inclusion of this skill removed potential interesting play styles made me feel guilty when I wanted to experiment and in a general sense slightly decreased my enjoyment of the game what I'm calling min maxing is pretty similar to other gaming neuroses for example needing to search every single hallway of a JRPG despite having a thousand elixirs feeling compelled to collect everything even if it means hours of not having fun and and of course speedrunning is just just getting um moving on I believe that the term min maxing originally came from D&D and RPGs when you would use math to

perfectly optimize a character for a very specific purpose however I'm using the term to describe something slightly different in short the compulsion to do the most optimal play even to the detriment of my own enjoyment of the game the feeling that forces me to Google best leveling priests build in Ragnarok Online the feeling that I simply have to grind each unit to level 20 before I advanced classes in fire emblem needing to get plus fives in every single level in oblivion my problem isn't that you can game the system by being as efficient as possible my problem is when it's specifically not fun to do so that being said this compulsion is not always problematic in MMOs it's critical to optimize your combat efficiency for raids some games primary fun is finding Opie combos of skills and of course the severity of this feeling varies greatly between people some people can ignore JP boost I wouldn't grind crew levels in FTL though some people feel the need to do so if they have the opportunity so when

does me and Maxine become a problem first when the interesting mechanics are much less time efficient as I get older and have less time to devote to games if I'm forced to make a choice between an interesting mechanic and something that lets me achieve my goals quicker I almost always will take the quicker one of pure practicality in reality the amount of time saved could be pretty minimal but this psychological burden is very hard for me to ignore my next problem is when single-player games have a very strong positive feedback loop the obvious example is an option to increase experience or resources gained by investing in this early and leveling in an optimal way you can sort of outpace the difficulty scaling in the game besides of feeling like I'm forced to pick these options they often end up decreasing the difficulty in the later stages of the game the period when you're already understand the mechanics and would benefit from greater challenge often ends up being the easiest part solving the game can feel fun but in practice it often means that I lose interest during the climax though it can

still be fun I enjoy plants versus on but literally every single level I will do the same strategy and speaking of which the third problem I found is having an optimal strategy in advance Wars I could come up with a brilliant tactic to counter the enemy's composition or I could just build MEK infantry and gradually take over the whole map when a single strategy seems effective in every situation and there's a heavy penalty for failure such as losing an hour's progress I feel like I'm disincentivized from trying anything new to summarize for people like me finding a way to optimize the game can be an enjoyable challenge but can also feel like a curse that results in me having less choices of player taking fewer risks and theoretically having less fun it's not critical to avoid these men maxing traps in all games but if you want to help protect me from myself here are a few things to stay away from try to avoid increases resources gained mechanics unless

they're completely necessary try to prevent there being an optimal play style if a single strategy works every time there's no incentive for growth don't force the player to choose between fun and time efficiency it's just not even a choice for me our games are certainly not perfect in this regard but I found that this lens of will the player feel like they have no choice but to do this is a helpful tool when trying to find the fun gameplay loops in our games thank you very much Thank You Justin please welcome D hi a few things on the top I'm gonna make this talk as optimistic as possible I've tried to include as many existing in

recent examples from the indie game scene as possible to show it looks like when things start working my opinion but times it dips into industry examples okay this talk is gonna be about me hah so it's important for me to enter it start with Who I am especially especially for those of you in the back this is my face I'm D I'm a fun person my pronouns are they them she her I grew up in Chicago Illinois in the States I now live in Seattle Washington rock on uh I used to be a fedora kid my senior quote in the yearbook in high school was a quote from a goofy robot anime I really like the color purple and mustaches and I've been working in videogame communities for the past few years I got kind of a goofy smile on this one okay cool you all know me and Who I am so this is me and this is why I want you to think of me target me make me your target audience if you are a creator of games

systems design communities writing journalism as an indie who is not beholden to stakeholders target me higher diversity consultant and make me your target audience this is a cool Oh oops okay there we go cool I have dark skin in character generators make my brown skin the normal eyes choice when I open your character generator make brown skin one of the first things I see I don't want to scroll through to find brown skin target me I'm a second generation immigrant I'm Filipino American I will never be accepted as Filipino or as American fully I'm third culture target made I grew up in the so-called system of TACA see and have dealt with a lack of self-worth an unhealthy relationship with my value as a person my entire life if you make digital Interactive's target me I have a non-traditional relationship

with my body especially with regards to my appearance and presentation target me if I want to enforce the pronouns they them I want a game and system that does so respectfully target me I live in a political context that makes my lived experience much more arduous than is validated by the larger communities that surround and encompass me yet I choose to be optimistic and hopeful as hell target me target me in such a way that my existence is not a punchline it's great when the jokes I make are a punchline and sometimes funny but don't make my existence or attributes a punchline yes I acknowledge the possibilities when I use the phrase target me make me the target audience of your creation an individual can take this and ask can I make money off of me can I make money off of you can you use me as a mental or crave exercise for a few games and that's a little weird

if I think about it too hard but yes I acknowledge those possibilities but my favourite possibility that you can take away from this talk is can you make me excited with your next creation can you make me feel excited like as excited as I was the first time I felt like I belonged when I moderated MMORPG forums for this possibility I invite you to target me lastly target my students I teach programming to folks in the gender diverse population who are career changers adult as adults into the tech industry for the interested students I teach them about game making every day that I teach them I reminded of how they were prevented or invalidated from going into tech or games programming growing up and that they are hungry for it now I reminded of all the folks who want to play games that target them and haven't found those games so yes make games for yourself make games for your friends

make games for your knees but when you can consider hiring a diversity consultant and making a game that targets me thank you to all the games that have and continue to target me final notes before my time is up you save them and everything and speaking elevate your Ramon Raiders don't exploit people's traumas higher diversity consultants personnel health comes first you deserve a good quality of life thank you good night [Applause] Thank You D that was great all right move along we're on number eight here please welcome Frank [Applause] hello so yes in the game that I released last year I had a project called the

Toth sausage conjecture and about a month later I received this email from Toth's grandson they said how did you know about my grandfather's work this is amazing how did you know about the sausage conjecture are you are you a mathematician did you find out about it from another colleague at NYU would work with my grandfather and I'm definitely not a mathematician but I had a nice conversation with lászló tóth grandson and he was very excited and happy and that made me happy and so I thought I would spend my five minutes on the soapbox celebrating the work of this man Laszlo Fez Toth and maybe giving just a brief explanation of the Toth sausage conjecture first of all there are a couple there are a couple of other famous lászló tóth s-- one of them was a Hungarian geologist who thought that he was Jesus Christ and vandalized the Pieta the

other one was a fictional character created by the comedian Don Novello who wrote funny letters to celebrities and politicians but this is the lászló tóth that we are here to talk about Laszlo finished off a Hungarian mathematician who was someone who worked in the sort of higher order geometry he wrote books like regular figures which were full of beautiful images of patterns and shapes and and tiling systems and the sausage conjecture is a problem in the domain of sort of in the domain of the sphere packing problems and sphere packing problems are our problems in geometry that look at how you can efficiently pack lots of spheres together into a volume so it's sort of goes back to the sixteenth century when people would look at stacks of cannonballs and wonder is that the most efficient way to arrange

cannonballs in the case of the sausage conjecture Toth was looking at ways of wrapping spheres and the most efficient way to wrap spheres using the least amount of material so in this case we have a bunch of 2d spheres which are also called circles and so you look at these and say what's what's the most efficient way to wrap these if I'm using string let's say what's the way to arrange these spheres so that I have to use the least amount of string in order to wrap them up and it turns out that the right way to do it is to just line them up like this right like a sausage one after the next in a straight line and that's the most efficient way to wrap them until you get to seven then once you hit seven this is actually a slightly more efficient way to arrange the the the circles so what about spheres well in the case of spheres it the same thing holds true right

you'd line them up just like a sausage and to end there you go all the way up until you hit 56 and then at 56 all of a sudden this becomes the most efficient way to arrange them right and you might ask yourself what about a three sphere right what about a hypersphere in four dimensions and it turns out that yes just as you might expect somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 there's a there's a but we're not sure where but there's a spot where it becomes more efficient to not arrange a pan up through the first fifty thousand for sure you should just line them up or I don't know how to gesture in 4d space but you lined them you line them up like this but then at some point there's at some other arrangement that is more efficient and and so you might think now this is going to continue right and in the higher dimensions in five dimensions and six dimensions in subject you're always going to see something like this

where first you want to line them all up like this and then at a certain point there becomes a more efficient arrangement but Toth disagreed so toss theory was that starting at five dimensions it's always most efficient to line them up in a saw and it never changes so that is the sausage conjecture four four four dimensions five and above the sausage arraignment is is is always optimal no matter how many spheres that you are rapping so as it turns out we know for a fact that this is true four dimensions of 42 and above that has been proven everything between four and forty two it's we don't know but we think he's probably right that's what a conjecture is right and so that is the the taught sausage conjecture and just as an example of of what is kind of interesting about this it's relevant to cryptography and code so if you're for example if you're designing a language

sphere packing problems are actually really relevant to that because you want to pack as many words as you can into your language space but you also want them to be as far apart as they can be so that if you're sending a message over a noisy Channel the receiver has the best chance of interpreting each symbol correctly and so that is the the the toss sausage conjectured thank you bet you didn't think you're gonna learn about multidimensional sausages today thank you Frank please welcome our next speaker Rosa hello everyone I'm Rosa I'm a member of the co-operative digital

liberties and co-founder of the project games for the many I'm also that speaker that starts making everyone feel a little bit uncomfortable by bringing politics to a games event so as a Spanish games developer working living in the United Kingdom I'm going to start by mentioning a political event that over there was massive you might have heard about it the UK decided to leave the European Union in 2016 the general population voted to leave by about 52% in favor but a proced 80% of the games industry didn't want this on the day of the result a bunch of us went to the pub and we'd order drinks and remote and we said how did we contribute to this debate when all we make is games then last year a sudden general election was called and the British Labour Party came knocking to our door they wanted us to make a game that would teach people about their campaign pledges in a way

that anyone could understand and engage with so we kind of took this as an opportunity to stop moping and tried to contribute in the only way we knew how by making games that's how Corbin Run was made it's a short Arkady game about what Libra stood for during the election you play Jeremy Corbyn who is the leader of the Labour Party and she's on tax dodgers taking the money they stole and using it to fund campaign pledges as you go people join you until you build up a mass movement and together you overcome the opposing party the Conservatives it's really short it's funny we hope we weren't trying to paint a picture of suffering or make europa universalis but rather unpicked the complex web of politics and presented in a way that anyone could understand it went viral it was downloaded 150,000 times in one week and was covered across all major media in UK and some in Germany and Japan we

started calling games like ours campaign games a childhood news gains but tied to particular social or political campaigns so this is what we learned firstly simulation games have a high barrier to engagement so much discussion of serious games sent around what games can do by way of simulating real world systems and that this can be a valuable approach but the key to getting wide audience to share a game and making it go viral is that players can understand and get involved with the game as quickly as possible and simulation can be a bit too complicated to allow for the sort of engagement so instead pick expect mechanics which tell the political narrative you want to communicate so by combining simple expressive mechanics inspired by existing games we could create an easily legible engaging way to say what we wanted to say we got across a rhetorical point that was more abstract but also easier to grasp thirdly is that humor helps disarm people who might not otherwise agree with your point and it allows a broader

audience to enjoy your game we used memes humour and caricature to draw people in and it was this witty tone that why Corbin Ron broke through filter bubbles and had media pick it up and even allowed conservatives to play and enjoy it we hope so art has historically been used as a platform for engaging in political conversation from Murali's MoMA Ficano the futurist Dada the situation is and while games are not the answer to everything and neither should they be I'm not saying that I think games can and should form a rich new mode of discourse that allows us to comment on and question our political landscape in illuminating new ways so we're at the beginning of a burgeoning movement of campaign games we have fiscal combat in France Tehran Taipei and campaign games are on the threshold of having a major impact on political campaigns worldwide so we feel proud that Corbin Ron had a real-world impact on British politics and we think what we managed to do shows

a path forward for developers all over the world to use games to participate in political movements we believe that by making an impact on the political landscape across the world proving that games can be influential as more than just mass popcorn entertainment we can earn games of place on the wider cultural table and try to reach a more secure future for a medium thank you [Applause] Thank You Rosa was that margaret thatcher's ghost in the game recognize that ghost anywhere all right please welcome our final speaker Ethan [Applause] so I'm here to talk to you today about the brightest future right it's what I call the moral imperative for trying hard doing difficult things and for

coolness basically in both aesthetic and modality but before I get too deep into it I just wanna slap a big ol imo on this whole thing they asked me to give a rant which was a mistake I intend to give one there will be some strong opinions and some unsubstantiated claims so don't at me so yeah Who am I I'm Ethan Redd I'm founder and creative lead of virtuoso neo media we are a new production house focusing on bringing color and fun and life-affirming charm to what we create our current project is blazing legion ignition a first-person shmup drama about a four-story taller mecha and consequences and just here's some other stuff i've made so you get a flavor of me but enough about me i'm here to talk to you today about like nothing really technical or even immediately applicable but i'm here to talk to you about attitude and specifically one that i've noticed this last maybe two years or so that i've playfully dubbed weak wave

where it's like this weird demon baby of post-modernism and can't do ism right there's so much defeatism we have like almost as fetish type relationship with failure excessive self deprecation cynicism and irony for their own sake there's there's nothing wrong with these traits by themselves right but taken together and as a matter of course i hate this and it is antithetical to what i think art is supposed to do to be and don't get me wrong it is very difficult to be an optimist in the year of our Lord 2018 right around the world we are facing so many rich and complicated issues and to me just look at this country we have a flamin hot cheeto for our president we have we've seen the rise of nationalism we have almost weekly mass shootings and police brutality we have people drinking lead water for God's sake right like we're facing some really hard stuff it is a very scary time to be alive but that is not why we

should crawl into our own shells that is why we should be bold because we are the artists the thinkers the dreamers of dreams right we paint the cultural landscape that everyone else lives in and the world right now needs inspiration they need to see champions and need heroes they need hope and I think we have a lot to contribute you know as artists as game makers whatever we need to redefine what we consider possible both in our craft and in our own lives because people are watching right I like the example of a Tony Hawk landing the first 900 in 1999 it was an impossible trick at the time but has since become standard in vert skating at this level because kids grew up watching him doing more than what they thought was possible and aspired to that level we need to do amazing things because they are difficult and because those kids and our peers are watching we need to bring our best to inspire that in

others like the heroin-addicted kung fu master still looking and seeing potential and a young street urchin who would go on to be one of the greatest action filmmakers of his time and inspire one of the greatest action filmmakers of all time in my humble opinion we need to aim higher in our own work and in our fictions that we create we all love to rag on Star Trek for how can't be colorful and weird it was back in the 60s right but it dared to ask the question what if things were better what if we could get along what if we could invent solutions to our problems instead of just complaining about them and it inspired civil rights activists like Martin Luther King to technologists like the creators of the first cell phones and home computers that we all use these days inspired real world change we have more to contribute to this world than depression memes samey games and just like being sad about stuff like it's

hard right now but we can we can improve things we can inspire people who can make a tangible impact on this world even though our work maybe doesn't we are tomorrow and I refuse to live in a world where that's a step backwards from today I refuse virtuosa refuses I invite you to as well because the future is as bright as we make it thank you forever [Applause] [Applause] Thank You Ethan you you crushed it that that wraps it up for the soapbox and the independent game summit please be sure to fill out your feedback forms to let us know how we did and we hope to see you again next year but before we go let's have one final round of applause for all of our amazing speakers [Applause]