Recap: Two5six 2014

This past Friday in Brooklyn, New York, Kill Screen hosted its second annual Two5six conference, bringing together minds from the world of video games with outside voices in related fields. The format was similar to last year's event, but in a different location and, unless I missed it, it was not livestreamed. There were talks about sound design, voice acting, and spatial narrative, among others. Kill Screen founder Jamin Warren moderated the entire 8-hour event, and once again showcased his skills as both an interviewer and a facilitator. I always think it's a shame when there's a panel on the stage and each one of them speaks exclusively to the moderator, but this year at Two5six there were more than a few instances of panelists *gasp* talking to one another.

I wouldn't say anything at Two5six 2014 totally bowled me over, but it was a fun, engaging day of on-stage discussions, off-stage chatting, and some pretty delicious doughnuts. I'd like to reiterate my fondness for the speaker pairings both from audience experience and conference design perspectives. In many cases, I was familiar with the "game" people, their games, and what they think about their games, but was almost universally not aware of the speakers they were setup with. This brought new contextual understanding to the games side of things, while also framing games as part of culture with radio, museums, and experimental film. Plus Kill Screen is actually able to leverage some recognizable names as draws to the conference while insuring they aren't just going to be retreading old material. Kill Screen has already begun recapping many of the talks from the conference on their website, so even if you didn't go, there's a chance to see what you missed.

I'm not sure what I really want from conferences anymore except maybe the opportunity to meet people I don't normally talk to, and I was definitely afforded that opportunity at Two5six. On one hand, the speakers almost all stuck around for most of the conference, open to conversation during breaks or for establishing contact at a later date. On the other, I got to hang out with fellow audience members, particularly other freelance writers, in what became an informal sub-convening of our particular niche in the industry. Two5six affords a certain kinship among people who work in and around games, and it's strength is, at least symbolically, forging those connections outside of just interactive software. It might not seem like must-go, must-see kind of conference, but what is? I imagine you'll get different answers depending on what each person was looking to get out of it. From where I'm sitting, Two5six does a pretty bang-up job of doing what it sets out to do.

Blips: Approaching Critical Mass

Source: Critical Proximity

OK, I'm getting back on the horse this week, and I'd like to begin by highlighting last week's Critical Proximity conference. I'm still digging through all of the material presented during the series of talks, but it's an amazing collection of game critics speaking passionately about their practice. On the Critical Proximity website, you can watch the archived livestream of the entire day or click on individual talks to watch video presentations and read full-text transcripts. The video quality on the livestream is too low to follow along with presenters' slideshows, but the audio is plenty functional. As for the talks themselves, I was afraid going in that this series would end up being mostly critics sounding off on their well-worn platforms of choice, but instead I've been quite surprised at the diversity and originality of thought from every talk I've taken in. Conference organizer Zoya Street led things off with a charge for game criticism to be more of a conversation and less of a solitary endeavor, which set the precedent for the bevy of speakers to follow. There are too many great ones to list them all, but Zolani Stewart's presentation on the importance of weird games and the necessity of being critical of the video game industry's capitalist underpinnings, resonated pretty strongly with me. Hopefully we'll see another round of talks next year, and some forward progress on the topics at hand in the meantime.

I'm also happy to report that the weekly game crit curation website Critical Distance has reached its monthly Patreon goal. Senior Curator Kris Ligman gave a talk at the Critical Proximity as well about the process of composing the site's weekly round-ups and what goes into the decision-making process of whose writing gets highlighted and whose doesn't. Best of luck to Kris going forward; Critical Distance is an incredible resource.

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Blips: Conference Chic

Source: How to Be Visibly Femme in the Games Industry
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

So there's a big video game conference coming up –what are you going to wear? There aren't great official standards place for many of these sorts of events (for better or worse), so it's up to you to figure this out for yourself. Maddy Myers just posted an article on Paste where she recounts what it's like to attend these types of events as a woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated environment and how clothing selection plays such a profound role in how seriously you're taken by your peers. Jeans and t-shirts are considered "professional" attire (or "professionally casual," really), a notion that feels unique to the game industry –a concept born of the programmer man-cave perhaps. In contrast, to appear "cute" is to be disempowered, and unfortunately there's a lot of truth in that, which, as Myers explains, makes for an uphill battle for a woman of short stature in a crowd of dudes. Myers story is deeply personal and touching. She talks about how she's felt pressured to dress like "one of the guys," despite more recent inclinations to don more femme attire. Please give the whole story a read; you might even learn a bit about certain fashion trends along the way (I did).

Blips: The Lovin' Spoonful

Source: UX Week 2013 / Ian Bogost / Fun
Author: Ian Bogost
Site: Vimeo (Adaptive Path)

At this year's UX Week conference, game designer and professor Ian Bogost gave a talk about the meaning of "fun." The context is worth noting here, which Bogost does early on in the video you can see above. This is a conference for "user experience" designers, which is seen as a separate industry from games, except where game companies hire UX designers to work on parts of their games (i.e. the menus). The backstory is that because of gamification initiatives and the creeping notion that making anything into a game makes it more fun, folks from non-game industries are looking to game people to show them how to make their products more game-like and thus more fun. Sounds pretty good, if things actually worked that way.

Bogost's core analogy is how the old Mary Poppin's jingle, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," is like when a company applies game elements (fun) to something that is perceived as not fun. A spoonful of sugar with medicine doesn't make it seem like you're just eating a bunch of sugar, at best it just makes the medicine taste slightly less terrible. It doesn't make taking medicine something that you enjoy, and it might even sour your taste for raw sugar by association. The same goes for gamification. If you're told that the menial task you need to accomplish is now a game, your mind might be distracted enough by the game elements that you forget that you actually hate what you're doing, but the notion that that task will be miraculously transformed into something fun is highly unlikely.

I'd encourage you to check out the whole presentation where Bogost goes on to dissect what we're actually saying when we call something "fun." It's a shorthand, often delivered as a formality for identifying something as satisfactory, but unremarkable. It's a word with an ambiguous referent, the same way saying "I'm fine" doesn't, on it's own, tell use very much about your current condition. Ultimately fun is born out of a respect for what you're doing and being allowed the space to be playful within that activity. If one behaves as if "at play," but they have no respect for the activity or the greater purpose for which they're doing what they're doing, then that person won't have fun doing it. The larger lesson is not to make things games to make them fun, but to present things as what they are, in hopes that the respect for the medium at hand can be fun for those who elect to make it so.

Recap: Twofivesix: A Videogame Arts + Culture Conference

Twofivesix, Kill Screen's first ever video game arts and culture conference, took place this past Saturday at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, New York. Unlike the large-scale, multi-day productions of a typical technology-centric conference, Twofivesix was an intimate, focused affair that was able to say its piece over the course of just a single day. Granted, it was a long day, but refreshingly paced with breaks, complimentary refreshments, and friendly chatter. The result was a tight, fun gathering of game thinkers.

A large part of the conference's success can be attributed to its thematic, conversational format. This saw on-stage pairings between Journey executive producer Robin Hunicke and MoMA curator Paola Antonelli under the banner of "Games as Interaction" and Dance Central project director Matt Boch with Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey in a session titled "The Controller is Dead." All the while, Kill Screen co-founder Jamin Warren drove conversation forward, interspersing targeted questions with supplemental humor that really helped to keep the presentations agile and charming. In fact, props to Warren for holding the stage down for the better part of 8 hours.

As is usual with presentations of this sort, my biggest takeaways stemmed from the topics that I knew the least about. I was fascinated by Jeff Lin's account of the tribunal system in League of Legends. Lin's team at Riot Games asked their own community for direction on behavioral standards and enacted a transparent disciplinary system designed to help players learn from mistakes. Did you know that the majority of "toxic behavior" in LoL is not from trolls or spammers but from infrequent incidents by a large portion of "normal" players in accumulation? It's true. Riot Games uses this data to skew the behavioral psychology of their gigantic player base. Having Lin on stage with Chris Poole, founder of notorious Internet netherrealm 4chan, was a genius move as well, and made for a great comparison of community management styles.

The vibe of the Invisible Dog Art Center was befitting the carefully curated DIY ambiance of Twofivesix. The venue looked a bit rundown, like the owners claimed squatters rights sometime not that long ago, but the aesthetic was also rustic and nicely complemented by an art exhibition of pencil drawings and miniature dioramas. It all seemed purposeful. The conference took place up on the second floor which was just one big room. The whole scene reminded me of when I saw Gang Gang Dance play in what seemed to be an unfinished loft in Philadelphia in 2005, but with nerds instead of music weirdos (I identify with both by the way).

Key to any enthusiast gathering is a welcoming, conversational atmosphere, which Twofivesix did its best to provide. I chatted it up with journalists, developers, volunteers, presenters, students, and advocates over brisket sandwiches and Vietnamese iced coffee. Because food, drinks, and restrooms were all accessible within the second floor conference area, most attendees stuck around, only sneaking out for smoke breaks. The sporadic downpours also contributed to most people opting to hang inside between talks. Twofivesix's attendance was a little over a couple hundred people, if I had to guess. It was a good number. Seats were relatively full, but not jam-packed. The crowd felt like it was part of a little community, which is not always the case at larger events.

There were no Q/A sections following talks, so it was up to attendees to make the most of those conversational in-between segments. If there was something you wanted to ask a speaker, you had to engage directly as if approaching any other conference-goer. Most presenters actually stuck around for the duration of the conference, which made it a little disappointing for the few who did not. Busy schedules, I understand, but the tone of Twofivesix was such that even the folks on stage didn't come off as hierarchically "above" the masses. For what it's worth, the stage was a relatively low height as well.

I hope Kill Screen puts on another Twofivesix next year. I'd be curious to see what they'd decide to keep or change. I vouch for the return of the beef brisket, oh, and the thematic pairings of speakers from different industries; that too.

:images from Kill Screen: