Experimental Gameplay Workshop

The First Experimental Gameplay took place at the 2002 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California.

2002 Presentations:

gameLab's Arcadia
Eric Zimmerman
ARCADIA is made up of tiny little faux-Atari 2600 games that are incredibly simple to play. But the player plays all four games at the same time, creating a strangely de-centered gameplay experience. Every game has three "lives" and when you run out of lives in one of the games, the entire game is over. Right now there are six different mini-games, four of which are shuffled into place each game.
definition six's Climbing Game
Chris Hecker

The climbing game is an experiment in direct control over a human body and its limbs. Instead of laying an abstract interface over the motions of a body like most games, we allow the player to drag and position limbs directly, with a "body knowledge" subsystem that will [hopefully] keep the climber moving in an intuitive and predictably human way. The goal is to capture the rhythm of movement and stress/relief cycles of rock climbing. The core gameplay goal of the game is based on analogy: if climb A and climb B feel different to a real rock climber, then playing a version of A (call it A') and a version of B (B') in the game should feel the same quality of difference, so in SAT analogy notation, A:B::A':B'. If this actually works out, then it should be possible to implement real-world climbs in the game and have the target players (real-world amateur rock climbers) feel the similarities at an intuitive and deep level.

The screenshot shows the work in progress. All development so far has been on the underlying movement system. Well, that and the realtime BSSRDF renderer, as you can see from the shot.

Air Guitar
Jonathan Blow

You play Air Guitar by standing in front of a webcam and, well, strumming along to your favorite songs (you can play to songs you rip yourself, or to songs that come with the game). You play concerts and attempt to entertain crowds of people with varying and conflicting interests. The main goal of this game is to allow you to control your game character just by moving your body. We all have a lifetime's worth of experience at moving our bodies around, so this should prove to be an intuitive, and yet intricate, way of controlling a game. Air Guitar seeks to improve on previous rhythm and beat-matching games by paying attention to the subtleties of the player's motion.

Frontier Exploration Game
Doug Church
Exploration has been a key ingredient of many fun and successful computer games. However, it is usually an important adjunct, rather than the primary mechanic. Frontier changes that. There are plenty of interesting ways the player can impact the progress of an exploration, and here we put those choices into the player's hand, in a flexible and fast environment which encourages intuition and risk-taking, not painstaking analysis and manual reading.
The Outcome of the 0th Annual Indie Game Jam
Chris Hecker, Austin Grossman and Mystery Speaker

In the Indie Game Jam, a whole bunch of experienced game programmer/designers get together for 3 days and work their asses off. The goal is for each participant to create a small game with new and interesting gameplay, based around a specific theme. Participants are provided with a pre-written codebase, implementing the core functionality necessary for a game of this theme.

The theme of this first Indie Game Jam is a secret, but it is very cool! Come to the Workshop if you want to find out what it is. (Though if you miss the Workshop, results of the Jam will assuredly be posted on the net).

During this presentation, the games produced will be shown, and a meta-discussion of the Jam will happen also (how well it went, how it can be improved for next year, how you can do one in your own home town!)

The list of particpants in the Jam is something like this: