Experimental Gameplay Workshop 2008
Call for Participation

Introduction

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is an annual gathering of innovation-minded game developers, hosted at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The EGW features many different kinds of games, including prototype demos (such as the Indie Game Jam games), shipped products (such as Katamari Damacy and MojibRibbon), and student demos. There’s always a bit of lecturing and discussion as well.

If you’re pushing the boundaries of traditional gameplay, we encourage you to submit your work using the entry form below. The submission deadline is Tuesday January 15, 2008.

Purpose

Our goals are to:

Showcase experimental, creative, non-traditional designs and ideas;
Evangelize the process of gameplay experimentation;
Galvanize the community of experimental game developers;
Advance computer game design as a craft and art form.

Today's mainstream game industry provides almost no support for experimentation in game design. Experimentation involves risk, and the industry is very risk-averse. But for the field to remain healthy, risks must be taken somewhere, and we must learn from the successes as well as the failures.

The Workshop strives to support risk-taking and to provide channels for communicating the results. We aim to legitimize and popularize gameplay-oriented research and development.

What Is Experimental Gameplay?

The boundaries of gameplay experimentalism are hard to delineate. The best we can do is to give some examples of things that are inside and outside of our domain, in order to illustrate the workshop's philosophy. We often deal with:

Innovative user interfaces that use natural language processing, image recognition, gestural control, new hardware devices, and the like.
Generative games, where the gameplay or world is dynamically generated based on choices the player makes.
Gameplay based on the emotions of (and interactions between) non-player-characters, where the player influences the characters to achieve some goal.
Interactive storytelling, where the plot or dialog of the game changes in a fine-grained manner (in contrast with more typical discrete "branching points").
Subtle emergent gameplay, where game systems interact to provide evolving situations. Physics-based gameplay would be an example of this. Another example would be a game with complex interpersonal interactions, like alliances and feuds between groups.
Novel sorts of multiplayer interactions -- online, at the same machine, with wireless devices, using image recognition, or whatever.

The workshop does not deal with:

New, strange, or "edgy" background stories, settings, character designs, artwork, audio, or plots that do not affect the core gameplay in a major way.
New hybrids of already-existing genres, unless the resulting gameplay is unexpectedly more than the sum of the parts.
Games targeted for under-served audiences, like games for girls, seniors, or 37-year old Antarcticans, but where the gameplay itself is not experimental.
Purely technical innovation, experimental business models or distribution mechanisms that do not affect gameplay.

The above guidelines are vague and incomplete, as new and experimental things will by definition fall outside existing preconceptions. Don't hesitate to contact the workshop organizers with questions. You may also wish to see what was presented during previous workshops; click here for the 2006 workshop, or here for the 2005 workshop.

We recognize that not all experiments are successful; designers learn from failure as well as success. There is no requirement that submitted gameplay experiments be "fun" ("fun" being one definition of "successful gameplay"), but they should be interesting.

There are no constraints on game budgets, team size, on whether the game has a publisher or has been published already, or on the target platform. Submissions do not have to be finished games, but having a playable demo is important. It is possible that a submission could be accepted without a running game as illustration, but this would be an exceptional case.

Proposals are accepted at the sole discretion of the judges.

Submission Form

To give us a good idea of what your game is like, please fill out this section and email it to the address below. We will respond with great haste and discuss.

Send completed questionnaire to workshop2008@number-none.com.
As a spam-prevention measure, you may be sent a follow-up email, 
which you must reply to in order for your submission to be received.

1. Name of Game

2. Description of Game (300 words or less).

3. Explanation of how the core gameplay is experimental (30 words or less).

4. Current phase of completion / Expected phase of completion at
   workshop time.  Please be descriptive of the level of functionality
   present in the game; don't simply give a number indicating time 
   remaining or percentage complete.

5. Give more detail on the gameplay experiment you are performing
   (take as much space as you need for this).  Why is this experiment 
   important?  What does it bring to games that is not already ubiquitous?

6. How will you know whether the experiment is a success?  What
   problems and limitations might arise?  What do these limitations mean
   for future incarnations of this kind of gameplay?

7. URL for Additional Info (downloads / info files / movies / etc.)

8. Special Notes: Does your presentation require any unusual equipment
   or preparations?  Is there anything you feel needs to be said that
   was not covered in this entry form?

Submission Deadline

Please send the completed questionnaire to workshop2008@number-none.com no later than Tuesday January 15, 2008. We encourage you to send it sooner than that, if you can.

Workshop Participation

Accepted speakers will be asked to give a 10-15 minute presentation about their game. All speakers should arrive with a completed, high-density presentation (slides and demo) and be prepared to answer questions about the content presented.

In addition, speakers must attend the Game Developers Conference 2008, where the workshop is being held. If this is not possible, we can make arrangements to present in your absence.