Key takeaways
- The 2015 session featured Thumper, Parable of the Polygons and Earth Primer, alongside a run of novel-controller games.
- The hall stayed open afterwards so the audience could play the prototypes directly.
- The presentation on That Dragon, Cancer ended in a standing ovation, and the organisers described it as one of the most affecting moments in the session’s history.
Most workshop line-ups are remembered for a game. The 2015 session is remembered for a presentation, which is unusual enough to be worth explaining.
The games
Thumper was shown before release – a rhythm game built around speed and menace rather than music-game friendliness. Parable of the Polygons, an interactive explainer about how mild individual preferences produce severe collective segregation, demonstrated that a playable argument can carry a piece of social science. Earth Primer took the educational simulation and made it something you play with rather than read.
Alongside those, the session ran a set of games built around unusual controllers, including Line Wobbler, SoundSelf and Curiouser and Curiouser. The hall was kept open for two hours after the session so people could actually play them, which is not standard practice and matters for physical-input work that cannot be understood from a projector.
Why novel controllers keep appearing
A new input device is the cheapest way to produce a genuinely new interaction, and the hardest thing to show in a conference slot. A game played with a length of LED strip, or with your own voice, does not communicate on a slide. That is why the 2015 format – demonstrate briefly, then let the room play – has become the standard approach for this category.
The presentation people remember
The team behind That Dragon, Cancer presented, screening a documentary about their work, and delivered a post-mortem about making a game about their son’s illness. By the organisers’ own account, it left the room in tears and ended in a standing ovation – described afterwards as one of the most affecting things in the session’s thirteen-year history at that point.
It is worth being careful about what that demonstrates. A session built to test whether unusual mechanics work is not obviously the right venue for a personal account of grief, and putting them on the same bill is either a category error or the point.
Our reading is that it was the point. The workshop’s brief is approaches to interactivity that have not been tried, and a game that asks the player to inhabit something unbearable is precisely that – an interaction design problem, solved or not solved, in public.
What the year says about the format
By 2015 the session had been running for thirteen years and had settled into a shape that could hold all of this at once: a commercial rhythm game, an academic argument, a teaching tool and a bereavement. No other slot at the conference could have programmed those four things together without it reading as incoherent.
Showing a physical-input game on a projector is a category error, and the fix costs nothing but floor space. Every conference that still gets this wrong could copy the 2015 arrangement tomorrow.
One-dimensional games and other constraints
Line Wobbler is played on a single strip of LEDs – a game with one dimension of space and a door handle spring as a controller. It is the clearest example of what the novel-controller strand of the session is for: a constraint so severe that the design has to be invented rather than adapted.
SoundSelf used voice as the input. Curiouser and Curiouser, which had already picked up festival attention, worked on similar ground. None of these are describable in a screenshot, which is precisely why the session kept the hall open afterwards.
A playable argument
Parable of the Polygons deserves its own note, in a year that otherwise looked like the 2011 session with better hardware. It is an interactive explainer about segregation, built on a model showing that small individual preferences aggregate into severe collective outcomes. You play it in a browser in five minutes and you come out understanding a piece of social science you could have read about and not absorbed.
Putting it in a games session rather than an academic one was the right call. It is not a game about a topic; it is a demonstration that interactivity can carry an argument that prose carries badly.
What the open hall changed
Two hours of hands-on time after the session is a different kind of event from a talk. It converts an audience into testers, gives the presenters real reactions rather than applause, and lets work that cannot be understood from a seat get understood.
Our view is that this is the single most copyable thing about the 2015 format, and the thing most conference sessions still get wrong. Showing a physical-input game on a projector is a category error, and the fix costs nothing but floor space.
Images: Drool, via the Thumper Steam store page.