A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the second half of Saturday at the PRACTICE conference at NYU thanks to a very generious invitation from a friend. When I first heard about the conference, I was excited by the prospect of a game design conference in NYC, but was turned off by the price tag. But having gotten a taste for this conference, I’m confident I will fork over the money to attend next year.
Overall, I was really blown away by the quality and depth of discussion. It was a much smaller group than something like GDC, and I felt the passion for game design as a craft and life-long pursuit really permeated the atmosphere. I arrived toward the end of the panel on Saturday morning, and caught some words of wisdom from Richard Lemarchand which set the tone for my brief time there. He said something to the effect that a game designer should not hold on to a single philosophy of game design, but rather he should see games through the lenses of as many different design philosophies as possible. This was underscored by the juxtaposition of Dan Cook’s presentation on the creation of games as “value engines” (which I will get into more depth below) and Tracy Fullerton’s presentation of her game based on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. I don’t know if it was intentional by the conference organizers, or by chance, but I can’t imagine two back-to-back talks with a more different approach to game design. Yet both were very thoughtful and fascinating in their own right.
I have been a long time fan of Dan Cook ever since I found his amazing Lost Garden game design blog. I have gotten a great deal of inspiration from what he has written about game design over the years. Dan’s talk did not disappoint in the slightest. You can read a good summary of the talk here so I won’t bother to summarize the talk. Instead, I want to highlight and discuss a couple of his points.
Continue reading Reflections on PRACTICE