Wonderlab: Exploring The Future Of Games

A 3 day event called Wonderlab was held last month that saw creative artists from the field of gaming, theatre, digital and performance come together to explore the role of digital tools and ethics of play in games of the future.

By the end of the event, the experts were able to design a few games, explore the ethics of game design and present a new game to an invited audience to understand designing games that forced its players to learn to “read” them and exploit the inner knowledge of both the players and game developers.

Tom Armitage, the lead developer for BERG, was one of the participants and chronicles the event in his blog. Here’s a short excerpt:

The Lab fostered a growing literacy of games, considering “literacy” as Alan Kay did – the ability to read and write in a given medium. One overriding theme was the ethics of game-design. It’s a huge topic, especially in this post-Jesse-Schell  universe, and we explored it very thoroughly in some of the sessions. By the end, we’d designed both a game you could only lose, and a game where everybody would win. We created rules that were, in the real world, entirely unethical, but within the closed system of the game we were playing not only ethical but effectively irrelevant.

A short video of Wonderlab 2010:

Wonderlab

BergLondon: “Wonderlab”

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