Kill Screen Magazine Hosts Two5Six Conference on Games with Great Success

Kill Screen Magazine Hosts Two5Six Conference on Games with Great Success

Photos by Helen Han from the Twofivesix conference on May 11th, 2013

Located in a gallery called the Invisible Dog Art Center, where fine sculptures and photography are displayed, the introductory sign reads “ALL DAY TWO5SIX VIDEO GAMES ARTS CONFERENCE”. The conference awaits us upstairs, filled with experts, students, and otherwise friends of Kill Screen, emerging with an avid interest in video games. Stepping inside, I am undeterred by how fine art is presented alongside games culture. I can tell the dialogue is going to be fairly far beyond what I’m used to.

Trying something completely different, Jamin Warren and everyone else at Kill Screen put together an unlikely conference called Twofivesix. The conference featured eleven talks filled with spontaneous bursts of politics, engineering, and play. Uniquely, all but three of the scheduled speakers and interviews were paired from very dissimilar departments. Warren’s warmth and knowledge supplanted humor and introspection during his interviewing, though there were moments of straightforwardness.

Jeffrey Yohalem of Far Cry 3 – “I think we’ve got this whole range that we can work within to create meaning.”

The challenge, as he posits, is where is there a place where you can explore ideas, without necessarily having to be a game designer? From there, my mind began to expand. Can we gather our perspectives, learn something new, and form a different angle or are we fixed in what we know now? Is evaluation of the medium inert when we’re left to our own devices? Do we even have a choice in our own creations?

Where do our choices go when we world build anyway?

Paola Antonelli of MoMA – “The way one appreciates design […] it’s a work of synthesis. […] And it’s not only function or utility, sometimes it’s emotion. You know, sometimes it’s like the aesthetic experience. So there is that sense of adding something to the world that I think is very important.

His guest list ranged from industry folks steeped in code for more than a dozen decades, CEOs of startups that have supported the games industry, proponents of play for America’s youth, and sports enthusiasts outside of gaming lending their expertise to competitive gaming. The stage was open to professors, outdoorsmen, professors, curators, publishers, painters, designers, and architects to communicate how gaming’s past and present effected them, and by proxy, us.

Yohalem – “Maybe these addictive, fun loops are bad for us […] Maybe this makes us into Norma Desmond.”

But before the talks begin all the way to its end—barring the few toddlers who also joined the attendants—many listeners have known or been present for the evolution of games and what went into them. Let us listen to ancillary topics, that when it comes to a massive population and their experience in an MMO or a tablet game, all the way to a specific visage of Mark Cerny working on something in his youth, we’re already getting the references. The stimulation to learn more about the world and ourselves presents itself.

Jeffrey Lin of Riot Games – “If you look at the same player who’s playing a normal game of League of Legends or a ranked game of League of Legends, exact same person, but behaviors change. And it really shows you how context can really twist behaviors.”

Briefly, towards the tail end, Warren lays down a brief ‘what if?’ situation of flooding after we’ve all received Flash Flood alerts. Therefore some of the faces we’ve seen thus far are given survivalist leadership roles. These are obviously riffs on just the surface of what we’ve delved into during their presentations, yet suddenly I really like this lifeboat.

We’re in the Noah’s Ark of gaming and studies on gaming and I can’t be happier.

Rod Humble of Linden Lab, Everquest – “The thing about [the Voynich Manuscript] is it’s the spectacle of a mystery. […] And I’m on the mystery’s side. I don’t want anybody to solve it.”

So far, I’ve heard about sculptures and 19th century literature right next to Wong Kar Wai’s process where Chungking Express and Fallen Angels originated. Stage directions that are meant to take you out of the experience and building a house in the woods for eight days are things you can sign up for. Numbers for a baseball statistician’s dream ledger to the dynamic on a study of teenage boys choosing their own path to perform better in schools while not giving up video games are up on the internet. Noting the niche for video games to first be curated into the Museum of Modern Art had already existed under Interaction Design, and Valve’s Source engine supporting a voyeuristic Bergman experience is soon to be released on Steam.

Bill Squadron, Bloomberg Sports – “It’s really hard for people to think of things that they haven’t seen, and that’s why people who do have that creative vision— they have to sometimes fight their way through. But, you know, they can make that real difference.”

As a refrain, I am in a beautiful candy store. This is it. I approach Tim Schafer and he thanks me cleverly for being a backer. We part after an impromptu photo. I talk to others about pitches big and small on Kickstarter while the co-founder in person defends their growing diversity in a pie chart to the owner of Foursquare. They share compatibility nods. The data supports their endeavor. And with one grandparent at a time, the Oculus Rift is here to change the paradigm of virtual reality.

Constance Steinkuehler, Univ. of Wisconsin – “The reason is that most game text is at high school level or up. So we gave [the student subjects] text that they should never have been able to handle, but they got to choose the topic. And this time what we found is that when you allow them to choose the text, struggling readers and non-struggling readers—the difference completely goes away.”

The attendees are escorted to endless snacks and refreshments on a rotating basis. Then, once we’re told the event will continue to a selection of indie games downstairs in the gallery and of course, drinks, we get what we’re promised. Outdoors in a walled garden (only literally, since figuratively anyone can walk in and out) some mill about in the wake of an earlier flash flood and it’s so not Los Angeles that it’s almost jarring. Not unlike the video games conference, taking place inside an art gallery that still has its collection up. The juxtaposition doesn’t go unnoticed by the audience, and we’re the better for it. Can you imagine?

Andy Hunter, Electric Literature – “I don’t think that giving players rewards is inherently bad. I think like anything else […] it’s a tool at your disposal. And as a creator, you can use it well.”

Prevalent is the cynicism of player behavior, but we also love the medium. The community is evolving as it’s surprised us. Self-regulation along with positive reinforcement are both things that happen to this day. Our faith is restored like the bold building blocks we thought them to be. Where did that immutable cynicism go?

Even the creator of DrawQuest is here to tell us how the community doesn’t truly benefit from constant moderation. Lin tells us how he believes anonymity is not what drives bad behavior.

Nicholas Felton, Daytum – “If you’ve done a good job representing the data, people will see it as a mirror. They will recognize themselves in it.”

Inevitably, Journey comes up. Surveying the audience, a quick show of hands belonging to people who’ve played it pops up and nearly the entire room is filled with a sense of knowing. Where else are you going to get that around here? A majority of people present can see its depth, willing and able to talk that to death, with both Robin Hunicke and Kellee Santiago of the game’s dev team who’ve since moved on also present to do the same.

Dave Merrill, Sifteo – “If the Rubix Cube were invented for this interface, that’s what it would look like.”

Perhaps it’s time to bring it all in, video games are essentially a cross-section of such a vast scope of interdisciplinary works that we have to discuss so much more than we initially see. The commonality between us is that we are all invested and it’s time we showed that.

Below, where the beverages and games are, lays an amalgam of industry people open for a 4-player session of Monaco or an in-depth discourse on Time Til Dick and obscure western European army tanks. The creator of BaraBariBall noticed that players might need instructions so he laminated a couple sheets. Then we brought up the intricacies of DiveKick. We agreed that game will go farther than its criticisms. I learned that Bastion’s production had no interference from Warner Bros. giving them the freedom to make what they want to in a small team and how cool Transistor is going to be.

Tim Schafer, Double Fine – “When [Iron Brigade] finally came out, with all its mechs and shooters, it still had a lot of heart. I think that all of our games have a lot of heart in them. You see the love of every alien that you shoot.”

And maybe, if you’re anything like me and you stay a little longer, you get to hear about just how close to Catherine that Far Cry 3 initially was that Yohalem was surprised no one’s brought it up to him. In addition, we’re all here to find new experiences together, whether after it’s been made easier to be good by way of the Tribunal, or we’re diving our hands right into a pile of Sifteo cubes because our hands aren’t made to be flat, we’ll be sure to track our peaks and valleys over our entire lives outside of chat logs.

Unintentional as it may be, the running theme of this conference of abandoning our in-game norms coincided with Kill Screen’s upcoming issue the seventh, titled The Great Outdoors. You can find previous works here in their shop.

The entire Twofivesix conference was archived on Twitch.tv and can be found streaming here.

For a brief rundown of when is what, check below:

• 00:23:41 – 00:29:38 – Intro by Jamin Warren
• 00:29:40 – 01:02:32 – “Storytelling for the Next 100 Years” with Andy Hunter, Publisher of Electric Literature and Jeffrey Yohalem, Lead Writer of Far Cry 3
• 01:02:47 – 01:32:12 – “Games as Interaction” with Robin Hunicke, Co-Founder of Funomena and Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design at MoMA
• 01:59:14 – 02:27:20 – “Online Communities and Growing Pains” with Chris Poole, Founder of DrawQuest and Jeffrey Lin, Lead Designer of Social Systems of Riot Games
• 02:28:34 – 03:03:56 – “Rod Humble Keynote” with Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab
• 04:49:00 – 05:16:15 – “Sport and Digital Domains” with Bill Squadron, President of Bloomberg Sports and Mike Sepso, Co-Founder of Major League Gaming
• 05:15:29 – 05:47:47 – “The Education Sandbox” with Zach Klein, CEO of DIY and Constance Steinkuehler, Asst. Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 05:48:13 – 06:16:19 – “Can Good Game Design Give Us What We Want?” with Christopher Paretti, Former Head of Design, GREE and Nicholas Felton, Former Designer at Facebook
• 06:34:37 – 07:05:08 – “The Controller is Dead” with Matt Boch, Project Director of Dance Central 3 and Palmer Luckey, Creator of Oculus Rift
• 07:08:30 – 07:26:40 – “Enchanting Everyday Things” with Dave Merrill, Co-Founder of Sifteo
• 07:27:05 – 07:51:49 – “Playful Creativity” with Yancey Strickler, Co-Founder of Kickstarter and Dennis Crowly, Co-Founder of Foursquare
• 08:12:11 – 08:55:34 – “Tim Schafer Keynote” with Tim Schafer, Founder of Double Fine

Afterwards, on display were five playable indie games which included Hundreds, Proteus, Badlands, BaraBariBall, and Monaco.

Article by Helen Han. Last updated 2013-05-17.