Come down to the Studio from 1:00 to 2:00 and play Earpiece or Lose The Tail throughout Federation Square, or head out to the Main Square from 2:00 and find the Picnic Blankets to join in a game of Checkpoint.

From 6:00 until 10:00, we’ll be back down at the Atrium to play Bacterius and Double Agent before a playful Show and Tell Salon at 8:00 with some cool people doing micro talks about play and playful things to finish the whole day off.

We’ll be there from 10:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night, and you’re welcome to join us for the whole thing, but if you can’t make it, here’s a handy schedule and links to the games we’ll be playing so you can see exactly what we’re going to be up to.

And yes, there will be Lemon Jousting.

• 10:00 – Lemon Jousting
• 11:00 – Werewolf
• 11:45 – Off With Your Head
• 12:30 – Lunch
• 13:30 – Lemon Jousting
• 14:15 – Capetown
• 15:00 – J’Accuse
• 15:45 – Ninja
• 16:30 – Lemon Jousting

There’ll also be some games running all day and some drop in game design exercises:

• City Blocks
• Humanagrams

and between 3:00 and 5:00, you can come and do some Playful Secret Agent Missions run by a representative from the Society of Coney.

Phew. That’s enough for now. Details of the games we’ll be playing in the evening – and a playful salon – will go up later this week.

We will see you there.

On Saturday, we had people come through and draw pictures that we’ve now stuck on the wall of the gallery, and which we’ll leave there until the end of the show in November.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

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On Sunday, we had 5 game developers come in and make games out of them all – in just 7 hours. It was a little hectic, but in the end they managed to put together 3 completely different games – BBQ Attack, Inklings, and Terrace. Enjoy!

Thanks to Jason Bakker, Russell Dilley, Harry Lee, Chad Toprak, and Eberhard Graether for making them all possible.

The first of those is with Cherchez La Femme taking a look at Feminism and Gaming. We’re really excited about it and hope that this will be the first of a series of events and partnerships like this between now and Freeplay 2012.

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME: FEMINISM AND GAMING

Tuesday, October 4 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm

The Fox Hotel - 351 Wellington St, Collingwood, Victoria, Australia

Then on Saturday, we’ll be running a Playday of pervasive games. Come along for the whole thing or just drop in whenever you feel like it. The schedule is:

10:00 – Lemon Jousting

11:00 – J’accuse

12:00 – Lunch

13:00 – Lemon Jousting

14:00 – Humanagrams

15:00 – Ninja

16:00 – Off With Your Head

17:00 – Lemon Jousting

If you can’t make it along, head over to check out the games we have in the space and the artwork of local game artists.

Game/Play runs until November 5th.

Game/Play at NGV Studio

In collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria, we’re running an exhibition titled Game/Play which runs from in the NGV Studio September 24th until November 5th. It’s a mix of concept art, the digital, the physical, the pervasive, and the playful. As well as the exhibition component which includes over 40 pieces from local artists, playable versions of Solar 2, Antichamber, Once Upon a Spacetime, Captain Forever, AND the Winnitron, along with a bunch of game and playful events throughout our 6 week run.

Late night board games

Every Thursday evening during the exhibition, we’ll be letting the games out of their cases and playing them. Our current list is Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Brass, Zombies!!!, Fluxx, and Once Upon a Time, but we’ll be adding more throughout the exhibition – and of course you can bring your own. Be prepared to explain the rules though

Playdays

On October 1 & 29, we’ll be running some playdays. If you missed out on Lemon Joust Club during the festival, this is your chance to see what all the fuss might have been about. We couldn’t play that all day though, so we’re working on scheduling a bunch of other games. For a clue, check out ludocity.org and lose an hour or two in there.

The schedule for those will go up very soon.

Game Jam

We loved the project we did at State of Design, inspired by Adam Saltsman’s Game City Idea Bucket project so much we wanted to do it again. Drop in on October 15th to draw creatures, backgrounds, level designs or just scribble down your ideas for games, then come along on October 16 to see developers turn all of those into fully functional games – in a day.

And if that wasn’t enough, we’ll also be exhibiting in the gallery all of the drawings for the remainder of the exhibition!

*phew*

Hopefully we will see you there.

We’re helping to curate a mix of the digital, analogue, playful, artistic, and creative from Saturday 24 September – Sunday 23 October, and we’re looking for art, games and people to showcase their work.

Concept / Game Art

First up is a curated wall of concept and game-related art. We’re looking for everything: design sketches, level outlines, character studies, target renders, mood boards and more. The final versions will need to be print ready (300 dpi, a5–a3), but for consideration it’s fine to submit jpgs.  Selection will be made by us in conjunction with the Gallery’s curators.

Artwork can be submitted to ngv-art@freeplay.net.au

Board Games

We’re hoping to look at the evolution of contemporary board games, how they’ve been influenced by what has come before, and how they’re influencing the emergence of digital games. We also want to make sure people have a chance to play them, so as part of the month-long program, we’re looking for temporary donations of interesting contemporary games, as well as people who can break them out of their glass cases and play them as part of Late Night Board Games currently scheduled for Thursdays throughout the exhibition.

Expressions of interest for games or running play-sessions can be emailed to ngv-boardgames@freeplay.net.au

Game Jam

We’ve already run an event at State of Design inspired by Adam Saltsman’s Idea Bucket game from Gamecity, but we thought we’d do it again – but go one step further and exhibit the artwork & games at the gallery.

Tentatively scheduled for the exhibition’s mid-point on the weekend of 8 and 9 October, this is a chance to show off your game development mettle or just come along and see how games are made. To see what was cooked up before, check out our blog.

Expressions of interest for taking part can be emailed to ngv-gamejam@freeplay.net.au

Other stuff

We have loads of other stuff planned – a month is a long time to fill – but for now, we’ll keep it back as a surprise. Looking forward to letting you all know what it is.

Enjoy.

While I wasn’t physically present, I have read through all of the articles, blog posts, and twitter commentary – which I’ve linked to as best I can at the end of this post – as well as spoken to our board, our program advisory committee, audience members who were there and some of the speakers too.  In response, I thought it might be useful to explain some of the choices we made in the leadup to the event, the specific panel, and what I think we might be able to contribute to going forward.

2009, 2010, and 2011

The criticism had been there in 2009 and 2010, and going into 2011 it was something I absolutely wanted to address. Unfortunately, this year became swamped with production issues and I had to make a choice to either focus on trying to improve the gender representation across the program from 2009 and 2010 or to find a way just to put the festival on. In hindsight and knowing the issues, there are a huge number of things I would do differently in programming, in production, in focus, but in the moment of putting the whole thing together, I made the decisions that I made, for better or worse.

I’m writing this not as an excuse but to hopefully point out that I was aware of it, even as I chose to prioritise production issues over programming. I had committed to accepting any criticism this year with the aim of learning and working even harder to find a better balance in 2012.

But it wasn’t just about gender.

Bubbling under both days of our Conference program was more than just issues of gender; there were issues of sexuality, of disability, and of inclusiveness. I work really hard to make sure that Freeplay is an inclusive and safe environment – as shown by people feeling that they can bring up what they want to discuss – but I think that sometimes you only really know how an audience is going to react when you physically put that audience together with the shape of the event, the panels, and the people who make all of that up.

Why wasn’t there a session on inequality at the festival?

Putting a program like Freeplay together is a compromise between the core of the theme, the sessions you want to put on, the people you can get for those topics, and the affordance of the space and the format.

Some were planned during our initial session brainstorming, but with conflicting pressures, they didn’t come off, either through planning, lack of time, or not being able to find speakers through the networks we had available to us. They’re delicate topics and ones that I would want to tackle properly, so in the end I made the choice not to follow through with them, again, perhaps a choice I would have made differently if I’d known, but in the moment of putting the festival together, I did the best I could.

The Words That We Use.

This panel was never supposed to be about gender. It was supposed to be about the stories we tell ourselves, our critical culture, and the critical culture of other creative industries. In hindsight, I didn’t make that clear to the audience in the program, and I don’t think I adequately briefed the panel for the intended topic.

In terms of panelists, the festival takes a heavily curatorial approach to that, filtering offers to speak through our advisory committee, the theme, the intentions of the festival and sessions, and where necessary, we try to fill in the gaps through our own networks. Everyone on that panel was chosen to be on it because of their interesting perspectives on those topics, and if Freeplay had a similar panel in the future, I would ask them back again because either I or someone on our advisory committee knew them and knew that their contribution would be interesting – but that contribution was supposed to be about criticism, about writing, and about alternative ways of viewing critical cultures outside of the mainstream, not what the panel evolved into.

The bigger issue.

Other creative industries struggle with very similar challenges – Sophie Cunningham wrote at The Drum on writing and publishing; Max Barry wrote on his blog about dogs and Smurfs; Joyce Morgan at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote on representation in theatre from earlier in the year – and I think it’s an important discussion to have as part of games as both an industry and an artistic sector. It clearly needed to happen, so in many ways I’m glad that it grew out of Freeplay. It also suggests to me that our audience feel a sense of ownership over the festival as a safe place to voice their concerns, thoughts, and feelings, which is absolutely one of the things that I try to ensure for both audience and speakers, and is why I would encourage focusing on the issues rather than on a specific panel or on individuals who weren’t prepared for a topic to go in an unexpected and incredibly sensitive direction.

Next…

Freeplay has very limited resources after the festival, but I don’t want to wait until 2012 to continue what I see as the two elements of this conversation – one is about inclusion, and the other is about the role and aim of games criticism.

For the inclusion conversation, I’ve started talking to some possible partners about salon-style events that can engage with these in far more meaningful ways. For the criticism conversation, I’m really interested in the unconference format similar to one that the Wheeler Centre did after their Critical Failure sessions.

Both need work, and I’m focused on another Freeplay related project right now, but with the level of passion around these specific topics, I’d be more than happy to accept any and all contributions of help to make them a reality, so please get in touch.

I’m also very conscious of the lessons learned and will be working really hard to make sure the festival addresses as many of them as possible for 2012.

Thanks.

Links:

• Gamasutra: Gender Debate Dominates Freeplay Finale
• Alive Tiny World: Freeplay, and THAT Panel; with panelist Drew Taylor commenting
• Critical Damage: Videogame Criticism, Videogame Journalism, Journalism about Videogames, Videogame Criticism: More a Rant than a Manifesto
• Gamasutra: Games Criticism, Women Critics, And Challenging Sexism
• Searing Scarlet: Yes, This is a post about The Words That We Use Panel in Freeplay11.
• THAT panel: Hindsight is a wonderful thing; with panelist Alison Croggon commenting.
• GameTaco: A snapshot of the entire Freeplay Twitter stream.
• Panelist Andrew McMillen posted an audio recording of the session
• GameSpot AU: Speaking Up: Why Female Game Writers Shouldn’t Be Ignored
• Alive Tiny World: It’s time to stop being afraid

And, just like in a game, you can’t predict exactly what that’s going to look like. You can’t hold a beta phase for a festival or playtest it or run metrics to find out what will happen when 200 people get together in a room.

And that’s brilliant.

Because for us it means that people feel a sense of ownership over the event, the conversation that comes out of it, the space we’ve created, and the realisation (which is easily to forget in the emotional up and down of actually producing the festival) that what happens during Freeplay actually matters to people.

Thanks to you all for coming, for being passionate, for being engaged, for sharing, and for letting us continue to do it all.

We look forward to the conversations between now and Freeplay 2012. And we look forward to announcing our first post-festival project taking place in late September with the National Gallery of Victoria. More on that very, very soon.

In the meantime, we’ve put up the photos from all of our events. Enjoy!

Freeplay 2011 - The Games That Made Me

8 Photos

Freeplay 2011 - Lemon Jousting

35 Photos

Freeplay 2011 - A Musical Interlude

15 Photos

Freeplay 2011 - Saturday

46 Photos

Freeplay 2011 - Sunday

39 Photos