Speakers and Sessions…

As with previous years, Freeplay operates a little differently to other events. We curate sessions and people in ways that we think will be interesting. You can still pitch sessions to us, but we’d much rather hear from you about what you do, why you do it, and how that fits with Freeplay.

We’re also very interested in alternative structures for presenting. Obviously we’re keeping lectures and panels and workshops, but we’d also like to incorporate playful sessions or microlectures or anything anyone else might pitch to us, as well as more physical and active events as part of the Freeplay Arcade in Experimedia.

To register, you can fill out the form here. If you have any questions, drop us an email.

Freeplay Arcade

To register your interest for the public Freeplay Arcade, fill out the form. If you have any questions, email us at expo@freeplay.net.au.

Associate Producers

To help us with the growth of the festvial, we’re once again looking for some associate producers to help us coordinate specific events.

Associate Producers will be responsible for working with the festival director, program advisory committee, and production manager to help shape and deliver one of the Playful Program events, or help to coordinate the awards and volunteers, following the entire festival from programming to production. These are volunteer positions.  Email us to register your interest including any relevant gaming and events experience.

We don’t want to do that this year.

Instead, we want to look around at the moment we’re in now, reflect on that, see how it’s informed the festival, and then turn our eyes towards the future. Six months isn’t that long away, but beyond that there will be another six, and then another six, and then another, and that’s where the amazing stuff lives, not in the past, but in the future – and where we think the 2012 Freeplay festival theme fits into that.

But before we do, just a little bit of the past, and a little bit of the present.

First off, our shift in dates. Freeplay has always been in August, but in 2011, it was clear that the month was getting a little busy with events here and around the world. We took a look at all of that and tried to find a gap. September is relatively free, and was available, so we bumped there. We think it’ll be a good fit for us going forward.

Secondly, as you may have heard, we’re saying goodbye to our outgoing co-director Eve Penford-Dennis who is moving on from her position at the festival. Without her, Freeplay simply wouldn’t exist. It was her initial phone call and subsequent suggestion that we take it on that set the wheels in motion that have seen the event grow far beyond anything we could have considered back then. We owe her a huge debt of gratitude, and we hope that we can do her work justice.  Here’s what she has to say in her own words:

“The Freeplay Independent Games Festival has been an enormously exciting event to run, and I feel very privileged to have been its co-director.

“It’s always been important to me to promote, through Freeplay, the talent, and sheer ingenuity that people display when unencumbered by the weight of conformity in mainstream game development. It has been both humbling and inspiring to work for a community that is so positive and passionate about games, their way.

“Leaving something you’ve been an integral part of for a long time is always a difficult decision but I’m proud of how Freeplay has grown and transformed the public conversation around games and play. In particular, I’m proud of the public program which drew over 1800 people through Experimedia in 2011, the awards which celebrate the best of Australian creative development to local and international audiences, and establishing Freeplay as a stand-alone organisation which I’m sure will support Freeplay long into the future.”

2012 also marks the last festival for our other co-director, Paul Callaghan. He’ll be here for the next 6 months – and a little bit beyond – and will no doubt write an endless series of posts here, spruiking the festival, so we’ll leave our thanks for him until later.

Expressions of interest for the Freeplay director role will go out later in the year.

Now, to more of the present and the great big open future, as seen through the lens of our theme – Chaos and Grace.

Game developers, no matter where they sit as artists or industry, live in chaotic times. Studios have downsized or vanished completely while at the same time there has been an explosion of new opportunities in online or mobile. While mainstream media pulls out the same lazy old clichés, videogames enjoy a level of cultural and institutional interest that they’ve never seen before. Improvements in technology have created a much more level playing field, where what sets projects apart isn’t their ability to make the hardware sing, but in how they create unique and creative experiences.

It’s a part of our job that we navigate the chaos and bring it to order. It is, essentially, one of the fundamental aspects of videogames. Abstract and fuzzy rules drawn from moments of inspiration must be streamlined, made concrete, and turned into computer code that then runs in sequence on CPUs and GPUs, lighting up pixels on displays, pumping the cones on speakers, or spinning tiny motors inside a controller. Everything that a videogame does, it’s fundamental architecture, the deepest layer of subtext possible, is the necessity of creating some sort of systemic order from the chaos.

Looking outwards, as developers – as people – we exist in a complex web of systems that are personal, social, political, cultural, artistic, and uncertain. We tell ourselves stories to make sense of them, about what we’re good at and not so good at, about why things happen or don’t happen. We place our trust in those chaotic systems and hope they mean something, even when, fundamentally, those systems don’t care one jot about us.

But in that maelstrom of chaotic behaviour and our essential need to make sense of it, to bring it to order, we sometimes create – or stumble upon – moments of beauty, moments of stillness, moments that change us, moments of grace.

At the very base of why we do what we do is our desire to make something appear in the world that wasn’t there before, something that will delight or inspire, infuriate or illuminate, explore or entertain, something we haven’t yet fully seen, only glimpsed. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re seeking moments of grace between us and our audience, finding a common language in the spaces between us. As artists, creators, developers, thinkers, critics, and players, we need to embrace that grace, the compassion it implies, and its fundamental humanity that lies at its base.

Hence, in a roundabout way, this year’s theme. We want to explore the stories we tell ourselves as individuals and as a collective, as makers and players, as artists and industrialists. We want to look at where those moments of grace lie in the rest of the world. We want to create spaces of delight, of wonder, of soaring insight and deep introspection. We want to create a space that speaks not to the past, but to the future, not to the things we have made, but to the possibilities of what we can make. We want to draw order out of the chaos, and we want to do it with glimmers of hope, with crystal intent, and with an endless supply of grace.

Freeplay 2012 will take place at the State Library of Victoria and beyond from September 19-23^rd. The full announcement is available here.

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.