One of the things an event like Freeplay encourages you to do is to reflect on the shifts going on around its existence.

Here’s what we wrote in the leadup to 2009:

The first Freeplay took place in a converted karate dojo in the city in 2004. Back then there was no PlayStation 3, no Xbox 360 and no Wii. The PSP had just come out, and the original DS had only just been released in Japan earlier that year. Gaming was dominated by the PlayStation 2, with the Xbox taking second place, and the GameCube kicking around in the background. On the PC, Half Life 2 was finally released after ten years in development, and World of Warcraft was unleashed on the world.

2005 saw the beginning of the end for that generation. The PlayStation 3 was unveiled, the Xbox 360 was released, and we got our first glimpse of the Wii’s unique motion control system. By Freeplay in 2007, Sony had finally released the PlayStation 3, finishing up the launches of the current generation, and Apple had entered the market with the disruptive iPhone.

In 2009 – with Freeplay taking place at the State Library of Victoria on August 14 and 15 – the landscape for independent and creative developers has changed considerably. All of the platform holders have their own online services delivering innovative, independently developed games – Flow, Braid, World of Goo, Castle Crashers, N+, Noby Noby Boy, and there are new avenues such as the App Store and Steam for developers to get their work out into the world.

There’s also a greater understanding of what it takes to develop games and their place in wider culture. Witness the change in the number of game related courses, the increased visibility of stories (both positive and negative) in the mainstream media, the attention suddenly being paid by Hollywood (again for both better and worse) and look at the number of festivals and events around the world that focus on the creative and artistic side of making games.

In 2010, it felt like we were still carried along in the wake of those changes, with greater visibility, experimentation, and commercial success of independent developers and artists.  In announcing the program, we wrote:

At the end of late last year, after the dust had settled from Freeplay 2009, Eve and I sat down to decide what shape Freeplay 2010 should take. 2009 was very much our first experience of running a festival, and we learned a lot just through putting the whole thing together. One of the things we felt was the need for a specific theme to bind everything together. While we curated 2009 pretty closely, there wasn’t a unifying topic or take home by design. In hindsight, the program coalesced around practical, mid-level skills – less about getting started and more about managing the process, less about the state of the industry and more about the opportunities.

In thinking about it, we noted that coming out of 2009, there was a really strong creative energy – a desire to just get out there and make things – that also seemed to be trying to figure out how to focus itself and how best to approach the sometimes thorny issues at the root of all creativity. In planning 2009, it’s very much that energy that we’ve chosen to focus on in 2010.

Which brings us to our theme and to our program. We chose ‘Play is Everywhere’ because we wanted to look at the creative process from a wide range of angles. We wanted to look at how we come up with ideas, how we take them to completion, how we foster the ones that work and let go the ones that don’t. We wanted to look at play in the context of our audience, of the classroom, of the work we do day to day. We wanted to encourage experimentation and exploration of the form, and a greater awareness of opportunities beyond what most of us consider the industry holds.

We wanted to build a festival of ideas. We wanted everyone to come away from it with a sense of possibility. And we wanted everyone to feel part of not just a development community, but an artistic and creative one too.

At a time when the established studio system was in a period of flux and where new opportunities were presenting themselves, we wanted to encourage people to look beyond what they’d always done and out towards the possibilities of games as an extension of play, an art-form, and as an essential part of our culture.  This felt to us like the right event at the right time, hopefully inspiring people in what turned out to be a much bigger period of flux post-Freeplay than we anticipated.

Which brings us to now.

For 2011, we wanted to achieve a couple of quite important goals.  We wanted to encourage people to continue to make things; we wanted to dig into some of the more practical questions of game design and development in a much more hands on way; and we wanted to take a look from the other end of the spectrum we used in 2010.  Rather than looking outward at play, we wanted to encourage people to look inward.

Which, we think, is encapsulated in our theme of 2011 – handmade. It’s a word, an idea, that sums up what we hope people will take away from 2011.  Much might change between now and then, and we’re expecting it to, but looking around at where games are at, we think it fits rather well – and like the necessities of all creative endeavors, it gives us our start.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be announcing more, including calls for speakers, volunteers, deadlines for our awards and expo, and everything else that goes into making Freeplay work.  Follow us on twitter or facebook, subscribe to our email list or RSS feed, or to relive the past, check out the videos of 2010 over on our Youtube channel. Otherwise, we will hopefully see you at the State Library in August.

In SYN’s own words:

SYN Media Learning Week is underway next week!!

We will be hosting a week-long series of Free Teacher Professional events at The State Library of Victoria.

One of the highlights of SYN Media Learning Week will be the Keynote Presentation by Mark Pesce.  Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web to invent VRML, Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of media and technology for a quarter of a century.
Mark Pesce will be speaking about the “four domains” of importance to educators in the 21st century: Constructivism, Sharing, Mobile and Digital Citizenship.

This presentation is an amazing opportunity for teachers to experience the knowledge of Mark Pesce in person.

There are still spaces available in this session, Thursday August 27 1:30 – 2:30 pm and it is FREE!

Book online http://www.eventbrite.com/event/373156120 or email training@syn.org.au

Our speakers page has also been updated with the bios of some newly confirmed speakers – currently, we have 41 developers, educators, artists, writers, journalists, bloggers, film-makers, cross-media experts, and students taking part across the two days.

The Village Roadshow Theatrette is where we’ll be hosting our lecture / panel sessions.  We want to make these a little bit longer than in previous years to give the speakers more time and also to give the audicnce more time to ask questions.

Planned sessions include:

• The mainstream versus the independent sector
• Transitioning into indie developlement
• Diversity in the industry
• Where games development will be in the next 5 years

The Seminar rooms at the State Library will be where we hold our smaller, more focused workshops:

• Procedural content creation
• Managing small teams
• Running a team using agile
• Audio design
• Level design
• Programing for artists
• Writing for games

Lastly, the Experimedia space will house our public program, incuding demos of games from indie developers and a series of panels devoted to exposing a broader audience to what we do as developers:

• Games and screen culture
• A game design challenge
• The role of education and development
• Where to find free and open source development tools

Over the next week, we’ll be confirming with our speakers – drawn from diverse backgrounds including professional and indie developers, educators, cross-platform creatives, film makers, and writers – and filling in the detail.

Xperience XBOX

FRI 17 JULY, 6.30 – 9PM

Come in and experience some of the best XBOX 360 games with an evening of modern, multiplayer, and online XBOX 360 games, such as Guitar Hero: World Tour, Halo 3, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Street Fighter IV, and Sacred 2. There’ll also be giveaways and opportunities to win major prizes*, including an XBOX 360 & games pack. All funds raised on the night will be going to benefit the Royal Children’s Hospital. So engage with XBOX 360 gaming and help others at the same time! Presented in association with OzBoxLive.

Where: Experimedia at the State Library of Victoria

Cost: FREE [Bookings required] *$5 payable per ticket for the prize raffle

Phone: 03 8664 7099
Email: bookings@slv.vic.gov.au
Online (via Eventbrite): http://xperiencexbox.eventbrite.com

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About

Freeplay 2009 took place at the State Library of Victoria on August 14 & 15.  Over 200 people came along to our panel, lecture, and workshop programme taking place in the Village Roadshow Theatrette and Seminar rooms, hearing from over 50 speakers including developers, educators, students, programmers, artists, film-makers, and cross-media practitioners.

For the first time, Freeplay held a public expo program that took place in the Experimedia room at the State Library.  Over 300 people had the chance to play locally produced independent and professional games, take part in discussions about games and the broader gaming culture, and workshop their own ideas in a game design challenge run by Infinite Interactive.

Our international speaker, Pteri Purho, drew large crowds to talk about not only his process for creating games, but also the role of creativity in creation and play, and his return in our Freeplay Greatest Hits Panel saw him create rag-doll peggle in under 5 minutes.

In the wake of Freeplay, we’re hoping to continue to build the creative community, supporting independent developers through discussion spaces and events, and putting together our plans for 2010.