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.

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