Playful 2008
At the Dconstruct conference on the social web earlier this year, Alex Krotoski spoke about building a bridge between the game and web communities. The difference between these two, she claims, is mainly that while game developers get to design products that target people like themselves, the web community designs solutions targeted towards very different people than themselves. But as games become main stream (Nicole Kidman appearing in the Nitendo DS lite ads for instance), and room for play is more accepted as a way of enhancing the user experience in web applications, the two communities definitely have something to learn from each other.
So, largely agreeing with Alex I spent last Friday at Playful, a one day event about games and play hosted by Pixel-Lab here in London. There were many great speakers on the program and although a few of these came disappointingly unprepared, the atmosphere in Conway Hall was warm, fun and engaging.
