Even More Playfully Awesome

Over two weeks after the fantastic Playful conference and we're finally just getting to writing up our thoughts. It's cause we've been too busy playing! NOT. We've been too busy working. But actually, the lovely thing about The Go Game is that a large percentage of the time work is play and play is work and everything is fun and awesome like PANDA BABIES AT THE PLAYGROUND (except when it's not).

But anyway. I'm getting off the topic of this post, which is supposed to be the Playful conference. Or more specifically, the insightful, hilarious, creative, laugh-out-loud funny, drop-your-jaw cool, rock-your-world exciting thoughts and ideas spouting from the mouths and bursting from the slides of this year's speakers. I could go on for hours about all the fantastic things I heard but to make my life easier and your life awesome, the lovely guys at Pixel Lab have already done the full-on recap on the Playful Blog. Here are their links:

What Happened, Part 1. My personal highlight - Roo Reynolds talk, especially the Minesweeper movie. If, like me, you spent an embarassingly excessive amount of time playing Minesweeper instead of doing your homework in high school, you will find this roll-on-the-floor hilarious.




What Happened, Part 2. Personal highlights were an interview with the creator of Alice & Kev, a touching, honest, and brave story of a homeless family in the Sims 3, A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles from James Bridle which Chris mentioned below, and a great talk from Katy Lindemann on Game changing & Change Through Play, who later told us she was at the Go Game panel at SXSW! I wish we had met then so we could have chatted about fun things like cute robots and making not-fun things fun. Cause I'm all about that. She showed these two videos, which I very much liked.

On making communication with the government fun and full of dirty words as well as real messages:



On making recycling fun!:



Okay, I realize this blog post is getting long. If you're still with me, we're on the last part:
What Happened, Part 3. Part 3 included one of the most enjoyable talks I've ever seen (if that makes any sense), a series of drawings displayed on an old school overhead projector by the illustrative genius known as Rexbox.

He drew sheep, game consoles, funny pictures of himself as Tina Turner, and cool stuff like this:


I also really loved Simon Oliver's points on the tightknit, supportive, friendly, help-a-brother-(and-sister)-out world of game designers. We've definitely felt this love times a million since we moved to the UK.



So there we go. Some of our favorite stuff from Playful. Go dive in, click around, watch some videos, and prepare for the awesomeness.