Kickstarted intimacy – Designing intimate spaces for strangers

Conference, GameJam

Don’t wanna read? Find the recording of the GDC Talk here, mine starts at the 10min mark (all the others are great too!). 

Are you sick of having the same small talk conversations all the time?

“Where are you from?” “What do you do” “What is your monetization strategy?”

Are you craving real, deep connections instead?

Yeah so are we!

That is why we designed “Blanket Space”, an analogue, 3-player experience which aims to create intimate, respectful connections between total strangers.

At the Lyst game jam 2017 in Copenhagen Martin Nerurkar, Ludwig Sandbacka, William Zack Wood and I created this experience.

You can find the description of the game and the rules here, but I would advise you to find a person that played it before to facilitate the session as it can get intense.

Be aware that while we did a bunch of research into the areas of group talk psychology, LARP best practices and BDSM in terms of consent, we are no experts on mental health and this is after all a Game Jam game.

If you are curious about emotional engagement in games, how to frame experiences to help players to disengage or how consent works I recommend the following resources:

Furthermore the following video is an amazing 2.5 minute summary of how consent works. Please watch it!


Take care of yourself and the people around you!

 

NGC Talk

Uncategorized

Today I gave a talk at the Nordic Game Conference 2017 in Malmö.

The Talk is a brief summary of my master thesis. It researches the possibilities that alternative controllers and AI present for emotional engagement in video games.

“Have you ever thought about building a game that reacts to your players’ emotions, rather than telling them how to feel? What about using emotions as player input? In this talk, I will share some thoughts on what that could look like. I propose seeing emotional engagement as a process rather than a single state, and argue that “flow” is not only difficult to create in games, but can reduce the game’s impact on the player. To elicit deeper emotions in games, I suggest looking beyond traditional game interfaces, and exploring the possibilities that alternative controllers and artificial intelligence can provide. I encourage game developers to focus on the player’s emotional engagement, without limiting the player to a linear emotional experience.”

You can find the slides here: NGC2017/Slides

And if you curious you can read more about the teddy controller or read my master thesis.

Geek Girl Meetup Oresund

Uncategorized

Today I gave a talk at the geek girl oresund meetup about my teddy controller project. The talk was meant to inspire woman to start trying new things, to not be afraid of failing and to find an entry point into working with hardware.

The audience was amazing and very welcoming, they were even laughing about my (bad) jokes 🙂

You can find the slides of my talk here: ggmo

 

 

Konsoll 2016

Conference

I am so glad I went to Bergen to participate in Konsoll! The Conference is fairly small and very familiar. In my experience the Game Dev scene in Norway is very open, welcoming and cuddly and the days in Bergen proved this again.
My personal highlights were the amazing Art workshop with Lee Petty, playing a Tim Schafer narrated round of Mafia and Bergen itself.

Since Friday I have been drawing like crazy and have been very inspired for all sorts of new projects.

A big thanks to Krillbite studio for sharing the airbnb with me and the Bergen game Collective for letting us hang out and making me play mario cart 64 (I am pretty bad).

 

MassageChain

Massage Chain <3