I spoke at the ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium on Tuesday. I missed a day or two due to some unfortunate weather flying out of LaGuardia, but the conference was really quite interesting and wound up with a very nice talk by Liz Lawley.

I gave a talk about how Big Games could be used in libraries to bring in different audiences and engage a community of players and kids. Libraries are really such interesting spaces full of elements that would make great big games, from unique identifiers, to persistent identity to cool spaces.

Here are the slides from the talk. It’s full o’ images so it’s kind of big.

Mattia and I are running a game this weekend on Governor’s Island as part of the Figment Festival.

The game’s at 2 PM Sunday, July 8. Catch the ferry over and join the game. Ferries run every hour from 10am to 5pm from The Battery Maritime Building located adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry in Lower Manhattan.

Here are some photos from the game. We had roughly 25 people play. And I believe a good, sweaty, wet time was had by all.

Check out all the photos on here. Or just sample below.

Here they come to capture a the Informant.

On the move back to HQ.

Making sure the coast is clear.

Ambush!

Powering up to some Super Soakers.

If you were at this year’s GDC and noticed an occasional yelp emanating from a group of people mashing buttons on their cell-phones, clustered around a large video display, you may have wondered what all the hubbub was about. For the last six years Gamelab (the indie New York studio that we work for) has made a conference-wide game to be played during the GDC. What those people were doing was playing Gangs of GDC – this year’s installation of the Gamelab GDC game.

What the hell is Gangs of GDC?

Gangs of GDC was the world’s first (as far as we know) massively multiplayer mobile phone fighting game or MMMPFG. While the genre-name may be complicated, the game itself was actually pretty simple and straightforward. The theme was that rival gangs such as the Match Three Boyz and the MMOFOs are vying for control of the GDC by fighting over three neighborhoods scattered throughout the conference center. Each neighborhood consisted of a large flat-screen display set up in a high traffic area of the conference showing a grid of nine blocks.

Players would dial up a number displayed on the screen and be immediately placed on one of the blocks where they would either fight any rivals that were on the block or else flip the block over to their gang’s control. When fights occurred players resolved them through a simple rock-paper-scissors game where they pressed 1, 2 or 3 on their cell-phones to perform a light jab, a strong upper-cut or a devastating roundhouse respectively. Every five minutes each neighborhood would be scored and the gang that controlled the most blocks in a neighborhood would gain points for each block they controlled.

Read the full postmortem of the game design and development on Gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070427/gamelab_01.shtml

0092106, originally uploaded by gtrefry.

I am the economy is the pong paddle. Always willing to look the idiot for big games.

Welcome to the Street! This will be a real running of the bulls. Get ready to trade stocks and rip-off your colleagues in this game of inside information around Wall Street.

Set-up: send an SMS to insider.yo@jumpword.com with the word “join” in the message.

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