I was invited to be a keynote speaker at GamedevDays in Graz, Austria. I’m honored to have been invited to such a beautiful community and space. All the talks were incredible.
I learned so much in just one day. If you ever have a chance to go, I can’t recommend it enough. All my experiences up to now with speaking in Europe are inspiring me to want to write about the scene here.
I’m constantly blown away by how much more people know about art games, arthouse games, or experimental games. Like Berlin had this incredible Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: THE SOUL STATION show. I’m seeing glimpses of this stuff being mainstream.
..almost.
.. It’s been beautiful! Ok, so ramblings aside, following is my keynote turned into a blog post.
.. Years ago I started sharing small tools that I built for my games.
I published them all as one-off standalone things. They were usually presented as small silly digital toys, like a fake social media bar that would pour a constant stream of attention your way, simulating likes and hearts bursting out at whatever you did while using your computer, or a cute ASCII art drawing tool for if you wanted to quickly make some text art to decorate your posts with..
. All this seemed like a cute idea. People generally enjoyed finding these bizarre things and then sharing them with friends.
I viewed these more like creating a “toy”. I always had this strong fascination with small non-game like digital objects, such as desktop pets, or prank software, be.
