FDG Mid-Conference Report!

Howdy from Monterey! Specifically Asilomar. I am in a giant barn surrounded by tired by talkative game design people. This is my second time at the Foundations of Digital Gaming and so far it has been a blast; I’m really glad I was able to come back this year. Yesterday I attended the Intelligent Narrative Technologies Workshop, a fascinating look on story telling technology which pretty much broke my brain by the end of the day. My pen is almost dry from taking notes.

Reasons why the last two days have been pretty awesome:

• We are right next to the ocean. Like, the sound of waves is everywhere. It’s so ‘wild’ we found a dead seal and watched a deer take a pee.
• We went to the Monterey Aquarium to take in how they incorporate technology in their animal exhibits. Blown away! Lots of cool education games working side-by-side with the animal environments! Video coming.
• Great people are pretty much everywhere. I need a mixed reality address book HMD to keep track of everyone, my brain is tired.
• Catered food and wine: YES! It certainly dissolved our reluctance to talk to strangers.
• Adding to my reading list as I try to keep track of all the cool things people are involved with…
• As usual at conferences, I get a lot of brainstorming done during the downtimes. First draft of proposed dissertation work is looming over my head, after all!

Reasons why the last two days could have been better:

• Being from Florida, I expected it to be windy buy mild weather. Now I’m very cold.
• It could have been two days on a boat to the Bahamas, like last year. But I’m sure I’m not the only one sad about that.
• There’s so much going that it’s been difficult to maintain my P90X workout schedule. No, I’m not joking.

If you happen to be at the convention, come see my colleague, Juliet Norton, speak on her paper “Exploring Strategies and Guidelines for Developing Full Body Video Game Interfaces” at 7:30 pm on Sunday.