We started the session with introductions. Patricio Davila is a designer and interactive artist who’s made a simple game using Scratch about communication. Susan Bustos is a biochem phd candidate and musician who last made a game when she was a kid by typing in the code into her Tandy. Rosemary Mosco is a web comic artist who has done pixel art for games at TOJam. Peter Watts is a marine biologist and science-fiction novelist who coded games when he was young and also worked on the narrative for Relic Entertainment. Jim Munroe, the coordinator of the group, didn’t need to introduce himself as everyone in the group knew him, but for the record he has made two games, a text adventure called Punk Points and Space Invader.

Jim went on to read the founding principles of the group and invited discussion.

Then it was time for us to present what we’d come up with for assignment #1. Jim went first, attention hog that he is, and presented something he called:

The game has you playing as a baby in an activity saucer, except instead of doing nothing (besides, pff, stimulating development) the doohickys actually affect what’s happening in the room. Push the horn button, the light goes on. Twist the crank, the lady knits faster. Jim said that he intends it to be a kind of a toy-type game but thinks that it might be fun if the light makes the lady knit faster and knocks over the cup… a puzzle type of thing. Someone suggested that the goal of the game could be to get picked up by the lady.

Peter went next and described a narrative story type game where it begins with a suicide watched through a grainy videofeed. As the game progresses you learn why, and that you’re a kind of synthetic intelligence that can only perceive the world through security cameras, telephones, and other technology. Patricio suggested it might be fun if it was a live thing with actual actors playing out the scenes.

Rosemary showed a sketch of a top-down game where you play an albatross circumnavigating the arctic circle. You have to avoid fishing lines and keep well fed enough to find your mate. Since what inspired her to use the albatross was that she felt an emotional resonance with it, Jim suggested she check out Passage, a great one-person game that can be played in five minutes.

Susan showed us some slides for Viral Invasion, a game where you can play either a virus or an immune cell to either protect or attack a biological organism. She showed us some of the ways that the interactions could be dynamic and compelling-looking (she found the image below as an example) and mentioned that it could be a 2 player game as well. People said that it would be a fun way to learn and Peter mentioned that little boys would love to be a bad virus.

Patricio showed us a sketch for a game that would be played in 3D space in a gallery. There would be a paper mache model of the Andes mountains, and the game would be digitally projected onto the surface. As the player moved around the mountains collecting gold they would have to physically walk around the mountain model to see where they were going. He liked the idea of this required movement and even potential interactions with competitors. Peter brought up the idea that if the mache was instead fabric, projections could come from within the model rather than over top.

After we discussed all the game ideas, Jim gave a brief demo of the N level editor, which will be used in Assignment #2. He said he felt like the monotone guy in You Suck at Photoshop. Then we played Jon Mak’s Everyday Shooter. Soon after we broke for the night. Great first session!