Creative Coast Festival #2

Mind-controlling parasites and somersaulting cannibals – why game developers need biologists!

I will show you the wonders of life and the strangeness of creatures you have never heard about. Things that will spark your creativity and quite possibly haunt your nightmares. All in an effort to show how biology can be an important tool in the creative process of game development, and why game developers need scientific advisers.

A personal and professional recap of our journey as a company and my 12 years at Paradox. I'll share some of the highs and lows and some of the core principles we have applied over the years that have allowed us to grow while remaining profitable and increase the value we deliver to our players. 

Labyrinth Psychotica is Jennifer Kanary Nikolov(a)'s artistic research project on the simulation of psychosis. It was born from a personal experience of a familiy member and developed as an artistic research PhD trajectory with Roy Ascott's award winning Planetary Collegium at Plymouth University. Her research results contribute to an understanding of one of the last taboos and greatest mysteries of society, by using the potential of technology to simulate what it may feel like to be in a psychosis.  For her talk she will dicuss the importance of psychosis simulation and reveal the success of her design approach for the works 'The Wearable' and 'The Labyrinth'. She will also share her journey of artistic knowledge entrepreneurship and elaborate on how her works became a tool of empathy for mental health care workers around the world.  

Phoenix Perry discusses how machine learning can be used in designing games. By discussing an approach for using tools that could be co-collaborators with game designers to develop expressive play experiences, she proposes an approach to expressive play design. What would a co-collaborative design process look like where designers could supervise possible outcomes using machine learning and then feed those chosen outcomes back into their systems, creating dynamic games without the need for recoding entire systems each time?

Additionally, Phoenix will discuss her work with the Code Liberation Foundation Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEM fields.