gaming

Tom Armitage is a Game Designer and Technologist at the London-based games company Hide&Seek. He makes software, games, and strange systemic toys. He currently writes a column about design and games for Kill Screen.

He also works on a variety of toys and distractions including a series of curiously popular Twitter bots, most notably Tower Bridge. Having run weblogs since early 2001, he currently writes at infovore.org.

Tom has spoken on technology, games, and and social software at conferences in both Europe and the US.

To our pleasure, he will talk at the gaming session of Lift12.


Check out some of Tom's previous speeches:

• Everything is Multiplayer Now, at Playful
• If Gamers Ran The World, at Gamecity 08
• Playing Together: What Games Can Learn from Social Software, at the NLGD Festival of Games

or have a look at the movie Playmakers, directed by Lift France 09 speaker Ivo Gormley, featuring Hide&Seek, where Tom works. Playmakers explores the emerging area of pervasive games, the implications of reclaiming play into the public domain and the possibilities offered by new technologies.

Kars Alfrink is the founder and principal designer of Hubbub, a networked design studio for applied pervasive games. Hubbub works with organizations to create games that take place in public space, engage people physically, and are socially relevant. Amongst other things, these games are used to encourage good citizenship and to facilitate cultural participation.

Kars will talk at the gaming session of Lift12.

Read about Kars recent projects from creating a playful exhibition to making a game that teaches astronomy.

Have a look at the the presentation Kars gave at dConstruct 2011 (or watch the video) in which he explores ways we might use games to bring solutions to some problems social separation can lead to.

Lift11 speaker Etienne Mineur is featured on Robert Scoble's video channel. Robert made the interview at the Lift11 conference in Geneva, after Etienne's much acclaimed talk. Check out the amazing Ipad application invented by Etienne Mineur / les editions volumniques.

Disney just released a new game very similar to Etienne's technology.

Another example of the newsworthiness you get at Lift ;)

Gameification. Points. Badges. Gamepocalypse. External rewards. Every day the headlines about games remind us that there must be more to games than these keywords. The game industry has sometimes a bad navel gazing habit… which is why it’s good to attend event such as the playful10 conference in London last Friday. The point of this conference is to “look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We want people walking away talking about the nature of games… what they mean to different people inside, on the periphery, outside or miles away from the industry“.

The playful10 conference was certainly as good as last year’s: passionate speakers (ranging from comic book writers to hair dressers), intriguing topics (old jew jokes, item collections from badge to game controllers, Mad Men quotes, dead chicken, critics about gameification), good audience and cosy venue.

You can see my notes from the conference over on my blog.

Please note: Engaging users with games will be one of the themes discussed at Lift11. Get your ticket at the early bird price of 590chf for three days!

Bruno Bonnell is a legendary french entrepreneur, founder of Infogrames and former CEO of Atari . Today Bruno has launched a new venture in the robotic market: Robopolis. In his speech at Lift Asia 08 "From Robota to Homo Robotus" (with remarkable energy and great performance the morning after a legendary Karaoke Night ;) Bruno revises Asimov's laws of robotic and highlights the differences between the Asian and Western approach to robotics.

Jury Hahn is the co-founder of MegaPhone, a gaming company based in New York which makes real-time multi-player games on cell phones. Jury explains the potential of mobile gaming, and how phones can allow rich public interactions. She then demos MegaPhone's gaming platform and Lift participants go wild and play against one other :)

I have no idea why Google put me in the video thumbnail, if someone knows how to change that I'm happy to hear your solution :)

Jury Hahn is the co-founder of MegaPhone, a gaming company based in New York which makes real-time multi-player games on cell phones. Jury explains the potential of mobile gaming, and how phones can allow rich public interactions. She then demos MegaPhone's gaming platform and Lift participants go wild and play against one other :)

Guy Vardi from Oberon Media talks about casual games, an emerging part of the gaming industry that widely differs from the cliche we usually have on gamers and games.

In one of Lift's most legendary talks, Paul Barnett - creative director at Electronic Arts - explains that the conventional thinking which goes into designing an existing product and simply make it bigger, louder, taller, and crazier doesn't work in the world of online games. There has to be room for new ideas, and it's the person with the ideas who is going to be walking away with the money.

Robin is a researcher (studying artificial intelligence) now working for Electonic Arts. She is designing games for the Nintendo Wii - she worked on My Sims - and tells us about user-generated content and the importance of social software in gaming.