Gamasutra - Features - "Postcard From GDC 2003: Experimental Gameplay Workshop"


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By Alex Dunne
Gamasutra
[Author's Bio]
March 7, 2003

Features

Postcard From GDC 2003:
Experimental Gameplay Workshop

For the second year in a row, the GDC hosted the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, hosted by Jonathan Blow, Chris Hecker, and Doug Church -- and backed by a supporting cast of over a dozen other developers. The goal of the EGW is to "provide a platform for game designers to showcase risky new work and discuss it with their peers, legitimize gameplay research, and foster a community of experimental game designers". In short, the EGW was a showcase to for the wacky ideas that sprang up from Hecker's Indie Game Jam.

That may beg the question, "What's the Indie Game Jam?" The IGJ is where a bunch of game developers (18 of them this year) get together each year prior to the Game Developers Conference, agree upon an underlying game engine, and work individually to create games based on that technology. This year, the "game engine" was a system developed by Zach Simpson called Shadow Garden, which Simpson developed for use in multimedia exhibitions in museums. It uses motion detection to process a person's shadow, and uses the person's shadow as the user input to the game, like the photo below shows:

Experiemental Gameplay Workshop shadow games...

So what the EGW showed a series of games all built upon this same underlying technology, all developed by 18 programmers, 2 artists and 1 musician at Chris Hecker's office in Oakland, CA, during a 4-day night-and-day marathon.

It was interesting to see all of the different variations that people came up with for games based on the premise of using a human shadow as the game input mechanism. Each game was only demonstrated for about five minutes, so the EGW's pace was rapid and felt about right -- the audience never had time to burn out on any particular game. The games ranged from a "whack a mole" take off (where the player moved his hand's shadow over appearing moles to whack them), to a rock-paper-scissors takeoff (shown in the photo above), to a 3D fly through developed by RAD Game Tools' Casey Muratori in which your outspread arms represent an owl's wings and help you navigate around the game world (this game was the crowd favorite).

Held in a medium-sized room at the Game Developers Conference, the EGW was absolutely packed -- 120 people or more crammed into the room, filling up the aisles and standing packed in the back of the room. So it's clear that developers are desperate to see what results when 18 talented game developers lock themselves into a barn (yes, Hecker's office is a converted barn) for four days and try to come up with different riffs on the same underlying game concept.

If you're interested in checking out the Shadow Garden engine, the engine is going to be released as open source sometime soon by Simpson. (Although no additional details were given about that.)

I'll wrap up with some more photos of the games that were demonstrated:

Casey Muratori's 3D fly-through game. Of note, Casey was the only person to create an "attract mode" for his game. Apparently he has ambitious coin-op plans for it! His game featured a number of level goals (fly through certain structures, get the fish in the lake, etc.), and Casey created a short level intro movie that mimicked the well-known Tony Hawk level intros and got the audience laughing.

The start of the Rock-Paper-Scissors game.

This game, Paris Plague (something like that) was based on protecting your human immune system at the microscopic level. Viruses swimming around could attack your body's shadow, but by casting a shadow over antibodies, you could charge them up and have them attack the viruses and protect you.

Never quite got the gist of this game.
A little too ex"perimental" for me, perhaps!

A real-time "Scrabble"-type game, where competing players try to snatch letters with their hand shadows as the letters cross the screen, in an attempt to form words. The top of the image under the players' scores shows that they have each grabbed one letter so far (in light blue), and they are reaching for the passing letters (the blurry green circles, in motion).

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