Some small things, loosely joined from Playful

I attended Playful on Friday - a conference on play and games. It was pretty good and a bit inspiring with an interesting mix of low-level game controller hacking and high-level theories of play and gaming. I liked the low cost, informal, non-corporate feel of it, which the venue Conway Hall contributes to. I guess Interesting is a bit like this but are there any web conferences like it?

Some highlights and things for me to think about...

Brass Band Hero and the Singing Sock Puppets from Matthew Irvine Brown were great, aimed at music learning. I liked his mantra of making more dots so that people can join them.

Chris Delay of Introversion Software showed their procedural generation of trees and cities for game environments - basically so they can save money. I don't quite know why but it just looks so compelling to generate your own city layouts like this.

Kars Alfrink talked about play, particularly how users will use tools to create their own meanings. So for applications like this designers should underspecify and, indeed, limit the tools, to encourage play and creativity. He had a lovely example of children playing at horses in Habbo Hotel (in which there are no horse avatars) and also the playground pattern from A Pattern Language which suggests providing an area with raw materials for children to create their own play.

Tom talked about everything being multiplayer. Amongst (rather a lot of) other things he showed the Obama iPhone app which includes a leaderboard of who has made the most calls and noted that the real world is aynchronous, and that's supported by game-like apps such as Flickr and Nike+

Oh, and Matt showed the Radio Labs DABagotchi in his talk about hardware hacking - respect.

I see that Roo has some more comprehensive notes up already.