Game Desing at the Royal Armoury
Posted 2014-10-27 - Archived under: activity, design construct, experience, game design, museum, workshop - Reply
Yesterday I held a game design workshop at the royal armoury. It’s a museum, so not quite as directly royal as the title might sound. No kings or queens in the audience. The museum shows artifacts from the Swedish dynasties. Right now there is an exhibition on the game of power, showing real historical artifacts, together with objects from the TV-show Game of Thrones. A nice and beautiful exhibit, where you realize the real historical dresses is actually even more extravagant and extreme than the once from GoT!
Because of the exhibit the natural theme for the game design workshop was the game of power, and I had a wonderful audience and design group, consisting of everything from seasoned experts, through interested gamers and even the next generation of yet just 7 and 10 year old designers! It is quite a task to try to satisfy such a broad audience, but I believe the format worked quite well. After a short startup with presentations on my view of what a game is (readers of mine, you recognize the design construct – activity – experience -model) we went directly into (re-)designing of games. This makes the startup a bit slow, but everybody gets to set off in the direction they chose, and by doing that gives me a chance to see what they focus on, and finally I can help the different individuals and small groups in their own way, starting thoughts around the specific area they are delving into.
Naturally there is a big difference between the kind of problems the seven year old ran into, and the ones the deeply interested games found. But they could all work on a similar task with a similar goal. Finally we all sat down together to show the games and talk about what we worked on, and this way the knowledge could spread even further. Also, the games looked really nice, and there were some really interesting ideas going on! Hopefully there will be an update to this in a day or two, when I get some of the pictures!
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