Amazing Games, Everywhere
Studio Cypher teamed up with the Synthetic Worlds Initative at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN to run the Ludium Game Conferences. The Ludia are designed to bring together academics and game industry professionals in a learning environment. A Ludium is not a typical academic conference: at the core of each event was a game designed to encourage the sharing of ideas and opinions between groups of Ludium attendees.
“The first Ludium was one of my favorite conferences ever”
The theme of the first Ludium was academic research in virtual worlds. Attendees were organized into groups tasked with creating a proposal for developing academic study within virtual worlds. Each group gave a presentation about their proposal on the third day. Studio Cypher developed a card game which played throughout the second day. This card game, a poker variant with the added component of idea generation, was designed to move ideas from one group to another so that the groups would communicate ideas throughout the proposal creation process. You can read more about Ludium 1 at the SWI page.
“By the end of the conference, I had become a full and willing participant … fighting for what I thought fair and just”
The second Ludium was focused on video games and public policy. Studio Cypher designed a two-day “democratic congress” game that asked attendees to creating ten policy points to take to real-world lawmakers. More than thirty academics, lawyers, and industry members attended Ludium 2, working together to produce a declaration of ten points. Ludium 2 also saw the election of Thomas Malaby as the spokesman for the policy statements generated at Ludium 2. You can read the rules and results at the wiki, and see photos of the conference in action at the Flickr group pool.
The IDEAS Festival was a yearly new media festival sponsored by the Telecommunications department of Indiana University in Bloomington. Studio Cypher was hired to create a mixed media story to promote the show in 2006. We created a series of four humorous websites and short radio plays which were released once a week for the four weeks leading up to the festival.
The websites told the story of time-traveller Silas McGuffin as he tried to steal the show at various (fictional) IDEAS Fests of the previous century. The game encouraged player creativity to get people involved before the IDEAS Fest even began.
At the festival itself, Studio Cypher promoted visitor participation and interaction with a live game that encouraged the audience to talk with the exhibitors and learn about their projects and displays.