Ludium Conferences

Studio Cypher teamed up with the Synthetic Worlds Initative at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN to run the Ludium Game Conferences. The Ludiums are designed to bring together academics and game industry professionals in a learning environment. A Ludium is not a typical academic conference: the core of each event was a game designed to share ideas between groups of Ludium attendees.

Ludium 1: September 29 - October 1, 2005

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 the card game 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.

Ludium 2: June 22 – 23, 2007

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 Ludium 2 results or read the Ludium 2 ruleset.