After a successful year touring with her talk “The Modern Motivators of Play” in support of the launch of The Game Development Strategy Guide a year ago, Cheryl Platz is debuting a new talk inspired by the content from the book based on the prompt “Weird is Good” from this year’s Global Innovation Forum. Join her and the rest of the talented lineup on November 18 and 19 from companies like Nike, The LEGO Group, Canva, Save the Children, Pfizer, IKEA, and many independent creatives like Cheryl. Learn more at giflondon.com.
Weird Avatars and Wonky Worlds: The Wonders of Self-Expression in Gaming
When The Sims hit shelves, the gaming industry began to see how a generation of gamers yearned for platforms of self-expression. As technology evolved, the types of games that thrive did with them – we’ve gone from a world of narrative-heavy single player games to a world with open-world creator platforms like Minecraft and Roblox alongside platforms with economies driven by self-expression like Infinity Nikki and League of Legends. Join Cheryl Platz, video game dev, game professor, host of gamedev podcast Enduring Play, and author of the Game Development Strategy Guide for this tour of current markets and emerging trends. Have you embraced your weird yet? Do you truly understand what’s going on in the low-fi worlds of Roblox and Minecraft and why self-expression is the fastest growing modern motivator of play? Don’t miss your opportunity to find out how these changes apply to you, even if you’re not in gaming – because the world has already changed, and if you want to meet your customers where they are, you might need to start with a new avatar.
Cheryl is delighted to be speaking on this topic, hailing from the land of the ultimate weird avatar, Jimothy the raccoon – the Seattle Indies game development community recently hosted an entire game jam devoted to him. But even since she proposed this talk, games like Scriptorium and Dressmaker are showing that player self-expression remains a hugely influential motivator of play at all scales of gaming and levels of fidelity. At the same time, the “friendslop” genre is well-known for lower fidelity graphics that bring a sense of joy to participants.
“The weird is the point. We’ve spent decades trying to create perfect copies of reality, but games can be so much more than reality ever could – and standards for realism have never been higher, or more expensive. Classic, impressionistic, and artistic games are thriving in their modern weirdness. You have a choice: spend a fortune to be a shadow of the real world, or get weird and create a wonderful experience that has never existed. What will you choose?”
– Cheryl Platz, author of The Game Development Strategy Guide