At the beginning of May, Jon and I visited Atlanta, Georgia, for IA Summit 2016. This is the second time we’ve attended at the IA Summit: last time was in 2012, in New Orleans. This year, we presented the latest iteration of our game design talk, “How Do I Game Design?”. 

As promised during our talk, here’s links to a couple of the things we talked about:

• The Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework paper
• 8KindsOfFun.com – Marc LeBlanc’s Game Design Thoughts
• The Definition of a Game – Game definition generator
• The Resistance – a board game we mentioned
• Half-Life 2 – a video game we mentioned
• Gone Home – another video game we mentioned

A video of an earlier version of this talk was captured at OSCON 2015, and you can find it on YouTube. You can also find the slides from the IA Summit 2016 version on Speaker Deck.

I really enjoyed our second visit to the IA Summit, and definitely hope to come back next year! A particular highlight of the conference was the games night, which is quite unique to the IA Summit –– I love it! Highlights from the talks include:

• Léonie Watson’s keynote about accessibility and inclusion, which featured a slide deck composed of movie quotes.
• Lisa Welshman’s keynote on how design can impact real human beings.
• Jesse James Garrett’s 7-in-1 closing keynote on… well, everything the IA industry needs to know?
• Dan Ramadan’s talk on “Taxonomies, Tags, and Trajectories at the BBC”
• Jorge Arango’s talk on “Placemaking Lessons from the Magic Kingdom”
• Stephen Anderson’s talk on “How To Design A Concept Model”

… but everything I attended was amazing. There’s lots of great photos of the event, not taken by me, online here. Thanks to the organisers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees for putting on an amazing event!

IA Summit 2016 was one of the most diverse-feeling, inclusive conferences I’ve ever been to, and the community –– while, as game designers, we only really sit on the intersection of it and many other communities –– is incredibly welcoming and friendly.

Atlanta was also an amazingly friendly city, with a lot of interesting attracting (oh my, go and visit the Georgia Aquarium!) I’m looking forward to getting an opportunity to revisit it in the future! I’m also really looking forward to venturing to Vancouver, for IA Summit 2017.