Playful Learning: A Conference Like No Other

Conference Report by Joe MacLeod-Iredale

I am approaching the end of my PhD investigating game making as a teaching tool, I have presented at a reasonable number of conferences in the UK and Europe, I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for….  I should have realised something was afoot when Manchester Game Centres own John Lean, one of the conference chairs, urged me to go experimental with game making workshop, saying ‘they will be up for it’.

I left the house at 5:05 to the University of Sussex near Brighton at 10:10 to dive straight into the opening activity run by the drag artist Alfie Ordinary– turning metre tall paper people into drag queens!  Alfie selected me as one of his favourites and the hundred or so attendees seemed to like my four-armed cyclops wearing a fig leaf and high heels, cheering loudest for me.  I was declared the ‘Diva Supreme’ and proudly wore my sash for the rest of the day!

Subsequent workshops ran the gamut from a presentation on neurodiverse play practices and using cryptozoology to engage ecology students, to the use of narrative game to games teaching formal logic to philosophers and sitting on the grass outside with a puzzle box prompting us to consider failure in our teaching playfully.

My workshop was billed as a world record attempt for the shortest game jam (there is a record for this, but Guiness told me that it was not administered by them).  Essentially, I sat down four groups of four and five participants around piles of game pieces and printed out grids.  After only five minutes of game chat I asked them to simply start playing.  Miraculously, it worked!  People were soon rolling dice, drawing boards, moving pieces around and talking intently.  As a facilitator there was not much for me to do as I saw three of the groups games resolve out of the chaos, the laughter and banter got louder.  The fourth group got bogged down trying to useful and educational about skill acquisition through HE (which you can’t do in 45 minutes).  At the end of the session each group explained their games, one was about making the most of conferences, one was an abstract race game with interesting blocking mechanics, and the final (loudest) group had created a game where seagulls (omnipresent on campus) and humans competed for food.  The last two of these groups spent their break finishing their games.

The seagull game, now christened ‘Flock Off’ made an appearance at the pizza party that night and was played by 25 people, with a big cheering crowd at the end of the night!  I will be getting in touch with Guiness again as it turns out a bunch of playful learning academics can make a game from scratch in 45 minutes.