{Craft, Game} Play

Exploring the space where crafts and games meet.

Games have much to learn from craft, and vice versa. Craft is collaborative, open-ended, creative, meditative, and focused on visual aesthetic goals. Games can be competitive, strategic or luck-based, and focused on player engagement. This workshop focuses on bringing these communities closer together by looking at the similarities and differences between craft-play and game-play, and the lessons that can be learned from each community with a view towards being able to create new kinds of game and/or craft experiences.

This workshop aims to build a community of scholars and practitioners interested in the intersection of games and crafts, and to identify research questions, project ideas, and collaboration opportunities.

Call for Participation

{Craft, Game} Play invites participants from a diverse set of communities: game designers and crafters of all kinds are welcome to attend (including crafters who know very little about games, and vice versa!). The workshop will be a full-day "studio", where participants are actively engaged in brainstorming project concepts and building prototypes for those concepts. The morning session will involve group brainstorming and organizing into teams for exploring concepts in more depth, while the afternoon session will be a hands-on {craft, game} jam, with the goal of having a prototype completed by the end of the day.

Interested participants should email Gillian Smith <gillian@play-crafts.com> and Anne Sullivan <anne@play-crafts.com> with a short statement declaring their interest in the workshop, what they hope to learn from the experience, their background in games and/or crafts, and any ideas they may already have for what they wish to create in the studio or any specific issues they would like to see addressed. Pre-existing ideas are not required for participation!

Request for participation is due by May 15, 2015.

Organizers

Gillian Smith

Assistant Professor of Game Design/Art+Design and Computer Science - Northeastern University
Co-Founder and Artist - Play Crafts

Anne Sullivan

Co-Founder, Creative Director and Artist - Play Crafts
Lecturer in Game Design - University of California, Santa Cruz