Reddot: Define Game Design Conference 2014

As the second game related conference by reddot, well known for their reddot design awards, this years edition called "Define Game Design" took place on the 23rd October at Café Moskau. Similar to the last year, they had a broad variety of speakers from industry veterans to indies. Last year I was not quite sure about who the addressed audience is and had some questions in my mind, so I was curious how this year will be and how the whole thing developed. On their website, they actually answered that question in the description of this years conference as they say: "The conference is specially designed for all those who want to get closer to the field of communication design and the topic of game design in a modern and literally playful manner. Gamers, designers, marketing experts and others with an interest in the industry will be introduced to the core of game design, getting exciting insights into current topics and familiarising themselves with the latest projects in this all-encompassing and constantly advancing discipline. The objective is to create an interface between agencies, their clients and game designers and to thus provide opportunities for exchanging innovative ideas."
So this time, the audience seemed to be mixed as well, but unfortunately I did not have the chance to attend the whole event this time and therefore could neither talk to many people nor write a review of the speeches. But the sessions that I watched, e.g. the speech of Eric Zimmerman (author of "Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals”) and Peter Warman were really interesting and reflected game design from different perspectives in their own special way. Furthermore I luckily had the chance to talk to the organizer Birthe and host Daniel Budiman and ask them a few questions after the event which they kindly answered.

Photo: Matthias Medger - Peter Warman talking about consumers.. and Techno.

The reddot as a design related award has a completely different view on game design than the game developer or consumer perspective that grew over the last decades and as I used to ask myself how that could fit or even be useful - but now I understand this fresh perspective as a chance and I see, how profound they try to find their own evaluation-system for game design, that comprises all aspects that are relevant for games.

A game jam under that topic would have been conceivable too, to combine the science with some applied experiences - especially as there was the monthly Berlin Mini Game Jam two days after the conference, which might have been a good point to start. Maybe that could be the next step for 2015, or they will have other plans - I will stay curious anyways.

Concluding, I may need to add, that I don't know anything about the design industry and about design awards in general and I am not an academic on game design and research either. As a studied audio engineer/composer working for games, who just has been loving games since I was a child I also still have a lack of game analytic skills and I was never taught in game design. Therefore I have a "different" perspective on game design talks than most of the other attendees and I always hope to learn new things and I am always really interested in game design related topics.