Aleks Krotoski 

Do games have BarCamps?

Unconferencing for gamers
  
  


This weekend is the second BarCamp unconference in Brighton (or, as we like to call it, Silicon Beach), the sister event to the many BarCamps that have sprung up around the world since 2005. They're populated by web geeks who spend two days and a night giving talks, drinking beer and making robots.

Everyone who comes to a BarCamp has to give a talk for 30 minutes. It can, literally, be anything you want, from visualising relationships in virtual worlds (that'll be my talk) to how to make a cup of tea. But the talks aren't the important bits; no, it's the pitching in and workshopping on weird applications, new social-technical ephemera and, yes, robots.

It's all about playing with technology and making new stuff. Neat.

Now, the web and the game worlds rarely collide in these kinds of events; the techno-silos are alive and well. But BarCamp-like unconferences may very well happen in gameland, where game geeks get together en masse to collaborate on new software over a beer-fuelled weekend of geekery, and I just don't know about it.

Does anyone know of any game un-conferences out there?

 

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