Hey everyone! With IGF next week we’ve been fortunate enough to give some thoughts about mindful xp with a few places. We had a nice interview with Polygon two weeks ago where we went over how mindful xp started and some thoughts about our process. And today Gamasutra posted their Road to IGF 2013 on mindful xp where we had a chance to talk some of the lessons we learned with our project.

Next week at the IGF pavilion we’ll be part of the IGF Student Showcase. We’ve printed out some nice business cards showing off the different games that make up the mxp volume. Feel free to drop on by Wednesday thru Friday and grab one (or all 8). We’ll be hanging around to talk with everyone and hang out with all the other awesome IGF teams.

Wow! The mindful xp volume (a collection of our games from the mindful xp project) has been chosen for the IGF 2013 Student Showcase. We are honored and humbled to be selected by the judges for IGF 2013 and we’re looking forward to being at GDC and the IGF pavilion with all the other awesome student winners.

Thanks to everyone who supported and gave us advice throughout this project including, but not limited to Jesse Schell, Ralph Vituccio, Drew Davidson, Paolo Pedercini, Andy Nealen, Ian Bogost, Craig Adams, Walt Dessler, Adam Lederer, Luke Jayapalan, Chris Bell, Aubrey Hesselgren, the fine folks at Meaningful Play, the awesome dudes at Experimental Gameplay Project, our fellow students at the ETC, everyone who played/shared/commented on our games, and many more!

We’ll see everyone in SF!

Hey everybody!

Thanks for the great time at the Meaningful Play 2012 conference. We know some people were interested in our poster and might have not been able to get a good look at it, so here it is online for your convenience.

PDF: mindful xp poster

During the summer we’ve been busy submitting our work to various conferences both industry and academic, and we’ve happy to announce that we’ll be featured for both a speaker session and poster at Meaningful Play 2012, at Michigan State University! The conference is from October 18-20th, and our session will be directly after the keynote on the first day, the 18th. Our session is titled “The mindful xp experience: Developing meaning through rapid prototyping“, at 11:00-12:00 in the Tower.

The full program schedule is here.

If you’re going to the conference, please be sure to check us out! (as well as spread the word!)

[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

The Path Taken is a prototype developed in Flashpunk over the course of 11 days (originally planned for 7 days). In this game we wanted to model the feeling of regret and “the grass is greener on the other side” mentality. You play as Ward, a boy going through a rite of passage in a dungeon and learning a few things about life along the way.

Development

When we were brainstorming we went over a few ideas and eventually came across the idea of choosing multiple paths. However when choosing a path the player would have to make a hard choice and whatever the player choose it would have to seem like the wrong choice. We thought we could literally do this by having the other path visible but inaccessible so the player would be able to see what they had missed. We also wanted the game to have permanence and every time the player chose an action even if they started the game over the choice would persist.

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