Bogost-Man Makes Me Wet

I’m back from Vienna and decided not to post yesterday due to exhaustion. The last couple of days were quite taxing. FROG was exciting! The conference was part of some big games festival. The location was Vienna’s town hall – an impressive and intimidating location. I held my presentation in this room with historical banners on the walls and chandeliers the size of compact cars.

Here’s where the magic happens… for realz

The rest of the building was turned into a miniature GamesCom complete with an eSports tournament. Too bad I didn’t have the time to check everything out.

But I had an opportunity to meet Katie Salen. I had also the pleasure to make a schnitzel with Ian Bogost (he made an argument that we were actually making the schnitzels by ordering them). We were accompanied by Chelsea Howe, a person I can only describe as a wicked servant of Evil – she is working for Zynga. Actually I’ve met Chelsea at last GDC already and by pure chance she is on a tour of Europe with a friend. She just happened to be in Vienna at that time and discovered the conference by pure accident. What a small world.

After the schnitzel it started to rain cats and dogs. Ian turned out to be the only one in our group who had a umbrella and an idea where the next subway station was. As he led us for a surprisingly long time trough the poring rain, it started to dawn on us that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to blindly trust the only person who wasn’t in danger of getting wet.

But that little bit of water turned out to be just a little splash compared to the dose I received on my trek from the train station to my hotel. The rain intensity increased to Origami Killer levels and the walk lasted at least for 15 minutes. Lesson 1: Take an umbrella with you. Lesson 2: Don’t save on Hotels if they turn out to be in the middle of nowhere. But I had a great time nonetheless. It was an inspiring day I’d gladly repeat again.

The term Bogost-Man is a reference to this article on Gamasutra which Chelsea dug out. I was just about to bash the text for presenting tired, outdated psychology theories and ending on a rant about how games designer’s only goal is to fabricate fun. On a closer inspection the text turned out to be satire. It makes me sad that the games culture is in a state where the irony of such pieces is too subtle to be instantly recognized.