DC Metro

The United States Institute of Peace has looked at the gaming and simulation worlds and created a platform for peace negotiations and discussions.

Join us on November 10 as our member, Ronald (Skip) Cole, takes us through this Peace Platform and explains what it is for and how it works.

Agenda:
7:00 pm – 7:30 pm Meet and Greet, Networking, Announcements
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm Learning Game Development Showcase

Bring your prototypes. Bring your “Almost Playables.” Come ready to play!

What are your Learning Objectives? What are the Player’s Objectives?

A player learns what she needs to in order to win, so we want the player’s objectives and the learning objectives to be closely aligned. Let’s figure that out before the game is fully designed.

Contact Melanie at or Seth at and we’ll get your prototypes running (or limping) on one of our computers. Make a short list of learning objectives, and we’ll all try our hand at your game.

Then we’ll discuss how well the objectives align and what tweaks to the game design could help. We will have an “almost playable” prototype of Immune Attack 2.0 for your critique and other games announced. If you are developing a Non-Learning Game, bring it, too.

Cases to get you thinking:

For the June 9th meeting of IGDA DC, the developers of games created at the January Global Game Jam and the recent Health Games Challenge Jam will be presenting their games near where they were developed: at the Fairfax campus of George Mason University.  The meeting will occur from 5-9 at the Johnson Center Bistro.  The best bet for parking is probably the Mason Pond (Building 42) or Sandy Creek (Building 44) Parking Decks, as seen on this map: http://info.gmu.edu/FxMap09letterupdate.pdf.

Hope to see you all there!

Meeting Agenda:

5:00-6:30: Networking, Dinner, etc.

6:30-7:00: Announcements

7:00-9:00: Game Jam Post-Mortems

9:00-?: Networking

The DC Metro IGDA Chapter and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) would like to invite you to the next IGDA Chapter meeting.  Dr. Melanie Stegman of FAS will be hosting the next event and will be  giving a talk about their game Immune Attack.  We will also be discussing the Chapter's Steering Committee and vision for the way forward in the Chapter.

I'm sorry to have to do this, but I'm going to cancel our meeting tonight because I don't want people risking life and limb to get to GB which itself might even be closed.  Since the roads are already pretty bad and we anticipate getting up to another 9 inches, let's hold off on this meeting.  The venue has served us well for the past 5 months but given the growth of our chapter and its forays into other activities (like the Global Game Jam), we are reconsidering our meeting strategy.  Look for another meeting to occur at GMU later this month, the date of which will likely set the course for the coming months' meeting schedules.

The Global Game Jam is coming up at the end of January and I wanted to gauge our chapter's interest in participating.  I spoke with Norb and Jerry a couple nights ago at the Games Gateway meetup, who are a couple members of the chapter from before the Big Collapse of 2007, and they mentioned some contacts from the local SIGGRAPH group who might be able to offer space for participating in the GGJ.  I took part in this last year at MIT and it was a lot of fun; is anyone else interested in participating?

Greeting DC & Vicinity members,

Well, we had a pretty good turnout on Tues, 10 Nov 2009 when we met at Tyson's Corner for some beers and food at Gordon Biersch.  Thanks go to Trey Reyher for keeping the fire lit from the last meeting while we all caught up and also to Ross Dannenberg for help in "sponsoring" the event.  Many topics were discussed as we witnessed a traditional Redskins autograph signing during the evening.  Our next meeting is being scheduled for around 8 Dec 2009, but details are not set yet.