IGDA, Arkadium, and Local No.12 are coming together to bring you BackChatter, a massively multiplayer social game for GDC 2010.

BACKCHATTER

a massively multiplayer GDC game

more info: www.backchatter.com

The skinny.

IGDA, Arkadium, and Local No.12 are coming together to bring you BackChatter, a massively multiplayer social game for GDC 2010. BackChatter tests your social and strategic smarts - if you can figure out the backchannel buzz at GDC this year, you will dominate the game of BackChatter.

How it works.

BackChatter is a social game that is played over Twitter. In BackChatter, you place bets on words that you think are going to be popular in tweets about GDC. Then you score points every time someone else tweets those words. Score the most points each round and across the entire game and win prizes.

Why it's hot.

While several Twitter games have been launched in recent months, by and large they use Twitter as a way to market games, not play them. BackChatter is a Twitter-native game that uses Twitter both as the field of play and the mode of interaction. Being good at BackChatter means understanding the dynamics of the conference Twitter stream. It's a new way to play.

A tradition of GDC games.

For almost a decade, award-winning NYC developer Gamelab created large-scale social games designed for GDC. Now that the company has shut its doors, Gamelab co-founder Eric Zimmerman has joined forces with Mike Edwards ,Colleen Macklin, and John Sharp to continue the tradition of GDC game experiments. They call their collaboration Local No.12.

BackChatter goes open source!

Local No.12 is open-sourcing the code for BackChatter. This means that anyone will be able to create and host a BackChatter game for their own conference. Backchatter is being released as an open source project under GNU GPL 3.0 and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licenses. Together, these allow other developers to run the game and expand the code so long as they keep their versions under the same licensing agreements. For more details, see www.localno12.com.

About Arkadium

Arkadium is a premier game solutions developer for the casual game and advergaming markets. The company's growing archive of Flash-based and custom game solutions currently reach millions of people through some of the most popular online destinations and corporate branded sites on the Internet. For more information visit: http://www.arkadium.com.

About IGDA

The International Game Developers Association is the largest non-profit membership organization serving individuals that create video games. The IGDA is committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community. For more information on the IGDA, please visit www.igda.org.

About Local No. 12

Local No.12 is an experimental game collective. Veteran designers and technologists, the members of Local No.12 came together to invent new forms of emergent social play. Members include Mike Edwards, a programmer with a background in design and anthropology who serves as research faculty at Parsons the New School for Design; Colleen Macklin, designer and coder who teaches and runs the social game lab PETLab at Parsons; John Sharp, a graphic designer and game designer who teaches at Savannah College of Art & Design in Atlanta; and Eric Zimmerman, independent game designer and co-author of Rules of Play. See our BackChatter postmortem at South By Southwest a few days after GDC ends.

More info: www.localno12.com.