#Gamejam ZooMachines: Registrations are open! #gamedev via @cosmocover

Registrations are open!

Formerly known as the ArtGame weekend, Zoo Machines Festival, the interdisciplinary event to envision new species of video games, will happen on November the 7th, 8th, 9th 2014 in L’Imaginarium, le the cluster for digital creativity and innovation! It will be terrific.

Organized by Game IN (trade association for video game industry in Northern France) Zoo Machines invites developers, artists, crafters, makers… to push boundaries of video game and to undertake their weirdest ideas during one weekend.

Festival producer and Game IN managing director is enthusiastic: “Zoo Machines is a meeting of talented and passionate people who want to share technical and creative challenges. It is also a time to look ahead, to explore new territories or to get new perspective on video game.”

It will consist in one journey with panel discussions about experimentations and one gam jam to produce innovative games.

What makes Zoo Machines game jam so special is that we gather people who want to challenge themselves to create an innovative art form, questioning the medium and our habits, reel crossover between different fields of play, art, interaction and design.

Instead of being restricted by usual controllers and gaming standards, Zoo Machines invites participants to experiment for instance by disturbing uses and players’ habits, by giving new purposes to space and bodies, by hacking controllers and objects.
• The 2014 theme of the jam is “Surprise and Unknown”
• Registrations will be limited to 70 people in order to keep a human-sized event, and favor collaboration as there is none competition between teams
• Cost is 30€ per individual and provides many facilities, like great food for each meal.

This year, we’ve introduced novelty with a free-access journey for talks, testimonies and case studies. Besides producing experimental games, we felt relevant to open those matters from the jam to a wider professional audience and find a time to share ideas, feedbacks on experimentations and new models.

For this purpose, we have booked a few international speakers: artists (Jonatan van Hove, Kaho Abe) who will talk about experimental games and approaches. An evangelist (Joe Robins from Unity) about dev kits and experimentations. A researcher (Laurent Grisoni from French National Research Center / INRIA, University Lille 1) about cognitive rules VS interfaces. Developers (Adam Saltsman from Finji, John Polson from Indie Fund) about innovative ways to fund and publish games.

Finally, after this huge creative moment, all prototypes will be exhibited three weeks later at the Natural History Museum and at the alternative cultural location L’Hybride. It will be a great opportunity for the main audience to try out of the ordinary creations and touch of a finger the potential future of gaming.