Penguicon 2019 Redux
—Hermione Banger here—-
First I wanted to give you all an update on our time at Penguicon. Casey O’Donnell (my partner and co-founder and developer of Affinity Games and Fellowship of Fools: The Game) were both Featured Guests at Penguicon this year. I guess we sounded like cool guests? This meant a special name tag and ribbon, and our pictures and bios in the convention booklet (front cover pictured above), oh and we got some awesome free Penguicon socks!
Wait…What is Penguicon?
Penguicon is a annual convention held in the Detroit, Michigan metropolitan area every spring that consists of a three-day event of learning, playing, and sharing based on the two foundations of Open Source and Science Fiction.
“Over 1,600 nerds, geeks, and fans attend Penguicon every year to celebrate and share in what we all love. We are an all-volunteer, not-for-profit convention which brings together every kind of geek – software developers, moviemakers, authors and their fans, hackers, foodies – for a weekend of sharing in panels, workshops, and parties. “
Redux
Together we hosted three sessions at the convention, the first day was an hour for the audience to play with 1/3 of the Print-To-Play Friendship deck with us. This went spectacularly well, we played some of the lower-level trust gameplay modes and mods–Conversation Mode with the Signifier Mod and Lightening Mode with the Intentional Mod.
Many of the participants described themselves as on the autism spectrum and there were quite a few programmers as well in attendance, and yet the game seemed to really bring people out of their “shell” and encourage personal disclosure and meaningful conversation. One participant said, “An extrovert would not have made this game.” Guess we are a “party/conversation game for introverts! Makes sense, as the developers are both certainly introverts.
On Saturday evening we held a session on the newly released decks Romance and Sexuality, giving players 1/3 of both decks (as P2P) to play with in groups of five and to take home if they wished. We didn’t have a single copy left of these by the end of the weekend! Again we had players do low-level trust gameplay modes and mods to get a chance to see all of the prompts provided and start to get comfortable with the game in some of the “easiest” gameplay modes and mods. With these decks we played Conversation Mode with Signifier Mod, Lightening Mode with Intentional Mod, and also It’s Poker Night Mode with Intentional Mod.
We let players break into groups as they chose, which did result in people already partnered playing with each other and one group that was largely single men, to their chagrin. Casey played with that group, and despite the initial disappoint of not being in a group with female players, he found that there was a lot of personal disclosure and vulnerability that came out of the players that took him by surprise. After the session was completed, one of the players came and talked to us, he was a relationship and sex therapist said he loved the game and thought it had great therapeutic potential.
Another session we attended earlier that day on using games to develop social skills, particularly children on the autism spectrum. We got a chance to talk with her as well about the game, and will be sending her a P2P copy of the Friendship deck to use with her pupils/players.
Finally, on the last day we did a session on Friendship Games as a new sub-genre of games. What exactly are Friendship Games, what do/can they look like, what games might be considered Friendship Games, and what needs to they serve as well as the very human limitations we have with the number of relationships we can maintain. This session was particularly helpful for explaining the theory behind the game(s) to the audience, almost all of which had played two or all three of the different decks in the previous two days. The talk was also helpful for us in articulating much of what we’ve been talking about between ourselves, and helped us to write a paper abstract on Friendship Games that I’ll share with my patrons only tomorrow.
