Katie Salen Designs Games with Bar Codes, Inflatable Pieces, Hobbits, and Faxes

We’ve written about Katie Salen’s game-design initiatives a couple of times in recent years–in “The Principals of Play” (2006) and “Learning, a New Game” (2009)–so, naturally, we were interested to see Salen answer a few questions about her practice in a video interview posted last week on the Big Think. Check out the full video […]

We’ve written about Katie Salen’s game-design initiatives a couple of times in recent years–in “The Principals of Play” (2006) and “Learning, a New Game” (2009)–so, naturally, we were interested to see Salen answer a few questions about her practice in a video interview posted last week on the Big Think. Check out the full video above.

In the interview, Salen also mentions the “slow games” that she and some of her colleagues created in 2006 for the 25th anniversary issue of Metropolis. “What, we wondered, would it mean to design a game that takes 25 years to play?” Salen and Nick Fortungo wrote in the issue. Click here to download a PDF of the four “conceptual exercises” they came up with–two of which, Salen says, are still open to new players.
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