| Presenter(s) |  Katherine Isbister is a professor, games researcher, and author in the Department of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Katherine creates and studies digital games and other playful computer-supported experiences. Her focus is emotion and social connection--understanding the impact of design choices on these qualities, and getting better at building and evaluating technology that supports and enhances social and emotional experience. Her recent book, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design is about how designers take the human desire and capacity for feeling and turn all that into meaningful interactions with computers and, via computers, with other humans.
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| Description | Being together has always been a powerful motivation for the creation and enjoyment of games. In a world that increasingly blends and blurs the digital and the physical, how do we build play experiences that support rich and meaningful connection, rather than fragmenting, alienating, and isolating us? Katherine Isbister's research group is known for building technology prototypes that explore and also shape the future of social play. In this keynote, she will use recent technical prototypes her group has built to reflect on the question of what it means to engage in playful social engineering. Examples include custom-built wearables for live action role play, experiments in social VR, and biometrics as a communication channel in live streaming of gameplay. The audience should leave this talk with a broader sense of the future possibility space for social play, and points for discussion about the role technology may take in better supporting playing (and being) together. |
