2006 Sandbox Symposium Attendees, Awards Announced

Author: by Beth A.

Sandbox, an ACM SIGGRAPH Video Game Symposium, has revealed the final attendee numbers and award winners from its first Sandbox Symposium, also announcing that it will again be held in 2007 alongside SIGGRAPH in San Diego. Preparation for the first Sandbox started in January 2006 and the conference ran in Boston the weekend before SIGGRAPH on Saturday, July 29 and Sunday, July 30. There were over 200 attendees with a mix of developers, academics, artists and students, plus around 10 people online for the Breeze streams of the presentations. This diversity was also reflected in the presentations, papers, panels, and posters. 20 papers were selected through peer review from around 90 submissions to form a solid track across the two days along with 5 panels, a dozen poster sessions, and keynotes by Greg Costikyan from Manifesto Games and Ian Shaw from Electronic Arts UK. Yotam Gingold’s paper, “From Rock, Paper, Scissors to Street Fighter II: Proof by Construction,” won the Best Paper Award. Throughout the event, a carnival room hosted exhibits, poster sessions, and video game tournaments. Industry support helped make the carnival room an interactive part of Sandbox. The highlight of the tournaments was the Guitar Hero 2 tournament held by Harmonix and open to all attendees to play. Other tournaments that ran across the days included: Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, Halo, and a Retro Game tournament. Sony Computer Entertainment donated PS2s for the tournaments and prizes were provided by X-Gaming. There was also a social card game, Pitch, that encouraged attendees to form teams and create game pitches. Attendees also had the opportunity to participate in a public beta of the video game Skyrates. Skyrates (rhymes with pirates) is a game design and development project experimenting with sporadic play across multiple platforms. It is an ETC student project created by 4 team members. The team attended Sandbox and projected a Skyrates map so attendees could keep track of the in-game world. Academic institutions also showed their support for Sandbox. The ETC at CMU, Game Design and Development at RIT, the Center on Public Diplomacy and the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, as well as Sage, publisher of the Games & Culture journal, all were involved with this year’s Sandbox. For more information on this year’s Sandbox and updates on Sandbox 2007 and how to get involved, please visit http://sandboxsymposium.org/.