Gamma Announces 'One Button' Theme For GDC 2010 Showcase

Author: by Staff

Montreal’s Kokoromi collective has announced its theme for Gamma 4, with game makers challenged to make "innovative, experimental new games played with just one button" to be showcased at GDC 2010 in San Francisco. As recently announced, Kokoromi is partnering with Think Services' Game Developers Conference to bring the fourth edition of its renowned Gamma game showcase to GDC 2010 next March. Comparable to a longer-form, targeted version of the 'indie game jam' concept, previous years’ themes have included Gamma 01: Audio Feed (games driven by live audio), gamma 256 (games with extremely small pixel dimensions), and GAMMA 3D (games using red-blue stereoscopic 3D). Standout games like Passage, Paper Moon, and Super HYPERCUBE resulted. This time around, the Gamma organizers have framed the competition as follows: "Gestural controls, multi-touch surfaces, musical instruments, voice recognition—even brain control. Games are moving beyond the iconic hand-held controller, and into the future. But is the secret to good games found in high-tech interface hardware? Kokoromi proposes that game developers can still find beauty in absolute simplicity." Taking place on the evening of Wednesday March 10th, 2010, the Gamma 4 kickoff event bridges the end of the Independent Games Summit and the start of the main GDC. The playable games will be revealed at the Mezzanine, a venue housed in a historic two-story warehouse near Mint Plaza, in the heart of San Francisco’s SoMa district. The curated games will be featured on large projections, and accompanied by live DJs. Following the opening event, all the games will be playable for all in a dedicated booth on the Game Developers Conference Expo floor from Thursday, March 11th to Saturday, March 13th. In addition, game creators who are selected for presentation at Gamma 4 will also be awarded GDC 2010 All-Access passes. Game makers around the world now have from December 1st 2009 until January 31st 2010 at midnight Pacific time to complete and submit their single-input creations. Full submission rules and guidelines are available at the official Gamma 4 web page.