Letter from the Conference Co-Chairs
Dear game makers, artists, community builders, researchers and culture creators:
For us, Indiecade has represented the beating heart of games as powerful empathic and communal work, honoring the multidisciplinary design, system, and technical thinking that goes into what you do.
And what you do is hard. The end result is sometimes playful and uniting, sometimes soberly underscoring differences that are not meant to be othering entertainment. Your work reinvents itself even as its engaged with. It isn’t for consumption alone, but for
you–the creators. Making games changes you, and you change the community.
In Toronto, we are deeply embedded within a community that has found its footing, grown and burst at the seams with energy for creating and engaging with this medium. We were tremendously fortunate to be welcomed by the people who make and change games here, and so honored to share our skills and resources to aid in the creation of spaces and platforms to support this growth.
Indiecade East is an exciting highlight of the year, a chance for players, makers, administrators, scholars and more to come together from across the East Coast–but it is by no means where the work begins and ends. It brings forward lessons and insights from an incredibly broad range of practitioners–inside and outside games–that allow us to blaze forward in our thinking, change our minds about long-held assumptions, and do better work every day.
Every day we are challenged by what we choose to make and play. Your decision to observe existing rules, support systems, and technical constraints or instead question and break them, will shape the long-term human impact of these cultural artifacts as much as your individual sustainability. We are very interested in the act of game-making as a tool for social welfare, a small part of a broader system that strives to make life better for everyone.
At Indiecade East 2016, we invite you to talk about how you do this every day. Your code library isn’t just fodder for another talk. Your Let’s Plays aren’t just another opportunity to establish social media credibility. Your design refinements aren’t only for the player’s benefit. Your research isn’t just rehashing old knowledge in a new context. We want to talk about your every day–how it has transformed you, why and how you do it.
We look forward to hearing your stories. We look forward to making this part of your every day.
Jennie Robinson Faber & Henry Faber
IndieCade East 2016 Conference Co-Chairs