This year's tuning workshop was the best yet. As usual, we had about 100 people, most of them experienced game developers and designers, ready to work hard on our tuning and design exercises.

We present a series of exercies each year - some change, some stay the same. The Three Musketeers exercise, a mainstay,  is based on a game from Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games. Every year, attendees figure out how to tweak this game given new design constraints.

My favorite this year: one group added a white chess queen (princess character) and a black chess king (cardinal character). The princess turned Musketeers red ("blushing with love") when she came in contact with them (so that their blue chips were topped with red chips) - and the cardinal "filled them with cream" (a white chip was placed in between the red and blue chips - like an Oreo cookie. The fiction for this game was... interesting.  :)

Here we see Bill Fulton of MSR and other attendees discussing the different aspects of the Musketeers game. Discussions are based on the MDA framework that we have developed over the years.

There are usually three classrooms - each led by a different instructor.

Here's Frank asking the class to evaluate the success of their first round of changes. What worked? What didn't? How do actions in the game support the "Musketeers" fiction?

Throughout the workshop, attendees work in small groups, designing, testing and then refactoring based on the play tests.  The focus is on rapidly iterating through ideas, and discussing how proposed changes impact the player experience.

Justin had the privilege of working through his design with a young android!

In addition to the exercises, we also have "electives" - special one-off classes that the instructors design each year. Jonathan did one based on designing "advergames" - complete with silly (but scarily believable) "memos" from the corporate clients.

Frank's Real-Time Tuning exercise (of a "Massively Multiplayer Offline Rock Paper Scissors" or MMORPS Game involving a hospital fiction with tiny "pills") was a real blast.  I did an AI elective - will post slides soon.

Here we see workshop detritus - including random scatterings of game deck cards - some distributed by the staff, others, designed during the day.

This year's instructors :

Jonathan Hamel, Robin Hunicke, Frank Lantz, Marc LeBlanc, Andrew Leker, 

Steve Librande, Art Min, Harvey Smith, Tim Stellmach, Bernie Yee

For more information see the Design Workshop web pages here.