Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is the second Gamecamp. Organised by awesome people, hosted by PayPal/Gumtree/eBay with food from Pizza Express and booze from Unity, it works on the unconference model. In short: a conference without a plan. People turn up. Anyone who wants to try and run a session, can do so. Just lob up its name on the board. People turn up. People leave. People may get annoyed/inspired by what others have done, and do a response session later in the day. And then, 8 hours later, everyone goes to the pub.
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Do you remember last year when I went to the Gamecamp “unconference”. Go read about it. It was a lot of fun. They’re doing another one this year on May 8th at Whittaker House (Ebay/PayPal/Gumtree.com’s headquarters) in Richmond, London, and the first bunch of (free) tickets for the event go live at Midday today. As in, noon. They’ll disappear pretty quickly, so consider this your advance warning. You’ll be able to get them from here.

I spent my Saturday at the Guardian-run GameCamp in That There London Town. It’s an unconference. The idea being to get a number of people in a room for a day and improvise a conference, basically. About 120 people were there, of which a good chunk were a cross-discipline mix of developers (Mainstream, ARGs, indie, pen-and-paper, whatever), journalists, academics and general thinking-bods, and the remaining places filled by interested parties who applied for a ticket. Which was lead to the sort of social cocktail equivalent of the end-of-party one where every bottle in the house gets emptied into a glass, briefly enters someone’s stomach before finding its final resting place down a toilet. Except more fun.

It went a little like this.
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