Walking through the Moscone West Exhibition Hall, GDC attendees are coming across what appears to be a magnetic board of over-sized fridge poetry. Except, instead of surreal, incomprehensible verse, the words are assembled into game proposals. Participants select nouns, verbs, adjectives, and genres from a table of magnetic word salad and arrange them on the board. Once a semi-coherent title and genre are assembled, concept art for the titles are sketched out on adjacent Wacom stations by industry professional artists, including Levi Ryken of Double Fine Productions and Greg Broadmore from New Zealand’s Weta Workshop (he of the District 9 concept design and the Dr. Grordbort line of steampunk rayguns).
This crowdsourced idea generator, dubbed the Super Magnetic Game-o-Matic, is the latest work of Nick Ahrens of iam8bit. After his successful piece at last year’s GDC, entitled “Painting with Pixels,” Ahrens wanted to create something even wilder. With generated titles so far including “Tyler Perry’s 3D Dino Ninja Revolution,” and “Misadventures of Deadly Hamster Bieber Killers,” this week-long project will certainly be generating a lot of laughs, if nothing else.
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