Playful

“Like Russell Davies’ Interesting crashed head-first into a load of games heads. There were many fantastic talks. Lots of hardware hacking, lots of technology stuff, lots of game theory and ideas, and some completely out of the blue…truly awesome, inspiring, tears-in-eyes stuff.”
- James Wallis, Spaaace

Starting out to explore the world and future world of game design as Game Design London in 2006, the conference spread its wings to the wider world of everything and became Playful in 2008, relocating to the inspirational Conway Hall.

In our work at Mudlark we’re constantly reading, working with, hearing about and recommending to our clients people who are pushing the boundaries of new media, philosophy, philanthropy, research, and theories on anything from why Lego is brilliant, to exploring social problems through The Sims (all via computational matchboxes, graphs, robots and why we really buy fancy wrist watches).

Each year we work with a different designer on the identity of Playful, and get them to recycle and adapt the work of the previous year’s branding. Previous ‘iterations’ of Playful visuals have been created by the masterful hands of POKE London and Rex Box.

We’re really proud of Playful, because, apart from making it for ourselves (to see a line-up of speakers that we’d really want to see), other people like it too, and that these people turn out to be as awesome as the people we booked to take the stage. Each October we end up surrounded by the type of people who in their own ways are changing the world which makes Playful not just a project but an education and inspiration to us.

Website: thisisplayful.com