AFTER DARK: Let's Play
Thu Mar 21, 6:00 PM - Sun Mar 10, 10:00 PM

Take a deep dive with emerging and established game creators into how they’re furthering this notion, from outrageous collaborative games that challenge social dynamics to virtual reality games that are (maybe) good for your health.

//SCHEDULE//

Presentations:

→ Pinewood Derby Race
With Zeke Kossover
Weigh-in at 6:30; races at 7:00, 8:00, and 9:00 | Bechtel Gallery 3

For 65 years, the Pinewood Derby has been a rite of spring for the Boy Scouts of America. With a few basic rules of the road and gravity as the only propelling force, cars crafted from small blocks of pinewood compete to emerge fastest. Interested in competing? Bring your own handbuilt or kit-crafted car to try to take all the way to the finals. Check out the guidelines here. Not building your own car? No worries—we’ll have a few on hand for visitors to take out for a spin.

→ Connecting through Play: Designing Technologies that Bring Us Closer
With Katherine Isbister
7:30 p.m. | Bechtel Gallery 3, Webcast Studio

Read too many news stories about how technology is destroying our social connections and creating isolation and depression? Come hear about research focused on creating technology that playfully heightens and augments being together in the moment. Katherine Isbister’s lab is working toward a future in which wearables and other devices artfully bring out the best in us as social and emotional creatures. You’ll also get to try on and try out custom-built wearables her lab built to augment live-action role play.

→ The Deinstrumentalization of Games
With Eddo Stern
8:30 p.m. | Bechtel Gallery 3, Webcast Studio

As a games designer, artist, and educator, UCLA Game Lab Director Eddo Stern takes a remarkably experimental approach to his work. In this talk, Stern will discuss making games and projects about games as an expressionistic and humanistic practice. He will discuss the struggle of cultivating and sustaining a games laboratory that survives while resisting the prominent values, technologies, and expectations of the entertainment industry and highlight some of the inventive, genre-expanding work produced within the lab.

Ongoing:

→ True Colors
With the Social Emotional Tech Lab
6:30–8:30 p.m. |