Whaaat!?
That's "Whaaat!?," not "what?".
Urban slang dictionaries define the term as one of amazement and disbelief, combined with delight.
Itâs what organizers of ATLAS Instituteâs â,â hoped festival-goersÌęwould feel while attending the Sept. 29 event. The all-day festival was open to everyone, for a fee of $1.
ââWhaaat!?â is the reaction of someone playing an amazing game,â says Matt Bethancourt, director of the Technology, Arts and Media (TAM) program and the new ATLAS Instituteâs Whaaat!? Lab, where experiments are designed, refined and tested. âWe are interested in the delight others get from these experiences.â
Bethancourt and Danny Rankin, ATLAS instructor and recent graduate of the instituteâs Creative, Technology and Design (CTD) program, created the festival, where participants sampled experimental tabletop and electronic games, andÌęlearned about the art form of game design through speakers, panels and workshops.ÌęThe event was geared towards games that âdonât fit in traditional boxes,â says Rankin. The goal was to leave people âsurprised, maybe confusedÌęand hopefully delighted.â
Keynote speakers included gamemakers Mattie Brice, an independent video game designer, critic and industry activist, whose games and writings focus on diversity initiatives in the games industry, and Pippin Barr, assistant professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in MontrĂ©al, where he directs the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) AVĂûÊȘ Center. Additional speakers included Jason Tagmire, founder of Button Shy Games, and ATLAS Professor Daniel Leithinger, who led a two-hour workshop using the Nintendo Labo.Ìę
Arcades in the ATLAS Black Box and lobby, including collaborative, multi-player tabletop games, sound-music experiences and a kinetic video game that involves a lot of jumping around, will stay open throughout the day, and attendees will be able to play at their leisure. There will also be a large vintage arcade from the 1970s and 80s, with old Atari, Commodore 64 and Vectrex consoles, courtesy of CU Boulderâs Media Archeology Lab. Ìę
âIt will feel like your âcool friendâs basement in the 1980s,â Rankin says.
Festival attendees were able to sample production copies of âRavine,â a cooperative, tabletop, wilderness survival game that Rankin and Bethancourt created; âBusy Work,â developed by BethancourtÌęand his wife, Lisa, which employs phones, keyboards and a shredder, and won the 2018 IndieCade Media Choice Award; and âPlease Hold,â a narrative adventure done through a custom-designed phone, also created by the Bethancourts and Rankin.
âWe want to show people that games can be more than what they think, and hopefully leave them really excited and pumped about the future of whatâs happening in games,â Rankin says.
âThe idea is delight,â Bethancourt adds. âThe best thing about games and interactions are the times when they surprise you, and you have this total Whaat!? experience. Thatâs what we are focusing on.â
Whaaat!? was sponsored by the ATLAS Institute and CU Boulder's Engineering Excellence Fund.
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