Talk & Play #4

It's never been easier to make video games, thanks to the multitude of resources available and a growing worldwide community willing to help beginners. As a result, new games are being released every day, exploring different directions and tackling novel themes: playing is more stimulating and inclusive than ever.

Talk & Play is a bi-monthly meetup whose goal is to give a better idea of what it's like to create and play games today, providing the opportunity to local independent game makers to showcase their work in a friendly and relaxed environment. Everybody's welcome, whatever their background and knowledge level. If you like video games, we'll make sure you have a good time!

The event is split into two parts:

1. TALK: 2/3 short game-related talks (5 to 15 minutes), followed by a Q&A session – it's all about sharing knowledge.

2. PLAY: games made or chosen by the speakers will be shown; in addition, all participants are welcome to bring games they've made or are still working on – a perfect opportunity to discover and play new games, collect feedback and maybe find collaborators.

To give you a better idea of what you're going to find, check out these summaries of the first (http://bit.ly/talkandplay1), second (http://bit.ly/talkandplay2) and third (http://bit.ly/talkandplay3) Talk & Play.

The speakers at Talk & Play #4 will be:

Canupa (http://www.canupa.com/), a Berlin based indie game studio, will talk about their latest release Omicron, a colour reaction game for one or two players on the same touch screen device. It's beautiful and you should try it!

Martin Reiche (http://www.martinreiche.com), an audiovisual installation and game artist living and working in Berlin, co-founder and head member of the Laboratory for the Analysis of Social Networks (LASN) at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and co-founder of the Subformat Research Group. He will talk about how the art market works and how game creators can benefit from that.

Kristina Rothe (https://twitter.com/kris_rothe), game development evangelist at Microsoft with a background in game development, publishing and journalism, has worked at Travian Games and Square Enix Europe in the past. The title of her talk is "Three things to help your game get noticed", which is quite self-explanatory!

The organisers of the Global Game Jam Berlin 2014 (http://globalgamejam.org/) (save the date: January 24-26) will present some of the games made during previous GGJ in Berlin to show you that spending 48 sleepless hours with other people can be magical.

A MAZE. / Berlin 2014 (http://www.amaze-berlin.de/) (formerly Indie Connect) has just been announced, the tickets for the festival and the submissions for the awards are now open. Festival director Thorsten S. Wiedemann will give an anticipation of what to expect from the event and invite us to the upcoming Hyper Room (https://www.facebook.com/events/397018380400615/) party on December 7.

Would you like to give a talk as well in the future? Then get in touch (https://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-berlin/members/1939705/)!

Talk & Play is organised in collaboration with the monthly Berlin Mini Game Jam (https://www.meetup.com/game-developers-berlin/) and A MAZE. (http://www.amaze-berlin.de/)