A few weeks ago, I got to travel to Vienna for the Future and Reality of Gaming (F.R.O.G.) 13 Conference. I’ve been to a lot of conferences at this point, and I’ve presented my research a number of times, but this is the first time I’ve taken one of my digital projects.

Jesper Juul giving a keynote about failure at F.R.O.G. 13 in Vienna.

Allyson Whipple and I are collaborating on Choice: Texas, and so we traveled together. It was a great time to wrap our heads around the next steps for the game, and we got some excellent feedback on our very, very early version of the game — my favorite being that the game is “Slow, but that’s a compliment.” We’ve still got our work cut out for us on the game, but that’s not really what I wanted to write about today;  rather, I wanted to just record how much I enjoyed the conference.

This was one of the most productive, collegial conferences I’ve been to. It was small enough that people were quite friendly, and the conference was very well organized. Every talk I saw was compelling and thought provoking. I learned a lot, and I met some people whose work I will definitely be following. This is absolutely a conference I recommend for those doing research in and around game studies, and it’s a conference I hope to eventually go back to. I have a lot of nice things to say about Vienna in general, but in this case, the beautiful city and venue were really just a bonus compared to the great conversations and presentations.

And, of course, now it’s on to the next adventure — I leave tomorrow for Geek Girl Con, where I’m on a roundtable about women in the game industry.