Niels Keetels is a game design researcher at the Utrecht School of the Arts. He’ll talk about Softbody; an EMMA graduation project he worked on with four others. Softbody is a game that combines open-ended and goal-directed play in an elegant manner. The game’s mechanics were inspired by observations of children at play during field research at primary schools. Besides being decorative, the surrealist graphics give the player a sense of progression through changes in the environment. In this way the otherwise unpopulated game world is the game’s most important protagonist.
