Last Friday was Playful, a conference about vaguely game related things. A lot like previous Playfuls, but with Josie Long as a compere. Every conference should have a compere following talks with quips like "good to see people that are working at the height of technology and dressed like 18th century craftsmen".

Dough Globe, Mint Foundry

Foundry is a graduate scheme run by the agency Mint. Instead of hiring graduates to work for them, they instead take four graduates with different skills from what Mint usually do and give them a brief, support and 3 months to make something.

Last years Foundry batch made Olly, a machine that turns internet activity such as tweets into smells.

This years brief was "Make a toy that has a reason to exist", which resulted in sourdough you can play with. The Dough Globe is a container for growing sourdough in. The bottoms contains the sourdough whilst the top contains an arduino that measures the dough growth, following the important rule "Keep sourdough and electronics separate". The dough globe doubles as a video game controller. The accelerometer that normally measures dough agitation also controls a character on screen whilst the ethanol content of the dough controls the game difficulty. The player is rewarded with sourdough recipes.

One thing they learnt was "Don't personify the dough", or kids wont want to 'kill' the dough by baking and eating it.

Siobhan Reddy, Little Big Planet

Siobhan showed us a trailer for their new game Tearaway and said "Bad implementation is different from a bad idea". Catchy, just like the music on the trailer.

Hannah Donovan, This Is My Jam

"15 year olds of today never used MySpace. Facebook cover photos is most customisation they have known", Han said, "Services today are often about customisation, not really design, but there is something in the middle: craft". She pointed out how everyone on flavours.me looks the same and made us nostalgic for myspace. The proper old myspace with the overwhelming custom designs, not the new gentrified Justin Timberlake myspace.

Einar Sneve Martinussen, Voy

"We need more ways of blowing up the Internet." declared Einar. He pointed out that the tech industries typical visions of the future, such the Microsoft Productivity Future Vision, aren't about idilic seamless technology, but about people awkwardly poking phones. Instead of extrapolating touchscreens, Voy create new ways of looking at technology, such as light painting the ubiquitous wifi networks. Their "wooden whimsy" internet connected owl Ugle deliberately does very little, and acts as an argument against seamlessness.

versus

Bennett Foddy

Dr. Bennett Foddy is deputy director and senior research fellow at the Institute for Science & Ethics at Oxford University. And he made QWOP, the very difficult game where you must run the 100 metres by individually controlling the muscles in QWOP's legs.

He points out the Olympic is all about pain and suffering, with sports like race walking, essentially walking until it hurts. For some games, like 'slaps' or the cinnamon challenge, "pain is the entire game". Not all play is fun

Foddy seems just as interested in playing with the player, as he is in making things for people to play. Like the way that the old Apple II game Karateka would appear upside down if you inserted the disk upside down.

Holly Gramazio, Hide & Seek

Moving on from slapping games, Holly spoke about clapping games. There are no single player clapping games, which makes watching a person stand on stage by themselves trying to demonstrate them alone amusing. As Holly explains, you can use a wall to clap by yourself but "A wall cannot clap you on a horizontal plane". Clapping is like Guitar Hero without the need for technology. "Clapping is too amazing to leave it to children, freemasons and cheese sellers.", she said after telling us the various non-game uses of clapping before advocating augmented clapping, ""I want a clapping game where if I play really really well, fireworks go off". I'd play that.

A lovely mix of talks to think about, and conveniently the week before our new Playable City Award. There's more about the day's talks on the hashtag #playful12.