Until 2014, every year the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) held something called the Game Design Challenge. Competitors would design a game to fit within a “strange and unusual design constraint.” It was a popular part of the conference. This year, in honor of the the 30th anniversary of the conference, GDC has decided to reinstate the challenge. 

According to the conference website, the challenge is to “design a game that is meant to be played across 30 years—that’s 11,000 days, or 250,000 hours, or 15 million minutes… A full human generation.” Five game designers have been invited to participate.

The designers are Chris Crawford, the founder of the GDC, Nina Freeman, a level designer at Fullbright (Cibele); Zach Gage, an independent game designer (Sage Solitaire); and Laralyn McWilliams, chief creative office at The Workshop Entertainment (The Evil Within). Eric Zimmerman, independent game designer, professor, author, and Gamelab founder, will host.

This particular challenge was designed because game designers are particularly prone to focus only on current and future technology—and to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the conference.

In 2013, the year of the last Game Design Challenge, designers tackled the theme “the last game humanity will ever play.” The panel where the competitors presented their ideas is in the GDC Vault website.


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Linda learned to play video games as a way to connect with her teenaged kids, and then she learned to love video games for their own sake. At Pixelkin she wrangles the business & management side of things, writes posts as often as she can, reaches out on the social media, and does the occasional panel or talk. She lives in Seattle, where she writes, studies, plays video games, spends time with her family, consumes vast quantities of science fiction, and looks after her small cockapoo. She loves to hear from people out there. You can read more about her at her website, Linda Breneman.com or her family foundation's website, ludusproject.org.