Socialbomb unit, originally uploaded by doryexmachina.

Last week we took Socialbomb to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. We held a BoF session on getting social games away from the keyboard, and ran a full-scale, 30-person game of Socialbomb with the latest rev of the hardware at the Emerging Arts Fest.

We got a response better than any we could have expected, met some wonderful people whose work and opinion we greatly respect, and had a great time seeing all of the awesome things that are going on. I’ll post more on ETech someday when I’m feeling less consumed by thesis, but for now, here’s a beautiful shot which Mike took of the new devices. I feel very proud and hugely relieved. Back to game designing!

And here’s a video of our innocent little children behaving like the proto-Cylons that they are: once they see each other and start sending data, their send/receive patterns fall into step, making their transfer LEDs blink simultaneously. We didn’t program this behavior at all, and everyone (including us) finds it vaguely threatening. Emergence at work!

Socialbomb units in action from Mike Dory on Vimeo..