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Jason Rohrer Wins GDC’s Final Game Design Challenge
Today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, the 10th annual and final Game Design Challenge took place. The decade-long series of contests tasks talented game makers with making a game based off an abstract topic. In years past, SimCity creator Will Wright made a romance game built within Battlefield 1942, and Journey lead Jenova Chen created a Facebook game that examined the concept of permadeath. This theme of this final Game Design Challenge was the last game that would ever be played by humanity, which Jason Rohrer won with a clever concept involving a durable, metallic board game buried somewhere in the deserts of Nevada.
Rohrer, developer of games like Passage and Sleep is Death, wanted to create a game that nobody currently living would ever get to play. He researched a plethora of materials to make the game, and landed on titanium as being the most resilient against the test of time. The game pieces are designed to be slotted into the board and sandwiched between two sheets of metal that are bolted together. He custom built a titanium sheath and hermetic glass tube to seal the paper instructions in. He buried the entire kit – over 30 pounds in total – at an undisclosed location in the Nevada desert. Well, not entirely undisclosed: Rohrer handed out over 200 sheets of paper with hundreds of possible coordinates for the game. One of these locations marks the correct location, but Rohrer says that if you were to check one site a day it would take over 2,700 years to get to them all.
Jason's competition included Will Wright, Dishonored creator Harvey Smith, and more. The audience voted for their favorites by texting their picks. Rohrer’s prizes included a certificate to an acre of land on the moon.
Game Design Challenge host Eric Zimmerman explained why this is the final contest.
“This is the last game that humanity ever plays” is a statement very open to interpretation. “I wanted to end the run of the game design challenge on a high note,” says Zimmerman. “For me it’s been a contest of champions…. These people on stage are my heroes, and it’s my honor to work with them on this challenge.”
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