Grassroots Game Conference: 30+ events in 2nd annual game festival

Don’t be fooled by the Grassroots Game Conference‘s unassuming name. It’s playing host to the largest chiptunes festival in North America, the largest conference focused on women in game development and more than 30 events with speakers from across the country and Europe.

The second annual conference, organized by Nathan Solomon and his Philadelphia Game Lab, kicks off this Monday. Solomon stressed that it’s not a conference for gamers, game marketing professionals or industry game developers. Instead, it’s for anyone who has an interest in games. Solomon hopes the conference will inspire people to create games and to see the different kinds of games that exist.

The conference has six tracks, one for each day of the conference, with highlights provided by Solomon:

• Monday: Games and the Body, “where Accenture will be presenting its recent study on use of Games and Health, as well as information on a related new API”
• Tuesday: Civic Engagement, where “Tassos Stevens from the UK group Cloney will be keynoting the track on civic engagement, and leading real world gameplay around the topic”
• Wednesday: Women in Games, where “Heidi MacDonald, game designer and leading thinker in the area, will keynote a day of expert presentations and panels focusing on women’s use and development of games, intended to spark increased local activity”
• Thursday: Collision of Art and Games, where “Paolo Pedercini, a leading developer and academic working in games as art, will be keynoting a day focusing on the intersection of games and art”
• Friday: Collision of Music and Games
• Sunday: K12 Game Creation for STEM, where “Lucien Vattel from Gamedesk in Los Angeles will be presenting learnings from their ongoing initiatives in k12 use of games as well as recent AT&T-funded exploration”

Each day cost $20, $10 for students. Get tickets by clicking on the appropriate day above.

And don’t forget about 8static festival, the largest chiptunes festival in North America, taking place from Thursday to Saturday.