Heather Kelley of the Montreal-based development collective, Kokoromi, will be coming by the NYU Game Center on Friday, April 23rd at 6pm to talk about their now four year old game competition, Gamma.

Kokoromi was formed by a rare union of gamemakers and curators to promote games as an art form and expressive medium, worldwide. Based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Kokoromi produces events, develops games, and hosts a blog at www.kokoromi.org.

Kokoromi is perhaps best known for creating Gamma, the annual “new arcade” event. The Gamma showcases, which are free for anyone to enter, present independent designers with constraint-based challenges and a public play environment that push the boundaries of game-making.

Comparable to a longer-form, targeted version of the ‘indie game jam’ concept, previous years’ themes have included Gamma 01: Audio Feed (games driven by live audio), gamma 256 (games with extremely small pixel dimensions), and GAMMA 3D (games using red-blue stereoscopic 3D). The theme for Gamma4, held in March 2010, was One Button Games.

Heather will be covering the history of Gamma, presenting example games, and leading a discussion on the role of challenge and curation in shaping the development of this emerging art form.

The talk will be in Room 006 on the Lower Level of the Tisch building at 721 Broadway.