We hope you had a fabulous 2017. We feel like things flew by in a flash and wanted to take a minute to recap before discussing plans for this year. I was really excited to look back on the year in New York, as I think we ran a number of pretty significant events. It was also exciting to know that our London chapter was also having a great year!

Last year, we were a major part of Global Game Jam at the Playcrafting event - providing official Safe Space support for the first time. Rachel, Adina and I ran workshops through the event.

Global Game Jam Promotional Video produced by Playcrafing

During women’s history month, Maria’s VR game was featured by Playcrafting and I was invited to represent Code Liberation on a panel about women in games.

In February, Caroline and I ran a Music Hack workshop using p5.js to generate synths and visuals at MomaPS1 at the opening event of a series of Sunday sessions exploring the relationship between electronic music / technology and non-binary gender positions. It was a wonderful event that Honey Dijon then gave an inspirational talk at after. At the event, we also showcased a games made by Code Liberation women.

Over the course of the year, we were able to welcome Adina, Holly, Kat, and Maria as new members. This enabled us to work with Y&R on a series of concepts for their UN Whole Story campaign, which culminated in a workshop with a NY Girl Scouts troop, teaching them some basic 3D modeling and art based software skills for an Augmented Reality app of the same name. This also helped us raise around $6,500 for this event. As you all know, raising funds has been a big challenge for the organization so this is indeed no small feat. All of you pitched in for this and it was amazing to see it come together, despite all the obstacles put in front of us.

instagram photos from the event

As we move into 2018, we also want to acknowledge a major challenge that we faced in 2017 - the high number of traveling and away members. Most of our members are high achievers, and are in great places in their careers, which in NY means that you are usually somewhere else half the time, speaking, teaching, working and learning. This meant that we are not really able to get together often and spontaneously.

NEXT STEPS:

We are looking at reshaping the org in 2018 to support creative research around Games, AI and Play. Expect great things and stay tuned. More projects are in the works with the V&A.