The Experimental Gameplay Project began as a student pitched project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The project started in Spring 2005 with the goal of discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, we locked ourselves in a room for a semester with three rules:

• 1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
• 2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
• 3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarms", etc.

As the project progressed, we were amazed and thrilled with the onslaught of web traffic, with the attention from gaming magazines, and with industry professionals and academics all asking the same questions, "How are you making these games so quickly?" and "How can we do it too?" Though we successfully met our goal of making over 50 games, we realized that this project had become much less about the games, and much more about the crazy development process - and how we could help others do the same thing. We wrote about this process in our whitepaper How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days.

What's Next?
After two full semesters and two different teams busting out games in this way, we have opened up ExperimentalGameplay.com to everyone. Our goal now is to be a little arsenal for the aspiring game designer/developer. Whether a budding genius in high school, or a disgruntled professional game developer working in an oppressive large company, we encourage anyone with a brilliant game idea to prototype it and stick it on this site where they can get feedback, exposure, and who knows, maybe even a sexy publishing deal.

Contact
egp {[@}] experimentalgameplay