Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute invited me to keynote their 4th annual Game Festival & Symposium. Given they are in upstate New York, for once, I got to drive to a game industry event. And, despite the impending doom of the big Noreaster, I made the Montreal <> Albany trek without a hitch.

It was a fun little event and a nice change of pace versus monster events like GDC. The focus was on the students, as it should be, and the festival portion was a great opportunity for the student teams to show off their class projects. The conference portion offered lively discussion on the role of games in culture and explored games beyond the current mainstream offerings. My talk covered more industry structure stuff, QoL and changes in approaches to production, etc.

Here are a few pics I snapped:


Mary Flanagan (Hunter College) watches as SBRL lab director Jim Watt demonstrates the mo-cap studio.

Katherine Isbister (RPI) points to the “spy cam” in her game testing lab.

The Pros: Ian Stead (1st Playable Productions) shows off the awesome Puzzle Quest during the Festival.

The Students: student team GM’s their “space box” game, Atropos…

Steve Meretzky (Blue Fang Games) with son, and RPI student, Dan.

Ian with RPI alum Michael Lewis (Cryptic Studios), who uses his super heat vision to decipher the pub menu!

Opening keynoter, Katie Salen (Parsons/gameLab) discusses the notion of a magic circle surrounding play.

Studio heads (at left: Karthik Bala/Vicarious Visions, Michael Lewis/Cryptic, Mike DelPrete/Agora Games) grilled by RPI students.

Karthik hands out the student project awards, which were kindly sponsored by Vicarious Visions.

A peak inside the 1st Playable studio: Fernando De La Cruz, Colin Wilkinson, LaShonda Hopper, Ian Stead.