Was a busy week in Montreal! GRAND, the big game/animation research consortium was in town for their annual conference. Lots of amazing research being showcased - both hard/technical stuff, and more soft digital humanities type stuff. Though, admittedly, they still have a ways to go to make their work accessible and communicable to industry/outsiders…

I hosted the game keynote, which was a discussion between Clint Hocking and Caryl Shaw on intuition-driven versus metrics-drive design and development approaches. As a prelude, Concordia’s TAG lab hosted a workshop on how everyone can work together to best support the indie movement (or perhaps now what should be labeled as “garage” instead of indie).

There was also the Canada-wide Hotdocs-hosted screening of Indie Game: The Movie.  The post movie live satellite broadcast interview with the filmmakers and Phil Fish was a nice bonus. Was an enjoyable movie and nice to see it getting so much attention.

Some quick photos from the various activities:


Indie ecosystem workshop at Concordia’s TAG lab.


Went on a quick tour of Funcom across the street, during the lunch break.


Odd to see (tasteful) fashion spreads within a game studio… Funcom is working with FashionWeek.


Robot art as part of the International Digital Arts Biennial.


Poster session + opening reception of GRAND’12.


…with lots of technical research.


This one was dealing with latency in Street Fighter.


Ironically enough, heading out for post-conference dinner, we passed the student tuition protests on St-Catherines.


Valerie Steeves, criminology professor from University of Ottawa gives the opening keynote on kids + online privacy.


Post Indie Game screening chat with Phil Fish and the filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot.


10 litres of celebratory beer with Caryl Shaw and Manveer Heir.


Graphics/CompSci legend Ken Perlin delivers his “50 apps in 45minutes” keynote. Ya, he ran over just a few minutes ;)