Reality Panic

In early April, my logistical stars aligned and I was able to participate in three back-to-back events in Europe. Specifically, the ImMediaTe Cross Media Summit in Rome, Digital Game Production Malta’s Gamezing competition award ceremony and the Heidelberg Innovation Forum in Germany.

In Rome, I served on a panel discussing funding of various media projects. Of course, I handled the game perspective. Also, I hosted a batch of pitch-style presentations geared around the gamification theme. In Heidelberg, I did a similar pitch session, but also gave the opening keynote, discussing innovation and the need to embrace failure on the path to success.

The trip to Malta was the most eye opening, as it was my first time visiting the small country. I gave a keynote on trends in the game industry and how to grow a game development community. The speech was part of the ceremony to announce the winners of their student game dev competition, Gamezing. The industry is quite embryonic, but a dedicated group is working to propel things forward. And wow, Malta is a pretty fascinating and beautiful place. I wish I had been able to stay longer than just two days!

Here are some of the photos I took along the way…

Rome

Blossoming view outside my hotel in Rome, near Piazza del Popolo.

Riccardo Panunzio (FILAS) discusses the “futouring“trend in Italy.

The gate of the Canadian Embassy in Rome.

Casa del Cinema in the Borghese Villa gardens, where the conference was held.

Mega fountain photo action in Piazza Navona: Jaspar Roos (ABN Ambro), Jeroen Meijer (Muzar), Dino Patti (Playdead), Kamarul Ariff (MDeC) and Gohar Sargsyan (Logica).

The crossmedia creativity panel.

Malta

The view outside my hotel room in Malta.

Something about the tight winding roads mesmerizes me…

Beachfront in Sliema.

One of the many bays/coves.

Many of the buildings had beautifully contrasting colors with the typical sandstone bricks.

Saviour Chircop (University of Malta) welcomes everyone to the Gamezing award ceremony.

Outside Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta…

…and inside.

One of the “Three Cities” across the bay from Valletta, I think this one is Cospicua.

View of Valletta’s bay from the upper Barrakka gardens.

Just so happened there was a national Scouts parade in town.

The “Blue Grotto” along the southern coast.

Grounds of the ancient stone temple Hagar Qim, the oldest free-standing man-made structure (predating Stone Henge and the Pyramids!)

Some of the stones weigh up to 20 tons!

Cathedral inside the walled city of Mdina.

The mayor of Valletta, Alexiei Dingli and his family showed me around.

The ancient walled city of Mdina, founded in 700BC and continuously fortified over the years…

Heidelberg

View from my hotel window in Heidelberg.

Part of the Villa Bosch complex, where the conference was held.

Entrance to the more modern portion of the conference center.

Heather Ritchie (Lymbix) presents some cool text nuance/emotion parsing technology.

Andoni Gonzalo (Agla4d) discusses the use of advanced technology and 3D systems for construction optimization.

Idyllic river side views.

View of the Heidelberg Castle ruins from below in the city center.

The closing dinner was at the rather lavish Palais Prinz Carl.

While I’ve been out to Germany several times, I never made it over to Berlin. Finally, the opportunity arose when I was invited to participate in a Game Culture Circle “talk show”. The quarterly event is an eclectic mix of games discussion, playing, and schmoozing at the bar with folks from all corners of the creative/arts world. The theme was “play money” and it made for some interesting discussion (video coming soon).

While in town I also visited the HTW university and their Interaction/Game Design program, giving a lecture to the students and checking out their lab, mocap studio, etc.

Berlin itself was impressive. I was not expecting such a large city. In 4 days I really felt that I barely scratched the surface.  And, there was always this sense of a layer of “complexity” that made it hard for an outsider to navigate the social scene… Hmm, this requires more research on future trips!

Finally, it was a special treat to visit the recently opened Computerspielemuseum (Computer Game Museum), which I believe is the first dedicated and stand-alone game museum in the world.

Anyway, here are a few photos from the trip:

The famous “TV tower”.

Attendees playing the money game ahead of the show.

Host Armin Ceric and first guest Ren Reynolds discuss virtual world currencies.

The full Play Money panel in action: Martin Burckhardt, myself and Ren Reynolds.

Nearby HTW’s game lab: coffee house on ground floor, three story loft, then a big ass industrial crane on the roof. Nice.

The symbolic Brandenburg Gate.

The impressive Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It’s an odd experience to dive in and get lost between the massive concrete slabs…

Cool oddly angled/sketchy building near Potsdamer Square.

Sections of the Berlin Wall.

View of Alexander Square from the hotel room.

Entrance to city hall.

Another cool church.

Oh ya, fastest street car (Bugatti Veyron) in the world just spinning their in a showroom along the street.

The Donkey Kong like street art next to the Computerspielemuseum.

Super cool entrance to the Museum.

The Museum had a whole section on pre-digital games/play.

Some important game industry milestones, including a couple of missteps ;)

An impressive wall full of old gaming systems/consoles…

…including the infamous Virtual Boy.

The second iteration of PAX East was a complete zoo, with nearly 70 thousand attendees (making it currently the largest game related event in North America). As usual, when I attend PAX events, I get a melancholic type longing to be a better/greater geek ;)

Also, as is PAX tradition, was great to see the dominance of indie games mixed in with some of the bigger players. Sadly, I didn’t get in many sessions, but my “Here Be Danger” talk went well, with a packed room coming to hear about some of the dirty bits of the industry and what really to expect when working in games. Some of the topics I covered were:

• legal/contract stuff matters (like watch out for non-compete and IP assignment clauses)
• passion doesn’t count for much since everyone has passion
• need to have a life and outside inspiration/ideas and not jut regurgitate game memes
• ideas are worthless, need to be able to execute (and no excuse to not be DOing stuff now)
• think more broadly about the game industry as an ecology of valid sub-industries
• there is no job security, think like a freelancer and focus on projects that mean something to you
• Quality of life (including your physical health) matters
• Social skills are massively important (both to get a job, and to do/keep a job)… Everyone should read Darius’ networking guide

Folks seemed to enjoy the candor of my talk and I got a lot of Q&A and stragglers at the end. Oh, and too funny, at one point as I was talking and doing the good speaker move of looking/scanning the room as I speak, my eye caught SpiderMan in the far edge of the room! It totally distracted me, I just stopped mid-sentence. Damn SpiderMan!

Anyway, some quick pics from the trip:

Damian Isla showing off Moonshot’s new 2D side-scroller-shooter during the “Made in MA” pre-PAX party.

The ever focused Chris Hecker tweaking SpyParty during the party.

Total zoo on the PAX show floor!

Indie darling The Behemoth with a big booth at the center of the show floor. Each year they have a bigger presence (it’s my barometer for indie power ;)

Still, the big boys were showing off their big guns…

Big line ups for the big titles.

Phil Fish demoing FEZ to much positive feedback.

The board/CCG/table-top gaming zone.

I’m not quite sure how we survive GDC each year. This was my 15th time participating at the mecca of game development, and each time is a marathon’s test of endurance, with dozens of meetings, social events, sessions, expo floor runs, etc, etc. I leave each year utterly exhausted, yet excited by everything I learned and everyone I met.

Most of GDC is a blur as I’m still in my post conference coma… But a few key things included the prevalence (and parity) of  social/mobile topics vis-a-vis the usual console fare; several deep sessions on the meaning/value of games (eg, Eric on digital labor, Clint on dynamical meaning, Moriarty on sublime art, Brenda on tragedy, etc); the growing power of indie was also a recurring theme.

The rant session that Eric and I host each year was a blast and got a lot of attention. There were 1000+ attendees and the session always felt on verge of anarchy. Ryan spilling out his stolen coins from the bag was an epic moment. You had to be there…

As usual, Gamasutra has a full run down of the sessions and news. Here are some quick pics that I took:

Got stuck in Toronto for ~5hours (due to snow delay) with folks connecting in via Copenhagen. Despite warning Dino Patti (Playdead) that sleeping now would mess with his jetlag, he totally passed out - drool and all.

Cool academics discuss their game labs.

Small indie dev Last Day of Work showing off the huge differential in dev costs (orange) versus revenues (blue).

The Iam8bit giant pixel mural in progress…

Eric Zimmerman hands out card decks for the Meta Game.

Masaya Matsuura (NanaOn-Sha) and GDC bosslady Meggan Scavio at the ngmoco party.

Tim Schafer (DoubleFine) shows off the power of his shrinking ray gun.

Eric Zimmerman and John Sharp (SCAD) get design feedback on their board game prototype from Jason Rohrer.

At BigPoint’s “Playboy” party. Meh, not so great…

Mortal enemies Mark Rein (Epic) and Avni Yerli (Crytek) enjoying a drink at the Playboy party.

Clint Hocking (LucasArts) wows the audience with a deep dive on the meaning of games.

New IGDA bossman Gordon Bellamy addresses the IGDA’s elite during the VIP/volunteer lunch.

Cool game studio genealogy style mapping at the booth of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE).

The always bustling IGF area.

FRACT, from the University of Montreal, takes the IGF’s Best Student Game award.

Notch holds up the Audience Award for Minecraft.

The reclusive Arnt Jensen (Playdead) picks up Best Visual Arts for Limbo, along with Morten Bramsen.

Tom Hall and John Romero conduct a retro postmortem on Doom.

Brenda’s discussion on designing tragedy was moving. (That’s the kind of talk that should be a conference keynote, not Nintendo pitch barf.)

John Romero (Loot Drop) amasses disciples during the “bigger than Jesus” game design challenge.

Kiyoshi Shin welcomes the 160+ developers to the annual Japanese developers dim sum dinner.

At Clint Hocking’s post GDC house-warming party in the Presidio.

A sub-group split from Clint’s to walk over to the Lucas campus and visit Yoda’s fountain.

Hector Hocking, the next next generation of game designer?

Just doing final prep and packing for the big Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It’s the 25th iteration of the event, and they’re making a big deal of it with an extra helping of awesome (even too much awesome to handle at times)! This will be the 15th straight GDC I attend. And, I’m excited as always to learn and connect with peers and have fun. Plus I bought some new Nike’s with super cushy “lunarlon” soles, so I’m feeling good. Also, once again, I’m a speaker this year.

Once again, Eric Zimmerman and I are hosting the “rant” panel, titled “No Freaking Respect! Social Game Developers Rant Back”. The theme this year is social game developers getting a chance to bite back. Our ranters this year are: Scott Jon Siegel (Playdom), Chris Hecker (definition six, inc.), Trip Hawkins (Digital Chocolate), Brenda Brathwaite (Lolapps), Ian Bogost (The Georgia Institute of Technology), Brian Reynolds (Zynga), and Steve Meretzky (Playdom).

And, we’ve been getting a lot of attention ahead of the show. With the rant panel being one of the top sessions GDC is recommending to the press/media, and giving it some extra exposure via a Gamasutra highlight, and GamePolitics pointing to it (and labeling myself and Eric as “Rantmasters General”), as well as getting flagged as a social games session to watch for by AOL’s Games.com blog. I have no doubt we’ll deliver on the hype and have a fantastic session!(We’ve got a huge room that fits 1100 people, hope to see you there :)

Now in its fourth iteration, GameON Finance has grown into a superb niche conference focused on the biz aspects of the games industry. The 2011 edition was sold out, and had a stellar line up of speakers: from bigwig bankers and VC types, to single-man micro studios providing case studies of their success. Also, it was the most international so far with folks from Europe, the USA and Latin America in for the event.

Admittedly, I’m a little biased as I’m on the advisory committee, but unsolicited feedback was great. This year, I didn’t do a lecture (or last minute keynote replacement). Instead, I moderated three different sessions: one on indie successes, another covering connected consoles and the final a panel on business aspects of social games.

Here are some quick photos from the conference:

Ontario Minister of Economic Development & Trade, Sandra Pupatello, kicks off the pre-conference reception at Ryerson University.

Nathan Vella tells the Capybara story for the reception keynote speech.

Remi Racine (Behaviour Interactive) provides the opening keynote.

Piers Harding-Rolls (Screen Digest) dives deep into the numbers…

…I really liked this graph looking at the average spend per user on consoles vs. social games. Hmm, would be more interesting if he filtered out all the non-paying social players.

Key slide from the Mark MacLeod (Real Ventures) presentation!

A look at alternative funding strategies. Moderator: Marc Jackson (Seahorn Capital); bonding: Risa Cohen; incubation/acceleration: Juan Benito (Joystick Labs); indie self-funding: Nathan Vella (Capybara/IndieFund).

Dino Patti (Playdead Games) discusses the background and success of Limbo with Shaun Hatton (Electric Playground).

VIP dinner on the KPMG executive floor (FYI, its 46th) with Malte Behrmann (European Game Developers Federation) and Interactive Ontario bossman, Ian Kelso.

Separated at birth: Dino Patti (Playdead Games) and Nathan Vella (Capybara).

Dino showing off his hardy European drinking skills with a “Flaming Burning Lamborghini”(yes, the glass is on fire). Tom Frencel (Little Guy Games) and Trevor Fencott (Bedlam) watch on. Not pictured: Scott Simpson’s flaming mustache!