Reality Panic

It was a pretty painful journey to get to Australia. I left Montreal Sunday at noon and got to Melbourne on Tuesday at 10am! Fourteen hours on one flight segment is just not fun. Thankfully, Melbourne is a really nice city full of friendly folks - settling into town was a welcome change of pace. Anyway.

(Continue reading about my trip to Oz, or jump straight to the fun pictures!)
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I reached a small personal milestone this month: I was quoted in Wired magazine. Some stupid bit about why games based on movies usually suck (and somehow, I don’t recall saying anything about JLo). It is kinda silly, as I do quite a bit of interviews and such, and get quoted in lots of places. Let me explain.

A little over eight years ago, I made a personal decision to leave the staid world of database programming and IT consulting and move into the emerging world of “multimedia”. The ultimate goal was to get into games, but at the time there wasn’t much game stuff going on in Montreal. So, I figured that web and 3D stuff, and other such digital and wired things was the next best answer.

It was the summer of ‘96 and I picked up the July issue of Wired as a means to get me up to speed on all things “wired”. I’ve been reading it ever since. Back then, I said something to the effect of “one day, my name will be in this mag”.

Anyway, seeing my name there while flipping the pages in LAX waiting for my flight to Oz put a smile on my face :)

As an aside, it is kind of ironic that in this same issue, Montreal is declared as an up-and-coming game development hot spot. Ah, another smile :)

Man, I’ve got to stop travelling. 30+ hours of travel time to get to Australia is not something I am looking forward to… I’m heading down to Melbourne for their annual developers’ conference. Of course, I am very much looking forward to _being_ there - just not _getting_ there. (As an aside, having played the great game of rugby for nearly half my life, I’ll have to sneak out of the conference to catch the World Cup final!) Anyway, I’ll be giving two lectures: one on overcoming industry issues (eg, piracy, censorship, risk aversion, quality of life, etc) and another on curriculum stuff during the academic portion. Fun.

Despite all the enjoyment I am sure to derive from my trip to Oz, I am quite saddened that I can’t attend the “State of Play” event being held in New York. I really dig all the IP, identity, culture, community type stuff. I am sure we’ll hear of more cool news, like Second Life giving their users the IP rights to characters!

Hopefully, this event does not produce any cheap-thrills style reporting that came out of last week’s Level Up academic conference. I was there during the lecture, and as Julian mentioned, it really didn’t go down like that…

Funny how game reviewers are being picked on for their lack of seriousness/maturity, yet the “grown-up” journos are far from ideal role-models…

I recently received a piece of print-spam from Blockbuster. They were pushing the latest releases, their “club” program and some coupons, etc. But, tucked in amongst the promo bits was a section on “Entertainment for the whole family”, where they proclaimed their support for the various media ratings systems. Nice.

They even have a trademark on “Youth Restricted Viewing” policy. Nice.

As an interesting aside, I heard from an inside source that of the retailers who actually have a formal ratings policy, the degree of enforcement at the point-of-sale is in the 50% range. Nice. But, that aspect was never reported on. Not nice.

As noted, I spent last week over in the Netherlands to attend the inaugural conference of the nascent Digital Games Research Association. Also, timing worked out nicely to stop in at one of the IGDA’s Amsterdam chapter events.

(Continue reading the summary, or jump straight to the fun pictures.)
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I am heading out for The Netherlands tomorrow. The Digital Games Research Assocation is holding their first conference, titled Level Up, just outside of Amsterdam. I’ll be providing an industry perspective to the academic/research focused content via my “in the trenches” panel.

Also, taking advantage of my time in town, I’ll be stopping in at the conveniently timed IGDA Amsterdam chapter meeting… Should be fun!

Given all the action, my guess is that my blogging will be somewhat impaired. So here are some links of interest to keep you busy over the next week or so:

- Oprah is looking for game addicts. Oh my! Someone make sure that the Counter-Strike playing kid quoted as being “this country’s greatest hope” is on there along with all the EQ widows…

- Nice to see some cracks being made to the DMCA, and steps forward for the preservation of digital games.

- Cool. A PhD course in Game Analysis Methodology. Something every game “journalist” should sign up for!

I’d keep going, but need to start packing ;)