Reality Panic

I visited North Carolina for the first time last week, Raleigh to be exact. I was invited to give the keynote at a local conference called Digital Game XPO, and was able to piggyback several other activities during my 3-day stay… In short:

• Met up with Heather Chandler (Media Sunshine) to discuss the future plans of the IGDA’s Production SIG. Heather was recently appointed as the chair for the SIG.
• Attended the IGDA’s NC Triangle chapter meeting held the night before the conference. Kudos to Dana Cowley (Octagon), the chapter’s indefatigable coordinator and Epic for hosting a great gathering.
• Had lunch with Michael Capps (Epic Games), one of my new bosses and freshly appointed Treasurer of the IGDA. We discussed org finances and related board of director matters.
• Presented the second-day keynote at the Digital Game XPO and hung around to check out some of the other speakers, etc
• Even had some extra time to go see Nacho Libre with some of the conference folks. Hehehehe, that Jack Black is so crazy funny :)

Here are some pics I snapped during my visit:

Entrance of the Epic Games office, where the IGDA chapter meeting was hosted.
CliffyB (Epic Games) demoing Gears of War for chapter meeting attendees.

Mark Rein (Epic Games) touching the in-house exercise equipment for the first time…

Coder extraordinaire Tim Sweeney (Epic Games) with his collection of colorful kites (which double as window blinds).

Best art in the joint: While most desks were adorned with the usual Star Wars and D&D inspired figurines/toys, this desk was plastered with kiddy art. Nice to see :)

Epic’s so-called quality of life room. Where’s the defibrillator?

Local heroe Jerry Heneghan (Virtual Heroes) delivers the keynote on the first day of the Digital Game XPO.

Farhad Javidi (Central Piedmont Community College) chats with Eeljin Chae (Dongseo University, Korea) during dinner after the first day of the conference.

Waketech Community College class project: A two-player Tetris-style puzzle game.

Another student project, this time using the Unreal engine for a futuristic racer game.

Folks playing America’s Army (which was partially produced locally) at the expo.

I was struck by the shortsightedness of Activision CEO Bobby Kotick on the limited prospects of digital distribution (or at least, that it is going to take a long, long time before it has impact). Valve (who just released Ep1 Steam stats) and the folks in the casual games space may have a thing or two to say about that… Ditto for an extensive report from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Even more surprising, days later, Activision announces a new publishing office in Seoul, South Korea. Good for them. But, let us not forget that over 95% of the Korean market is online. From the announcement, it was unclear if the office plans to push boxed product, or do stuff online (especially in light of Kotick dim views of digital distribution).

This all brings up an interesting passage from some economic/organizational behavior research I’ve been doing:

Some organizational fields are characterized by a distinct dominance order in which a few groups of actors [ie, publishers like Activision] operate at the apex while others survive on the bottom. In such instances, groups of influential actors have vested interests in preserving the social order [ie, boxed product sales via retailers]. Consequently, structural innovations seldom emerge out of the center of a hierarchically-organized field, but instead, originate in the periphery, and may conflict with the interests of central players. Since actors at the periphery of a field possess little influence and lack resources, social movements are the vehicles of collective action by which new forms become established. Such social movements typically assume a ‘conflict-oriented’ character in the sense that conflict arises when organized attempts to modify the prevalent institutional order encounter opposition [ie, like pooh-poohing on digital distribution] from interest groups opposed to the change.

This also relates heavily to the “margins” threads from the likes of Warren Spector and Eric Zimmerman over the past couple of years…

SIGGRAPH’s Montreal chapter felt like having a big pre-SIGGRAPH:06 party on Friday. All the local digerati were invited and geared up for some sponsored boozing. While I was invited, I had opted to not go (or, rather, I was guilted in not going because I had to be a good daddy and stay home to help with the kids and all that good stuff :) Since the IGDA chapter’s own event with BioWare was the night before at the same venue (Society for Arts and Technology), I didn’t feel too left out of the local community vibe - for this week.

That was the plan. As it turned out, I mistakenly dropped my wallet on stage during my welcome speech at the IGDA meeting. After freaking out some and looking everywhere for it, I called the SAT to see if they had it. They did. So, I just had to go back to pick it up… After the kids were asleep, of course!

There was a healthy ~400+ person crowd…

…enjoying the hip DJ tunes and VJ visuals.

EA Montreal was one of the party sponsors and brought in FIFA to play on a big 9′x12′ projected screen.

A few of the game dev folks at the party: Heather Kelley (Ubisoft), Damien Di Fede, James Everett (A2M) and Philippe Poisson (A2M).

Just catching up on all of the coverage from the Sex in Games Conference, held last week in San Francisco. The Sex SIG has several batches of links with pointers to coverage: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

If the Sex SIG blog site statistics are any indicator, there has certainly been a growing interest in the topic…

However, looking at the event photos from Ren Renolds, things look pretty tame by game industry standards (cough… E3… cough ;)

Got a complimentary copy of Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business, a nifty little book on the basics of blogging geared toward businesses. It was a little too 101 for my taste (eg, the whole first chapter is on “what is a blog”). It does however, give some good advice on blog tools, organization/process tips, and ton of info on metrics. While I’m guessing there are better books out there that cover specific areas in much more depth (eg, how to make money from blogging), this was a nice quick book to round out basic knowledge.

New tools for my blog toolbox from the book: BlogPulse (a site with tons of metrics related functions), Google Blog Search (didn’t even know they had a specific engine for blogs) and the fact that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of search terms from Technorati is pretty darn cool. Mint looks pretty tasty as well.

The IGDA officially announced its newly elected board members and appointed officers. Brian Reynolds, of CivII and Rise of Legends fame and the president of Big Huge Games, is now the new top dog of the org, the chair of the board.

“I’m thrilled to be leading the IGDA Board at a time when the organization is capable of making great strides in helping, protecting, and encouraging game developers. In particular, I joined the IGDA to help game professionals ‘get a better deal,’ and we intend to make progress on that.”

So ya, that kinda makes Brian my new boss. Technically, the entire board is my boss (yeah, that’s like 8 bosses at once). Well, actually, the board is elected by the membership to serve as their representative leadership. So, by extension, my real real boss is the IGDA membership (yowza, that ’s about 10000 bosses all at once ;)

I better get back to work!