Reality Panic

Right after the IGDA Leadership Forum, I flew down to Australia. The original motivation was to speak at the Game Connect: Asia Pacific event in Melbourne, but I made a side trip to Perth as well. This made for a pretty grueling travel schedule (eg, ~14hr flight from SF to Sydney, wait ~4hrs to get onto a ~5hr flight to Perth :(

The side trip to Perth was mainly motivated by the IGDA’s local chapter and their efforts to catalyze the game industry in Western Australia. I met with government support agencies, educators, VC types, press, students, and of course developers. IGDA-Perth has a nice summary of some of the action.

By mid-week, I headed over to Melbourne for the main conference. GCAP is a smaller scale and intimate event. Overall well organized and useful, but could use a bit more focus in terms of their content and who exactly is meant to benefit from the program… Anyway, I very much enjoyed my participation and the GDAA served as gracious hosts.

Running alongside the industry focused GCAP, was the consumer facing eGames expo. All the major publishers had a presence and the expo welcomed upwards of 20k visitors - not bad given the relative small local games market in Australia.

The ~30hr Melbourne > Sydney > Los Angeles > Chicago > Montreal transit home was much less enjoyable!

Here are some photos from the trip:

Perth skyline.

War memorial in Perth with stunning view of the river.

New IGDA-Perth chairman, Robert Spencer (Interzone Games) introduces the new chapter leadership: Andrew Hutchinson (Curtin University), Martin Masek (Edith Cowan University), Geoff Collins (WA Government Department of Industry and Resources ), Jon Hayward.

About 80 developers and students showed up for the Perth chapter meeting.

Chapter vice-chair, David Kazim (GO3 Electronic and Entertainment Expo) presides over the raffle prize giving.

Kathy Blashki (Deakin University) discusses educational/talent challenges during the Skills Forum at GCAP.

GDAA executive director Greg Bondar and president Tom Crago run the org’s annual general meeting.

Indie game dev action at GCAP.

At the women’s breakfast gathering/discussion.

Dave Glenn (Flagship Studios) gives detailed talk on random level generation techniques in Hellgate London.

Guitar Hero action during “free beer Fridays” at Tantalus.

Lovely zen-like garden in the middle of Tom Crago’s house. (Admittedly, the best VIP cocktails setting I’ve yet had.)

I slid away to catch an exclusive screening of the “final cut” of Blade Runner on a 4k digital projector. Stunning!

Known for strong government support programs, three reps came to discuss opportunities: Andrew Ferrington (Multimedia Victoria), Mark Fludder (Queensland Government), Amelia King (Film Victoria).

Matt Costello leads an entertaining/interactive session on story and gameplay.

David Hewitt’s (Tantalus) sharp wit and fun slides salvaged a relatively pointless “big debate” closing session arguing which console between PS3/Wii/X360 would deliver the great games of the future.

Random family milling about the entrance to the eGames expo.

Xbox/Halo was present in full force.

As were more local offerings: Auran’s Graham Edelstein shows off Fury.

Puzzle Quest sweeps the GDAA Awards. Well deserved!

By all counts, the IGDA’s first official self-run conference, the IGDA Leadership Forum, was a huge success. While we still have to tabulate the eval forms, anecdotal feedback has been hugely positive.

In it encouraging to see how well setting a narrow focus can work. We overtly designed the Leadership Forum to appeal to producers, team leads and studio directors. And, that’s pretty much exactly who showed up - over 300 of them. This allowed the content to stay focused and start at a higher level (given the assumed common base/understanding of the audience) and made the networking that much more stimulating.

Also, was very pleased with how well the “live blogging” idea worked out. A dutiful team of volunteer attendees wrote up summaries of each session. And, I heard that some developers were following the action, “live”, from there desk. Now, we just need to figure out how to stream videos live ;)

Anyway, was meaning to post on this way sooner, but got distracted by a side-trip to Australia - more on that later…

I’ve never ever played a Zelda game. There, I said it. Phew, that wasn’t so bad.

Given the popularity (and significance) of the Zelda series, I’ve always felt a bit of “shame” by the fact that I’ve never played one - not even a little (unless you count watching over my buddy’s shoulder as he played the original Legend of Zelda).

Growing up, my brothers and I always veered towards Sega in the Sega vs Nintendo debate. So, as a kid I never had the chance to beg my mom for a Zelda game for my birthday, or whatever. As time passed, I suppose I felt too “intimidated” to get started so late in the series.

Well, an upcoming fifteen hour flight to Australia (FYI, I’m heading to Melbourne for Game Connect: Asia Pacific), motivated me to pick up Phantom Hourglass as my official timekiller. I’m very much looking forward to finally diving into the Zelda universe after all these years. I just hope that my lack of experience doesn’t hold me back…

While most of the free world is rampaging against (mind you, Dr. Phil was way more measured this time out) the release of Manhunt2 and the various hacks - in turn helping it to sell - there’s perhaps a more serious issue at play for developers…

While the specter of censorship floats over the game industry at large, a developer not getting fair/accurate credit for their contribution to a project could cause serious/direct damage.

Ex-Rockstar Vienna producer Jurie Horneman posted the unpublished credits for the Vienna team members that worked on Manhunt2 for over two years (ie, before Take-2 shut down the studio and moved development to their London studio.) Kudos to Jurie for giving his teammates their deserved props, and for bringing the issue to light.

Why is this important? Accurate, complete, and fair credits are essential to ongoing employment, professional development, and artistic fulfillment for all developers. Further, having accurate credits also helps employers make informed hiring decisions.

In that regard, the work that the IGDA’s Credit Standards Committee is of particular significance…