Reality Panic

(It has been a crazy summer for travel. So, sitting between SIGGRAPH sessions in LA is now the first chance I get to whip up some quick notes on my recent trip to Brighton for the annual UK confab, Develop.)

The Develop folks put on another great event. There’s just something about being next to the beach/sea that just makes things better. I particularly like attending Develop as it is a nice one-shot concentration of UK developers (ie, to catch up with, to nag, to pitch, etc).

Two underlying threads in the UK continue to be the education/talent issue. Which, despite having a dedicated event (Games:Edu) to discuss it in, just didn’t seem to move beyond the usual gripes. The other thread was a palpable antagonism towards Canada (Montreal in particular) due to the lack of similar government support programs in the UK.

Perhaps I’m overly sensitive since I’m from Montreal, but I practically got into a shouting match with one panel. I told them they were wasting their time, that tax breaks are not a silver bullet (nothing is when you are dealing with a complex ecosystem), and that they should be spending their time working on the things they can change (hint, hint, education and talent). Further, I “predicted” that even if the UK government showed up tomorrow with tax breaks, it would have no material impact on the state of the UK game industry!

Anyway, I’ll hopefully post something on that in more detail later. Meanwhile, here are some photos to enjoy.

Ah, nothing like seeing the sea and sail boats out the front door of your conference venue.

Mark Morris (Introversion) inspiring academics that bedroom coding success is still possible.

Ernest Adams talks smack (or rather rants on the things academia should not be doing).

Dawn Beasley (Black Rock) not impressed by Owain Bennallack’s (Develop) nice shirt.

Ed Fear (Develop) orchestrates the pub quiz (my team did horribly).

Damian Isla (Bungie) and Chris Kline (2k Boston) tanking up at the hotel bar.

The BioShock team leads interviewed as the opening keynote session. (Produces one of the best conference quotes I’ve ever seen: “We hire less virgins”).

The Dare to be Digital contest games on display.

The outspoken Chris Barnett (EA Mythic) on controlling creatives.

David Braben (Frontier) discuss the Lost Winds development process on WiiWare.

David Braben and other proud Lost Winds team members during the pre-awards cocktail.

Folks settling in for the Develop awards ceremony.

Jo Cook, George Bain (Sony) and Alison Beasley (Lincoln Beasley) making faces post-awards.

First mid-conference fire drill ever! Poor Matt actually tried to talk over the blaring alarms ;)

Some very loud band during the GamesIndustry.biz party.

Julien Merceron (Eidos) showing off his IGDA members-only t-shirt.

One of the Dare to be Digitial teams, along with mentors Adam Martin (red glasses/white shirt) and Vicky Arundel (Introversion).

For the longest time, I’ve had the following Yoda quote as part of my email signature:

Do or do not. There is no try.

This resonates with me personally, as I prefer to stay away from “try” statements as it usually implies failure from the get go… Anyway.

Found this graph, as featured in the August issue of Wired, quite amusing.

Game dev education in the UK has come under attack over the past couple of years. Despite great efforts by many schools, the ones mucking things up are somewhat ruining the entire UK reputation.

Some of this has to do with raw “quality control”, for which the SkillSet accreditation scheme will help. But, largely, it comes from a huge disconnect between the academic world and industry. Partially due to developers’ aloofness when it comes to academic collaboration; partially due to academia not even bothering to check in (ie, to get context/relevance, guidance, etc).

In that regard, I’m happy to see that pixel-lab is organizing another edition of GAMES:EDU to take place alongside the Develop conference in Brighton at the end of July. This will be the third EDU event I attend. It is an important/rare opportunity for industry to connect with academia. And while the set lectures/panels are great, the most enlightening part has always been when attendees get around the table to discuss specific issues among themselves.

Admittedly, the IGDA has not done as much as it should to better reach out to UK/Euro educators. We’ve had a lot of success in North America, but need to bring some of our EdSIG pixie dust abroad. I’ll be sure to bring a pouch of it to Brighton ;)

It is the weekend before E3, and I’m NOT on a flight down to Los Angeles. This will be the first time since 1997 that I don’t attend the big show.

This largely has to do with the format change: from the all-in-one game biz mecca, to the much more scaled down showcase for publishers.

I went last year to Santa Monica, and had a tough time squeezing value out of the new format. Admittedly, being a non-profit association executive, I’m not exactly part of the target market. But, therein lies the beauty of the old “big” approach. which enabled all kinds of symbiotic stuff to evolve…

Not saying big is necessarily better, but big is different.

As part of The Escapist’s “Gaming Über Alles” issue, I whipped up an article on positive/cool trends going on in the game industry. I cover stuff like indie viability, charitable efforts, interface diversification, social impact, etc.

As noted at the start of the piece, it is easy to get caught up in all the negative stuff, working to fix problems and so on. We rarely do take the time to see the positive.

Happily, my small contribution to balance things was appreciated by a least a few folks, as noted in the comments section, for example:

…reading articles like this make me smile and when I feel good about the games industry I feel good about me…

Nice :)

Paris GDC was my first “excuse” to go to Paris, and so I took my wife along for the trip (hooray for frequent flyer miles). FYI, we stayed a week extra to vacation, but I won’t bother going into that here…

By all counts Paris GDC was a success, with packed rooms and many good sessions. As it turns out, trying to co-locate with Game Connection in Lyon last year was too great a distraction/conflict for all the biz dev that usually goes on. Whereas, running solo in Paris during the lovely summer season seemed to be the right choice.

Several of the sessions were repeats from the main GDC earlier this year. But, since I don’t actually get to attend many sessions while in San Francisco, it was a nice chance to catch up. That said, of course, there were also many new and specifically tailored sessions - including some given in French - big surprise!

Sadly, the publisher<>developer debate session I was suppose to moderate fell through. No publisher was willing to duke it out with Bill Dugan (Torpex), and so the organizers relegated to an updated version of Bill’s Leadership Forum talk on external producers.

Given that I stayed in Paris for an extra week, timing worked out great as IGDA-Paris was having a chapter meeting the day before I had to leave. As always, very cool to see how IGDA chapters from around the world operate, their vibe, etc. (In case you were wondering, my wife was asleep early that night after an exhausting week of playing tourist - so she didn’t mind me going out solo for this bit of work action).

Anyway, on to some photos:

The opening VIP reception, on a lovely terrace with views of the Eiffel Tower.

The Eiffel Tower at night.

Paris GDC was held in the La Defense biz/tech area on the outskirts of Paris.

Ralph Baer recounting the start of our industry.

Mark Healey and Alex Evans impressively present their keynote from within their game, LittleBigPlanet.

Jurie Horneman packed the room to discuss team productivity.

Chris Kline (2k Boston) gives a revised version of his BioShock postmortem (which he first presented at IGDA-Montreal).

Chris building the courage to wrestle with giant slugs (aka escargots)…

Kim Pallister (Intel), Amanda Mae Miller (Think Services) and Martin (2K Australia) chow down on more standard foods.

John Nash (Blitz Games) gives an excellent talk on the value of training (and investing in) staff.

Jamil Moledina (Think Services) drills Rob Pardo on all things Blizzard…

French developers start to arrive/mingle at the bar for the IGDA-Paris chapter meeting.

Renowned French developer Olivier Lejade recounts his colorful history in game development…

…much to the pleasure of the larger-than-expected audience.