Live from CGames
I am in Angouleme, France, a city that is known as the world capital of comic books (it hosts the famous Salon de la Bande Dessinée). The city is now working on becoming an important player in game development and I must say that based on the student work that I have seen, they're really serious about it. The CGames conference takes place while the ENJMIN school is officially inaugurated. They offer a masters degree on game development, teaming up students from different backgrounds and skills. I promise to later link to some of their projects, I've seen a lot of stuff that I really liked. What is even better is that the moment that I arrived there were 6 students playing Mario Kart DS (it just launched in Europe last Friday). I was carrying my copy, so I jumped in and had a lot of fun (if you are a regular you may know that Mario Kart is one of my very favorite Nintendo games).
rThe highlight of the conference so far has been yesterday's Chris Crawford video conference. Chris started to apologize to the French audience for the insanely rude way they have been treated by the Bush administration and many of his fellow Americans. Surprisingly, some of the French members of the audience told me that this is quite normal: most Americans they meet start by apologizing before introducing themselves. Apart from these sociological tropes, Chris described the language behind his Erasmatron project with a share of passion that is quite uncommon in game talks (of course, we all know Chris is a very passionate guy who speaks his mind and is not afraid to go against accepted conventions). On a meta-level, the talk made me think how few good speakers we have among the game researcher/developer community (Eric Zimmerman comes to mind as another exception). My problem in conferences is that most of the time they bring me back to my high school days, where the monotone voice tone of teachers made me lose any interest in the subject. Talks need to be designed, rehearsed and performed. No matter how interesting your content is, if you don't deliver it the right way, it will get lost to most of the audience. This sounds incredibly obvious but the problem is pervasive in academic circles. One possible solution is, of course, the Nintendo way. I keep dreaming of setting up Pictochat rooms so people can comment real-time about talks, not just to double check if everybody else is bored but mainly to give it a collective, augmented-reality quality to it. If you are attending to the DAC conference this Thursday at ITU, bring in my DS. I'll definitively bring mine. I promise not to play Mario Kart but it would be nice to see if parallel chatting could enhance talks.
rPS: Chris Crawford was recently interviewed at The Escapist.
rThe highlight of the conference so far has been yesterday's Chris Crawford video conference. Chris started to apologize to the French audience for the insanely rude way they have been treated by the Bush administration and many of his fellow Americans. Surprisingly, some of the French members of the audience told me that this is quite normal: most Americans they meet start by apologizing before introducing themselves. Apart from these sociological tropes, Chris described the language behind his Erasmatron project with a share of passion that is quite uncommon in game talks (of course, we all know Chris is a very passionate guy who speaks his mind and is not afraid to go against accepted conventions). On a meta-level, the talk made me think how few good speakers we have among the game researcher/developer community (Eric Zimmerman comes to mind as another exception). My problem in conferences is that most of the time they bring me back to my high school days, where the monotone voice tone of teachers made me lose any interest in the subject. Talks need to be designed, rehearsed and performed. No matter how interesting your content is, if you don't deliver it the right way, it will get lost to most of the audience. This sounds incredibly obvious but the problem is pervasive in academic circles. One possible solution is, of course, the Nintendo way. I keep dreaming of setting up Pictochat rooms so people can comment real-time about talks, not just to double check if everybody else is bored but mainly to give it a collective, augmented-reality quality to it. If you are attending to the DAC conference this Thursday at ITU, bring in my DS. I'll definitively bring mine. I promise not to play Mario Kart but it would be nice to see if parallel chatting could enhance talks.
rPS: Chris Crawford was recently interviewed at The Escapist.
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