Last Thursday and Friday, I attended the Game Developers eXchange at the Savannah College of Art & Design campus in Atlanta. Attendees were mostly students, from SCAD as well as Georgia Tech and other local institutions.
After introductory remarks, the first event was a panel moderated by Ian Bogost on independent games, with Eric Zimmerman, Tracy Fullerton, Frank Lantz and myself speaking. All four of us are fairly strong personalities, and the conversation went rapidly; subjects discussed included the definition of "indie game," whether indie games are really comparable to indie film and music given the scarcity of independent games that tackle risky subjects, different ways in which independent games can innovate, the role of the academy in fostering game innovation, and market conditions for indie games.
That evening, there were two sets of "roundtables;" I first attended one run by Frank Lantz (one of the main creators of 'big urban' games, and now of Parking Wars on FaceBook) and Elan Lee (one of the main creators of ARGs). One topic of discussion was whether games of these types can get beyond corporate sponsorship, and become commercially successful vehicles in their own right.
Subsequently, I watched Eric Zimmerman demo Gamestar Mechanic, the fruit of GameLab's grant from the Macarthur Foundation to create an application to teach game design principles to kids. (The site is there, but you can't see much would a logon, and since it's in beta, you can't register.) It's cute, and it does look like it would do a good job teaching some principles of level design, since in essence what it does is give you a toolbox containing terrain, enemies, HUD elements, and completion conditions for the level. One nice aspect; you can export your game as a Flash file and embed it on your own site.
The next morning, Eric Zimmerman spoke on the subject of what it takes to keep a small independent developer in business -- an unusual talk for him, since he more often speaks to design issues, and he's managed to keep GameLab alive and growing for many years now.
Following that began five parallel programming tracks, meaning I could attend only a handful of events. Rahul Sood, one of the founders of Voodoo and now at HP following its acquisition of the company, spoke on the subject of "The Video Game Entrepreneur," which was less useful than it might have been and at least partially a pitch for HP.
I spoke on "The Fall and Rise of the Independent Developer," essentially a slightly modified version of the presentation I gave at Game Focus Germany.
Brenda Brathwaite's talk was "100 Questions, 97 Answers, 56 Minutes (on 300 Slides)"; the "100 questions" were the questions she's most often asked by students to which there are quick answers (like, "what should my portfolio look like" or for that matter "do you know Cliffy B"), and was fast and funny.
During the conference, I spent some time chatting with both Brenda and Chris Crawford (with whom I haven't talked for some time), and wound up playing Notre Dame with, among others, Ian Schreiber -- who subsequently provided our review of the game.
At the conclusion of the conference, we went to a gathering sponsored by Janet Murray, who during the event revealed that Ian Bogost is now tenured.
One amusing moment; on Friday morning, I and the other speakers, all of whom were staying at the same hotel, got onto a student shuttle bus to get to the campus, which was consequently overloaded; one speaker was running late, and the driver said we'd wait. Several of the students decided to walk, and told us it was perhaps a ten minute walk. Eric, Frank, Tracy and I decided to follow them -- in other words, the New Yorkers in the group walked (Tracy's from LA, but spent many years in NYC), and the car-culture Americans rode.
Despite the air traffic chaos during the period, my trip was basically fine, except for the fact that on the way down to Atlanta, I was in the window seat next to a woman who could not have been less than 300 pounds... a tad uncomfortable, but at least a fairly short flight.
