What Happened? [Part 1]

I’ve now been sent more than a handful of accounts of what happened last Friday…so I’m going to do my own version with some links in it here…

1. Unwrapping the newspapers, as I’ve already said, was brill.

2. A line of people out of the building and up the road. Rather than the usual drifting in and finding coffee, there was a massive line of people. It was like being at HMV at midnight when some hyped up rubbish is about to come out and let everyone down (but not rubbish, or a let down, obviously).

3. Roo Reynolds. There he is in the picture at the top of this blog post. Roo talked about films and games, and games and films, and why the transition one way or the other is never quite as good as you’d think. Highlights from this talk were:

a) Being reminded how awful that game sequence in the film version of The Beach is, compared to how good it is in the book.
b) Mocked up covers of Withnail & I (XBox Live) and The Big Lebowski DS (subtitled: Somebody pissed on my rug man)
c) “Tetris: It was a time of WARRRRRR”
c) Minesweeper: The Movie (see below)

True to form, Roo was the first to clock in with his version of events which you can read here. He also announced his new games podcast with Leila Johnston entitiled Shift, Run, Stop. We’re going to check it out right now.

4. “One thing I’ve realised is that the web doesn’t smell.” New technology wisdom from Toby.

5. Leila Johnston. Leila read from her book Enemy Of Chaos and focused on the aspects of “entropy, disorder, and cryogenics, and therefore death.” Leila’s book sounds very funny. I don’t think Waterstones of Derby will be cool enough to stock it, so I’m going on the internet for it when I get me pay through this week. Leila also takes away the Shrewd Observation Award for looking out at the crowd and noting that “there is such a thing as an ageing nerd market”. Leila’s thoughts, and further inspired musings on some of the other talks can be enjoyed here.

6. “There are no funny games.” Controversial, I know. Toby said this after Leila’s talk. I’m not so sure. I thought the first two Monkey Island games were funny for a start. Discuss.

7. Kareem Ettouney. No slides, and no script, Kareem’s talk was a bare bones, honest, and mainly improvised exploration into why it’s really important to step back from a project, do your own thing for a while, consider the low points as a necessary part of the journey of creating something big and new and brilliant, and give other people ownership. Kareem is the Art Director for Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet – one of the most cuddly, customizable and collaborative games (in both development methodology and end product) ever, so hearing him speak about his emotions in this role was really interesting and made me feel okay about having personal-creativity-low-points from time to time.

8. Daniel Soltis. From tinker.it, Daniel showed us some of the playful things his tinkered with and made fun. The highlight was a wedding gift he’d made. The gift was inside a beautiful wooden box with a silver push button on it to open it. Push the button, open the box – but only if you’re in the correct place in the world. If you’re not, the LCD display tells you how many miles you are away from the correct position. The correct place in the world was a place of emotional significance for the married couple, thereby taking them on a journey to rediscover a part of their relationship together. Magical.

9. That first tea break, and realising that our volunteers were so damn good that there was literally nothing for me to organise apart from myself. The wi-fi was really bad, so we couldn’t get Wordr on screen like we’d planned…but hey ho.

10. Lucy Wurstlin talked about 4ip, and the things they’re doing. There’s a new game on the way that is supposed to be the most terrifying and immersive text-based experience yet created in the world. Lucy also said “thankyou” using a picture of a tank and a yew. Nice.

Coming up in Part Two, other things that happend parts 11-20.

This entry was posted by Richard Birkin, on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.