After the show we held an informal IGDA gathering at Java++, the coffeeshop near the campus. During this meeting Ken Bowen spoke about the RPI Student Game Club, Bret Dunham gave an update on the Albany Mod Project, Holy Strike, and we drew the winners for the raffle we held at the festival (free for IGDA members, $1 tickets for non-members).

Congratulations to the winners of the raffle. We gave away one copy of Guitater Hero, two books on game development from Charles River Media (courtesy of Greg Costikyan and the NYC IGDA Chapter), several free download coupons for GDC Radio and copies of the RPI Game Development Club's Annual collection of game projects.

Although this was the completion of the IGDA's involvement in the event, a symposium was held the following Saturday morning and afternoon. Included talks were by Michael Lewis, the CEO of Cryptic Studios, Ian Bogost, Ph.D. who is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, a Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and Partner at Persuasive Games, a panel of leaders at several Activision Studios including Karthik Bala, the CEO of Vicarious Visions, a panel of women in game development - Katherine Isbister and Tobi Saulnier (CEO of 1st Playable Productions) and a panel of young RPI alumns who work in the games industry including Ben Zeigler (you can read some notes from the event in several posts on his live journal), Erin Hoffman, Mike Delprete and, yours truly - Ian Stead.

Thanks to RPI for hosting this event and for all the hard work of the organizers and students and for the excellent presentations! Be sure not to miss it next year!