Back from Boston
It was crazy hot in Boston last week. Like, crazy humid icky hot. Didn't help that I was running around town, attending both the Sandbox games symposium and SIGGRAPH itself, and moderating/participating on five different sessions. It was a busy week.
The Sandbox event was a great first attempt at a more game focused conference intersecting with SIGGRAPH (which has always worked to woo the game dev crowd). Admittedly, there was an overall lack of thematic conhesion, resulting in the often comical pairings of topics (eg, crowd simulation code distribution/optimization techniques along with a polemic lecture on democracy and government funded games). Hmm, perhaps that's what lead to the conference's charm... David Edery has some commentary on his quick visit into the Sandbox. Also, Dan Roy has some good notes on the "in the trenches" panel I moderated, ditto for Gamasutra's write-up on the QoL panel I spoke on.
SIGGRAPH itself felt bigger than just 20k attendees. Perhaps is was the massive Boston convention center that just made things feel so big... Still, the event was fun and full of energy. As usual, I was mainly captivated by all the funky art/tech stuff, like the Guerilla Studio, Emerging Technologies and art exhibits, etc. Gamasutra has a summary of some of the Emerging Tech pieces.
The IGDA's "birds of feather" session was well attended, despite being located in the farthest room of the building! We mainly discussed positive trends going on in the industry today, with notes being dumped into my new informal "raves" project...
The game content/responsibility panel was particularly fun and was an important opportunity to discuss the social/cultural challenges surrounding games to a somewhat broader audience (than who would be at GDC, for example). The session got some quick coverage at both Gamasutra by Jill Duffy and Candace Lombardi at CNET.
Probably the most interesting and useful outcome was from fellow panelist Liz Losh. Having been inspired by the discussion (and her comment that the parental support materials produced by Hilary Clinton were sub-par), she created the "10 Principles for the Digital Family". Nice.
Anyway, here are some photos from the trip.
Greg Costikyan (Manifesto Games) praises the "process intensity" of classics like Chris Crawford's Balance of Power.
Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom (Harmonix) watches on as attendees compete at Guitar Hero 2.
Conference chair Drew Davidson (CMU ETC) enjoys the icecream bar. Yummy!
Olga Sorkine was one of the few female researchers presenting a paper. Of ~100 papers, about a half-dozen had female authors or co-authors.
Graphics legend Jim Blinn summarizes his paper during the "FastForward" preview session.
This guy took advantage of the FastForward to do more than just push his research...
A pixelated Nick Burton (Rare) before sitting for a nice tapas style dinner.
Tobias Biehl (IO Interactive) and Tim Rance (Lionhead) enjoying the tapas meal.
Heather Kelley (A2M), at same dinner, with purse shaped chocolate treat.
Appropriately for Boston, there was a teapot exhibit looking at the famous SIGGRAPH teapot model...
One of the funky instalations at the Art Gallary.
Very cool media table thing from Emerging Tech.
One of the beautiful art works from the Charles Csuri retrospective.
Minority Report style "multi-touch interaction wall". It was net connected too, diving into Flickr streams and Google Maps...
More fun stuff from Emerging Tech, "Tangible at Play". (I was able to make an odd crab crawler ;)
Hard at work in the Guerilla Studio.
Cool live-Pong style games with the Electronic Theater audience.
Cross shot of a section of the expo floor.
IGDA SIG Queens: Education SIG chair Susan Gold (Sierra Nevada College) and Sex SIG chair Brenda Brathwaite (Savannah College of Art & Design)
Me queuing up my slides during the games/CS educators panel (photo courtesy of Nick Burton).
Gary Schultz (Pixar) discusses the animation challenges in Cars during the Vroom Vroom: SIGGRAPH at 500 Horsepower special session.
LucasArts showing of their physics technology from the next-gen Indiana Jones game.
Posted on August 7, 2006 03:36 PM