Montreal Summit 2.0 Quick Recap

I'm scrambling to prep for my next trip (ie, to Korea for KGC and G*). So, I sadly don't have much time to go into any great depth. But, overall, the second run of the Montreal International Game Summit was pretty kick ass!

The first year had 500+ attendees and I'm guessing the Summit broke 800 for this year. In part, the jump can be attributable to the impressive roster of speakers they were able to bring into Montreal for the Summit (eg, Warren Spector, Neil Young, Eric Zimmerman, Doug Church, etc, etc). All the sessions I attended were well done, and I was particularly pleased to see that some of the none-mainstream sessions were well attended (eg, ARGs, real world games, serious games, etc). As a minus, I heard from a few techies that the programming sessions were too abstract and didn't provide much take-away (clearly something to work on for next year).

As the closing session, I ran a Zimmerman-style game design challenge on the theme of sex in games. It was an inspiring and wilding amusing climax to the Summit. Despite Heather Kelley's winning design for a game to teach female sexual response, my personal favorite was Frank Lantz's Spore mod, "Sporgy". (If anyone has a link to a summary of the session, please pass it along so I can update...)