Hello,
Today's is a bit of a different post,
as it will be about a video game convention I had the chance to go
to. Now wait! I'm absolutely not a video game fan, as I said
before, they tend to make me motion sick. The reason I went was that
my mum works as an adminitrator in the video games school (ENJMIN) in
Angoulême and, since I was invited, I though it might be an
opportunity to learn from passionate and sucessful people, even
though I'm not a gamer. You could talk to me about anything, as long
as you are passinate about it, I can swear I'll find it
interesting.And let me tell you, the speakers were MONSTERS in the
video game industry. It must've been amazing for the students of the
school to meet such well known creators. I know I would give anything
to meet one of the writers mentionned in
my top 5 books
(unfortunately, they're all dead now!). Anyways, the guests each had a
different specialty : graphism, game design, buisness... which was reflected in their very different personalities, they were far from
being the typical « geeks » that, to be completely
honest, I was expecting. These are the the creators I had the chance
to listen to :
Peter Molyneux (Britain),
founder of Lionhead studios, 22 cans and creator of Godus : The
chap gave a great speach, mostly about how to create/launch/earn
money from a game and free to play/portable device games. He shared
his experience of making the very sucessful game Godus, his mistakes,
his successes... He was surprisingly humble, funny and very interesting.
David Cage
(France), founder of quantic
dreams, creator of (between others) Beyond Two Souls and
Farenheit : David gave a one hour long conference about his
experiences on the road to becoming a sucessful video game creator. He told us
everything, from the day he assembled his first tiny team in the
music studio in which he was working, to the day he launched the very
popular Beyond Two Souls. He didn't omit the mistakes he
made, told us about his difficulties, his challenges but also about
the chance he had to work with stars such as David Bowie, Ellen Page,
Willem Dafoe... His career was great to hear about and super inspiring.
Thomas
Bidaux (France/Britain),
CEO
of ICO Partners :
This was more of a buisness oriented conference about choosing your
platform, your buisness model... What was interesting was that, even
though videos games were at the center of the lecture, the strategies
covered were valid for any kind of enterprise. I learned a lot during this conference, and not just about video games
(did you know that Victor Hugo was paid by the page ? That
buisness model had quite a big influence in his writing).
Gary
Carr
(Britain), head of incubation at Lionhead studio : One of my
personnal favorites. The speach was super interactive, lots of
slides, videos...Gary was inspiring, friendly and on top of that, a
brilliant speaker (like every single one I saw really). He talked
about talent spotting, creativity and the birth of a project. I didn't
get bored for a second.
Henry
La Bunta
(U-S), Chief
Visual Officer
at zynga :
Different conference in that it was purely graphism oriented,
many slides, videos, lots of demonstration. He insisted on the
importance of lighting, contrast and overall graphisms, not only in
video games, but in films as well. Even though I loved the other
talks, it was nice to have a break from the buisness and
« scriptals » aspects of video games to get deeper into
the artistics aspects of game creation.
Luke
Savage (Britain),
Academic
Development Manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe :
This friendly and accessible guy talked about the creation of playstation games, th programming, platforms and economics. It was a very quick and
precise conference, professionnal but still amusing.
Katharina Thielmann (Germany),
Co-President,
Head of Research - Games for Change Europe
: This lecture was focused on the importance of creating
behavioral games, ones that will make people think/reflect. Katharina
being a teacher has a completely different approach to video games. Since her conference was psychology based, I
really enjoyed it, she presented her games so perfectly that I now
want to play them.
Jenova Chen (U-S),
co-founder of thatgamecompagny, creator of Flowers and Journey :
To be honest, my head was like a watermelon at this point, plus
Jenova presented a video conference, which didn't help with my
limited focusing abilities. It was still great to hear such a young
talented creator talk about how he came to make his very unique video
games. He did it all with the intention of bringing people together « in
peace and harmony » as he said. I already wanted to play his
games before, it is even worse now, I feel as if I need them!
Unfortunately, I only was present two
days out of four, so I missed part of the conferences. But were also
talking :
Tracy
Fullerton (United States) Director
- Game Innovation Lab, University of Southern California
Patrice
Desilets (Canada), President
& Creative Director - Panache Digital Games inc, worked on Assasin's Creed.
Eric
Zimmerman (United States), Independent Game Designer & Arts
Professor - NYU Game Center
Jurie
Horneman (France), independant developper
Colin
Walsh (Canada), Founder - Celsius Game Studios
Boyd
Multerer (United States), Ran software for Xbox Console, founded
Xbox Live …
Being the giants of the game industry
that they are, I have no doubts these guys gave brilliant speaches,
to which I would've loved to assist.
The inauguration of the schools new
building took place at the same time as the « video game workshops ». The contrast between the passion and willingness to
share of the speakers and the boring, self publicising attitude of
the « officials » (mayor, prefects, government
representatives...) was pretty funny. I enjoyed the second
part a hell of a lot more !
Overall, it was a really enriching
experience, from which I've learned a lot! All of the
professionals had one thing in common, they weren't afraid to fail.
They had an idea and followed it through to its end, not knowing
where that might be . They also insisted heavily on the fact
that mistakes are important, the beginnig of creativity and that if
you are afraid of making mistakes, you'll never achieve anything.
In conclusion, if you have the chance to meet/listen to highly
talented people in any walk of life (even if you're not particularly
interested in their speciality), go for it . This way, you might
learn valuable life lessons, as well as mabye discover a new passion
(I definitively want to get back into gaming).
That's it for today,
Maddy
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