Games and Grog, once a month

The flurry of press today indicates that someone has decided to push this bill hard, and it’s become necessary to ask you all to step up.

There is a hearing Tuesday before the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies.

The hearing will be held in room A1 of the State House in Boston (Beacon Hill, Park Street stop on the Red Line). The hearing is scheduled to begin at 1:00 PM.

If all goes as planned, I will be one of several speakers at the hearing, and I will do my best to represent the Massachusetts game industry’s point of view. But I will have only a couple of minutes to make my point.

Our elected representatives listen to the public. I have become convinced that it’s important for game developers to be there as constituents. If there’s any way you can take the afternoon to attend the hearing, please do come. This is a dangerous and counterproductive bill in so many ways, and it could do significant damage to the perception of Massachusetts as one of the best places in America to make games.

To VERY quickly find your State Senator and Rep and their vitals, just enter your address here.

Then click on the names of your Senator and especially your Rep (”in general court”). If your rep is one of those on the committee, please be sure to contact him or her. Even if you can’t do it before the hearing, do it anyway.

Once again, here’s what you should emphasize (please, be as positive and polite as you can):

• Please oppose House Bill 1423.
• This bill would violate the First Amendment rights of video game
  developers and the public for whom we make video games. In particular,
  on Monday a federal appeals court confirmed a ban on a similar law in
  Minnesota. The bill is a waste of taxpayers’ money.
• The video game industry has an effective rating system in place
  to distinguish which games are not appropriate for minors. In particular,
  it’s more effective and provides far more information than the ratings
  system in place for movies.
• Mention the fact that some of the best and most innovative games
  on the market lately have come from Massachusetts companies. The
  Massachusetts game industry is booming, employs thousands of people
  and provides many hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the
  Massachusetts economy. H. 1423 sends the wrong message, that
  Massachusetts does not welcome the video game development industry.

There appear to be some powerful forces lined up behind this bill. Boston Post Mortem has never asked you for money or dues — but now we’re asking for your support in the form of action. Please contact your state reps. And if at all possible, come to the hearing.

We have a special treat for the March Post Mortem, in the form of an out-of-town speaker. Coray Seifert, Associate Producer and Cinematic Director at THQ’s Kaos Studios in New York City, will be giving a talk about the cinematics of Frontlines: Fuel of War. Coray is also on the IGDA Board of Directors, so if you’ve got IGDA-related questions it might be a good idea to talk to him! Here’s the “official” description of the talk:

From Boards to Binks: Creating the Cinematics of Frontlines: Fuel of War

Delve into the occult world of cinematic development for Frontlines: Fuel of War from THQ’s Kaos Studios. Join us as Coray Seifert presents all of the nitty gritty details, from early storyboards and ritual sacrifices, to final export and playing Dungeons and Dragons. Takeaway is a deeper knowledge of this studio’s cinematic process, and a resonant fear of your neighbors to the south.

On a sadder note, I’m sure you all saw the news that Iron Lore has closed down. We’ll be offering some time for people to raise a toast and maybe even have some former employees share a few favorite memories of working there.

Logistics:

Wednesday March 12, 7pm
The Skellig in Waltham
Directions here.

Sorry for the late announcement. Hope to see all of you on Wednesday!

The MIT Interactive Entertainment SIG is hosting an event tomorrow night featuring a panel of current and former game company executives discussing the rise (and in some cases, the fall) of companies and their pitfalls and successes along the way. Should be an interesting time!
Wednesday, March 5th – 6pm – 8pm

Getting Started and Succeeding

In December we talked to VCs and heard their side of the story in giving the money ‘away’. For our first session in 2008 we present the business owner side. Hear from a panel of some of Boston’s most successful start-ups in the interactive entertainment industry as they share their stories of humble beginnings, their biggest mistakes, greatest surprises and the stone-cold facts behind getting funded, published and running a business.

Panelists:

Jeff Anderson, Game Nirvana

Hank Howie, President, Blue Fang Games

Omar Khudari, former CEO, Papyrus Design Group

Moderator:
Rob Sebastian, CEO & Key Operating Partner, Ghost House Digital Studios

Information and to Register:

http://www.mitforumcambridge.org/imedia/events/2008-3/index.html

Time:
6:00pm – 6:30pm Registration & Refreshments
6:30pm – 6:45pm Opening Remarks – Welcome and Mission, State of the Market
6:45pm – 7:45pm Main Presentation with Q&A
7:45pm – 8:00pm Networking & Refreshments

Location:
Stata Center (Bldg. 32)
Room 124
32 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
MAPS & DIRECTIONS

For the February Boston Post Mortem, we will be featuring Chris Foster, Senior Designer at Harmonix, who will be doing a practice run of his GDC talk, “Your Music Is the Game: Designing PHASE, the Other Project at Harmonix.” This month’s meeting is sponsored: Harmonix will be providing food and drink tickets, so you’ll all be on your own tabs again for any other stuff, much like last month.

Also note that this is on a Wednesday, not a Tuesday, it was the only day that the Skellig was free. Apologies to those of you who can only make it on Tuesdays. (We also managed to avoid scheduling this one on Valentine’s day, which has been a problem in years past.)

Talk description:

Harmonix has established a successful series of “beatmatch” games, where players tap buttons or strum on plastic guitars to “match” the musical “beats” of a series of pre-recorded songs. Their new iPod game, PHASE, faced unique challenges: beats would not be authored by tech-savvy musicians, but would instead be algorithmically generated, and the game would lack the dedicated peripherals that were critical to the success of the GUITAR HERO series. This lecture presents a case study of adapting a proven design to new set of constraints. The presenter pries apart the company’s standard beatmatch design, and explores how each element had to evolve, or be discarded, in order to make the new project a success. Special attention is devoted to: developing procedural gameplay algorithms; embrancing the iPod’s unique input mechanics; and triaging unexpected changes in scope and schedule.

Demiurge Studios, in Cambridge, is moving to new digs after GDC. It’s an impressive new office space, just a few blocks from their current location! They’re growing a lot, which is what we like to hear around Boston. See their official press release here.

Jason Scott is kindly putting together the video that he recorded of the January Boston Post Mortem. For now, he has posted a video of Steve Meretzky’s amazing talk, which you can check out here.

A week from today is the Boston Post Mortem, 20:20 edition! We’re going to have 8 speakers give talks that consist of 20 slides, 20 seconds each, on various topics. Also, the meeting is sponsored by CIDC who will be providing refreshments–see below for answers to your questions about CIDC and the nature of said refreshments.

Our speakers:

Steve Augustino - The finer points of contract stuff
Jeremiah Chaplin - Thoughts on meaning in games
Steve Meretzky - Random brain dump
Paolo Piselli - How my thesis was very very wrong about the nature of fun
Tim Reilly - A critique of Tomb Raider Anniversary
Chris Canfield - Brain dump of ideas for text adventures
Jeff Ward - Agency theory
Hunter Keeton - IP issues for modding
There are others of you who have expressed interest in presenting, but haven’t submitted a PPT to me. Please note that we’re only going to do 8 talks, so there’s only room for two more. Those slots will go to the next two presentations I receive! UPDATE: there are no slots left! Sorry to those of you who weren’t quite fast enough. But we got a lot of interest, so who knows, we might do one again this year.
The meeting will be the usual time and place, 7pm at the Skellig in Waltham. For directions, see
http://bostonpostmortem.org/SkelligDirections.htm

Note that this month’s meeting is being sponsored by CIDC, who will be providing appetizers and 1 drink ticket per attendee. This means that there will be no Post Mortem tab: if you want food or drink beyond the sponsored stuff, you’ll pay on your own tab.

About CIDC, in their own words: “CIDC is a profitable and growing Internet-based software company that has been developing and refining its online gaming technology and eBusiness operational expertise for over seven years. Through our technology, we have become the most trusted name in online gaming and entertainment worldwide. CIDC developed the gaming and entertainment software for sites such as Everest Poker and Everest Casino at www.everestpoker.com and www.everestcasino.com.”

Look forward to seeing you all next week!

Much more important than my previous announcement about the Spike TV VGA awards, two Boston-area studios landed spots in Gamasutra’s 5 Best Developers of 2007. Congrats to 2K Boston (#3), and Harmonix (#2)!

For our January Post Mortem, we’re doing something a little different. Based on the concept of 20:20 and Pecha Kucha, the gist is that anyone can speak on any game-related topic, provided their talk conforms to the constraint of 20 slides, 20 seconds each. That’s 6 minutes, 40 seconds of talk.

**How to Submit a Talk**

The January Post Mortem will be held on Wednesday, Jan 16. If you want to participate, you need to submit a PowerPoint presentation and a brief (1 or 2 sentence) abstract to janpostmortem@orbusgameworks.com by Wednesday, January 9. The presentation must consist of 20 slides. The slides can be anything from text to abstract images to photos (basically anything but embedded video as that usually fails and we won’t have time to do live tech support). If you’re wondering whether your topic would be a good one, ask me. It probably will be fine.

The presentation must be exactly 20 slides, no more, no less. You can’t spend 6:40 on one slide, or 3:20 on two slides, or whatever. It’s a game, people. You have to stick to the given constraints. That’s part of the fun.

We’ll have time to show about 8 talks. If we receive more than 8 submissions, the Post Mortem committee will review all the submissions and select our favorites of the bunch.

**How the Talks Will Work**

Each of the presentations will be loaded on a laptop and ready to go. A moderator will briefly introduce the speaker and then the talk begins. Each presentation will have been configured to have each slide advance after 20 seconds, so it’s up to the speaker to keep pace with her slides. At the end of the last slide, the talk’s over and we load up the next presentation and introduce the next speaker.

If you have any questions, please send me an email!

I suppose this is a dubious honor, since the Spike TV Video Game Awards are a game industry punchline, but Harmonix took home Studio of the Year. Congrats to the hard-working folks at Harmonix. (Of note is that 2K Boston was another nominee, so Boston area studios made up 2 of the 4 nominees!)