Games and Grog, once a month

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!)

It’s getting to be that time. The Boston Post Mortem for the month of December is one week from today, Tuesday the 11th. Our speakers will be from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, which from my point of view is one of the coolest things to appear on the Boston game industry scene in the last year. Here’s their description of their presentation:

Last summer, 45 MIT and Singapore students worked to tackle 6 tricky research questions, turning them into playable games over an intensive 2 month development cycle. At this month’s Boston Post-Mortem, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab will present its first year of games and talk about the challenges of turning research into game design, working in newly-minted teams, and what worked and didn’t work with our development processes. For more information, visit http://gambit.mit.edu/

We will also probably do an informal Boston Post Mortem year in review, where we talk about what you like and don’t like about our little monthly event.

Where: The Skellig, Waltham
When: Tue December 11, 7pm
For directions and other info, check out our About page.

And as a special service to you folks on this mailing list, I will also remind you that tomorrow night (Wed 12/5) is an event hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Interactive Entertainment SIG. It’s about hooking up venture capitalists with game industry folks. For more info, visit the MITEF-IESIG website.

This Saturday, December 1st, is GameDev Day at Harvard University, a one-day series of free workshops on game development sponsored by Microsoft and the Harvard Interactive Media Group. No RSVP necessary, you just show up. Here’s their description:

Come to GameDev Day ‘07, a free event being hosted at Harvard University on December 1st, sponsored by Microsoft in association with the Harvard Interactive Media Group (HIMG).

A day about games, games, games:

o Learn to create your own games for PC or XBOX 360 with XNA
o Learn about the game development industry – process, careers, technology, companies
o Hear from the folks at Second Life about virtual worlds and technology
o Play Halo3 on XBOX 360 Elites
o Speak with gaming industry experts including people from SecondLife, Etherplay, Vibrant3D, Magenic, Microsoft
o Pizza
o Giveaways (games!)

It’s open to anyone and did we mention that it’s free?!

Agenda (subject to change):

10:15 - Welcome and Announcements (Edwin Guarin and Chris Bowen)
10:25 – Introduction to XNA (Edwin and Chris)
10:50 – Creating Your First XNA Game (Michael Cummings)
12:00 – Pizza & Gaming
12:50 – Creating Games - What *Really* Goes on Under the Covers (Mark Mullin and Dan Scherlis)
2:00 – Gaming Industry Q&A Panel (Dan Scherlis, Mark Mullin, Michael Cummings, Kent Quirk, Darius Kazemi)
3:00 – Blurring the Boundaries: CSI, Second Life and You (Kent Quirk and John Lester, Linden Lab)

[Meanwhile, in another room…]
12:00 – 4:00: Open XBOX gaming

A few more details are at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2007/11/18/gamedev-day-07-boston-xna-gaming-and-game-development.aspx

What: GameDev Day ‘07 Boston
Who: ANYONE - students, professionals, enthusiasts - interested in learning about how games are made and the gaming industry
When: Saturday, December 1st, 10 AM - 4 PM
Where: Harvard University [directions],
Emerson Hall [map], Room 105 (Note that we moved from Sever Hall)
Cost: Free
Registration: None, but if you’re on Facebook, add yourself to the event’s page!

I was asked to pass this on to the Boston game dev community, from a local film maker. Could be some good mutual publicity here for anyone interested in participating.

—

Hi,

My name is Spencer Kehe and I am a filmmaker who is interested in incorporating a video game into a short film I’ll be producing at the beginning of December. I am looking for something that I could get 20 seconds of to play around with that has some type of violence in it, ideally in 3D in a Shooter style but that’s not the only type that would work.

The director of the film is Jared Goodman, and it’s his third film in the past year. He just finished a feature length documentary for ESPN called Rumbo a las Grandes Ligas, about baseball in the Dominican Republic, and is starting post-production on a film that we shot in Medellin, Colombia, about a beauty pageant in an all female prison.  The short film that we are working on now is more of a labor of love but I think you’ll find the concept very interesting.

If you have a game or a small piece of a game that might work, please call me at 617-888-9370. I’ll tell you more about the project to see if we can collaborate.

Thanks!
Spencer

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
6:00 - 8:00pm
Stata Center - Room 124
Cambridge

Financial Games

Hear from 3 of the top VC firms investing in the gaming industry as they share with you their insight on what kinds of deals they find interesting and the questions to consider when creating a new property and/or studio. A market “state of the nation”, mobile, online, licensed intellectual property (IP) versus unique and the best way to seek funding will all be addressed.

For more info…

For our November meeting, Jim Buck of Twitchy Thumbs Entertainment will be giving a talk about physics for games, particularly under the kind of resource constraints you might find in a handheld environment. Here’s what Jim has to say about the talk:

“I’ll describe the methods I used to implement the physics for Rally Cross PS1 back in ‘96-97 - they were using realistic methods that hadn’t been used by that time and I think still haven’t been used too much to this day. I’ll also show Rally Cross running on a PS1 emulator as well as a PSP/Win32 game I developed for SCEA last year using the same physics methods. Though it’s “old” tech in the sense it was developed for a previous-previous-gen system, it’s always good to know how to do a lot with little resources.”

This month’s meeting is back to our normal time and place. Well–almost. Due to conflicts at The Skellig we had to move our meeting to Tuesday 11/13 instead of the previously planned Wednesday 11/14. But as usual, check out the “About” link on this page to see directions to The Skellig and info about paying for your food and drink.

There’s going to be a panel on virtual worlds for an upcoming conference at Harvard Business School on Nov 10th at 2:15pm. Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab/Second Life, will be giving a keynote preceding the panel and then will be participating in it. In addition to Philip, I have Mark Kern, CEO of Red 5 Studios and of World of Warcraft fame, Mike Hirshland who is a board member at Turbine, Corey Bridges of the virtual worlds platform company Multiverse, and Chris Carella of The Electric Sheep Company.

The registration site is here, along with more details about location and content.