Tag

Vancouver

Apr 11
0

Game Dev News: Just Like a Beautiful Flower

By | Chapter News, Events, General, Local News, Meetings | No Comments
Now if only it would stop staring at me...

Now if only it would stop staring at me…

Wow. After a long winter of hibernation (and possibly discontent), spring has come to our corner of the globe, and like a flower bursting from the icy soil, many game-related things are blooming around here (and not just my poetry).

As you may be aware from last meeting’s announcements, our friends at Full Indie in Vancouver are holding the first Full Indie Summit on April 20th, 2013 from 11AM to 4PM at the Rio Theater @ Commercial and Broadway. The Summit is planned to be a day of lectures by leading independent game developers that will teach and inspire, and at $10 a ticket it won’t be breaking any indie budgets. And it seems like a few gaming news sites are picking up on the buzz about it already. Should be great time for all.

Because the Full Indie Summit shares the same day as our scheduled mid-month Casual Gathering at Moon Under Water (and because so many of us are keen to attend), we’ve decided to move the meetup to the following weekend. It’s already been updated on the meetup site, but you may want to check your own calendar so you don’t end up alone at a local brew-pub with nothing to do.

Speaking of meetups, we’ve been asked by our new hosts at Christie’s Carriage House to provide them with an estimate of attendees before each Main Event meeting so that they can serve us better, and so we’d like to ask everyone who’s planning on attending to RSVP via the meetup event for every meeting we hold there. Please remember to do so. Thanks!

Last but not least, we would like to welcome aboard a new member of the organizing team: Melissa Reams! Mel will be well known to most of you as a long-time regular member of the group and she has graciously accepted the position of Sponsorship Coordinator. Please join me in welcoming her.

Jul 03
0

Video Games: Not Just For Men Anymore

By | General | No Comments

Anita Sarkeesian thanking her project supporters. Many supported her Kickstarter project in a reaction against those who harassed her. Trolls lose again.

I listened to an interesting segment on the CBC Radio program The Current this morning featuring an interview with Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency. If you haven’t already heard what happened recently with Ms Sarkeesian and the backlash against her project to analyze the ways women are stereotyped in video games, than you will definitely want to give a listen to this episode. It’s a real eye-opener to the kind of behaviour that some people find acceptable towards women, especially women who would speak up against the sexism inherent to the games industry. This is the sort of thing that is holding back game development from becoming a mature art form and really needs to be addressed by the industry as a whole if we want to evolve.

The second part of the segment features a talk with Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, one of the founders of Silicon Sisters Interactive. They’re a Vancouver based game developer and they happen to be the first female owned and run video game studio in Canada. And they’re doing their part to address the imbalance in the game industry by focusing on creating games for women and girls while being exclusively staffed by women and girls.

The entire recording of the episode can be found on the CBC website at the following link: Women and Gaming: Smashing Stereotypes.

Mar 27
0

Of Game Awards and Elected Boards

By | Chapter News, General, News | No Comments

And the award for the most subtle and least exploding awards show logo goes to...

The Canadian Videogame Awards Finalists have been announced. Along with the usual studio nominees like Ubisoft and EA, there are a number of indie developers who made the finals including:

Not only that, but an indie game is a finalist for the most awards: Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP by Capybara is a finalist in nine categories. The awards take place during Fan Expo Vancouver on Saturday, April 21st, 2012.

In other news, the results are back from the 2012 IGDA Board Election. The two vacancies on the IGDA Board of Directors will now be filled by Sheri Rubin and Ed Fries. You may remember Sheri from an Awesome Talk that she gave to our group back in October of last year. Congratulations to both Sheri and Ed!

Oct 16
0

ICIDS 2011: For those who love telling tales

By | Events, News | No Comments
Some days you gotta kiss a lot of frogs…

There’s an event coming up in Vancouver soon and, if you’re like me and love storytelling and narrative design in video games, you won’t want to miss it. It’s the fourth annual International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and it’s being held for the first time in North America this year running from November 28th until December 1st.

I’ll be attending this year and, if you’ll excuse the plug, I’ll be running a workshop on the 28th entitled “Rummaging in the Geek Culture Toolbox”. You can imagine that I’m pretty excited about it and I wanted to share my excitement by inviting all of you to attend. Invited speakers this year include Chris Crawford of Storytron, Mary DeMarle of Eidos Montreal, and Keith Oatley of University of Toronto. Further details on the conference can be found here: http://icids2011.wp.rpi.edu/ and details about my workshop are here: http://icids2011.wp.rpi.edu/ws-the-geek-culture-toolbox/. Note that there is a discount for IGDA Members.

I hope to see you there!