Tag Archives: IGDA

IGDA, Videogame Industry

IGDA Quality of Life SIG Committee Member

I’m not even in the games industry…why even try and be a committee member of the IGDA’s Quality of Life SIG? I think I can help is why!

It also might be a plus not being in the industry I’m only peripheral to at best, since I can’t really get fired for saying anything.

I’m also really happy if I can help get students more knowledgeable about the situation, and help facilitate the SIG to do great things. I’m going to be helping edit people’s own QoL stories, if anyone wants to contribute any, as well as help write or at least edit some of the white papers that the SIG will be doing. All this will hopefully grow the SIG so more rapid progress can be made, which is always awesome to see.

IGDA, Travel, Videogame Conferences

Develop 2009 Roundup

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The Develop Conference was good this year – I have notes to write up, some interesting ones, which I hope to sort once I do my gallery up with some new software (this has but a few of the ones I took with my new camera, and I’ll link to the notes here and in a minipost when they are up). I’m glad I went, and I think that not wasting holiday time is pretty important 🙂

Some CA's
Some CA's

The main thing was I got to talk to some great CA’s this year – who I also got to instruct them in the ways of Werewolf too. I also saw One Life Left (and participated!), although it seems it won’t be put up as a podcast, we’ll see. There was also Never Mind the Polygons, which was great. Much good discussion was had, and I caught up with some other people too.

I also put forward to the CA’s about the student SIG and got some positive and some muddling feedback, which I’ve taken on board 😀

Sadly, the IGDA presence was limited. I missed the Women in Games lunch (One Life Left was on at the same time), although this wasn’t strictly IGDA. The local chapter, from all reports is dead 🙁 a great opportunity there missed, especially since evening activities were limited – recession hitting in I guess!

Fear the Flaming Brighton Pier!
Fear the Flaming Brighton Pier!

The one thing I did miss, entirely unrelated to games, was having time to swim in the sea. It was actually rather sunny on the first day, but I lacked the time – there was bag packing to do, and in addition the Guardian Games Quiz – where we got a 20/20 for our brilliant “Brighton Pier on Fire” demonic monster 🙂

I also picked up Warhammer Mark of Chaos: Battle March – a mouthful to be sure. It didn’t change the original game much, but provided a good deal of fun for the reduced £4 price – the campaign has some quite fun missions (although I lament not being able to play the Dwarfs still, and I couldn’t get online). I might get around to writing something up about it, we’ll see.

IGDA

Revamping the IGDA Students SIG

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I’ve been working in the background a reasonable amount on a revamped IGDA Students SIG, which is still a work in progress, and still needs all kind of help to get going (waiting on the new site to get functionally started too doesn’t help matters).

The SIG, even though I am not a student right now, I just hope to get going. There’s been pretty much no student initiatives in the IGDA, the Education SIG is very centred on the educators, not educatees, and so it’s left to revamp the current Student Action SIG. Not much action, so I certainly think Students SIG is enough, for starters.

I’ve yet to contact the old staff from the SIG, but have been trying to contact students of various sorts, mainly through the forums and (nearly dead) mailing list. You will entirely believe how hard it is to find people to contact who haven’t got email addresses available: it’s Very Hard. What came out of this was the proposal – a draft right now, and needing working, I think, mainly on what should happen in the future, as well as organisational details.

Why is this important anyway? Well, even though I’ve barely taken advantage of it, the British Computing Society has an active Students section, and the IEEE has it’s own version. These have different activities, club parts, and so forth. I’m going to be contacting both to get some knowledge of how they operate, and will try at some point to contact our new Executive Director to get their knowledge on the subject.

It might only start as a web-based organisational effort, and not much more, but hopefully if people are willing to help – and unlike the Preservation SIG, I hope not to do all the work myself (since it’s really hard to find non-busy people interested in that niche, I can tell you!), meaning once it’s going it can run under it’s own steam and not peter out like the last attempt, valiant how that appeared at first to be. The new site should, I hope, be the easiest possible way to start it going, we’ll see soon I guess.

Email me now, leave a comment, or catch me at Develop if you will be there, since I’d love to discuss this in person with someone, and I’ll be bringing it up at every opportunity with any students I do meet 🙂