Balthazar Auger

Sorry about the short absence, work got the best of me.

What I intended to talk about earlier this week was about the latest crop of projects to come out of ENJMIN. Every year around the end of June, first year students demo their interactive pieces to the public.

This year, a grand total of seventeen works were presented. Not all of them are downloadable yet, I’ll update the list as they hit the web. Read further for the full list. (more…)

The reason I’ve been away from the blog lately is because I was attending the Paris GDC event, held at the “Coeur Défense” conference center. Let me tell you about it a little!

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The series of conferences is drawing to an end. A quick recap on what happened yesterday and today.

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Okay, it’s getting real hard to pay attention to these conferences and try to hold a deadline. So, short reviews.

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This week, a little bit of our precious crunch time is being devoted to attending a series of conferences held at our school. These conferences, dubbed “Les Ateliers du Jeu Vidéo” - The Videogame Workshop were organized by all-around cool guy Jean-Michel Blottière. I’ll attempt to report on some of them.

Today, the conference was held by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago via video conference. They talked about how to elicit emotion in games centered around the development of their current experimental game, “flower”.

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I’ve just heard that Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, has passed away.

That man was virtually responsible for the gaming (video and other) industry’s place in the world as of now.

I feel… strange.

A week has gone since I flew back from San Francisco to France. I had to jump in the flow of life right away, which didn’t really give me time to catch up on everything that had happened in that week. Maybe what remains now is what was more important? Anyways, Sunday is always a good day to look back.

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Seeing as the conditions at the IGF pavilion weren’t optimal for poesysteme-ing, I decided to go towards the “performance” approach and have every visitor collaborate to create and maintain a poesysteme every day. The game only got rebooted when the game crashed and at the end of the day.

People could add one or several words and see how they would trounce or get trounced by the other words that were there already there, adding their contribution to the gene pool. Before they left, I asked them if they wanted to adopt a word, based on a “Love at first sight” algorithm. Upon seeing a word they liked, they were asked to write a quick sentence depicting what the word meant.

Their collaborative efforts result in this dictionary of the absurd.

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I attended the Awards Show, and I have to say that it’s the most awesome thing I ever attended in my whole friggin’ life!

Poesysteme was nominated, next to great games like Crayon Physics Deluxe (Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner, go Petri!) and Synaesthete (Student Showcase winner). Having met Petri and the Digipen guys, as well as Nils (the author of Rückblende) and the P.B. Winterbottom crew, I can assure you that they are all great guys and that you should play their games and give them many bags full of money, sweet money. The room was packed with the coolest people of all, and I know Sid Meier, Gabe Newell and Ralph Baer now know my game exists. ROCK ON!

I was planning to do a daily writeup of the GDC but I guess I’ll have to accept the fact that a regular day at the Expo is too taxing. Usually when I get back to my hotel I just want to crash and burn. Cool-headed impressions from the confort of my home it will be, then!

Also, the expo? Sheer. Madness.