by [name redacted]
This year’s final IGDA San Francisco/Bay Area Chapter meeting – held Tuesday, the sixth of December at the Sony Metreon’s Action Theater in San Francisco – featured three representatives from Industrial Light + Magic and two from LucasArts. The assembled personages spent an hour discussing how, thanks to their new joint facility in San Francisco’s Presidio district, they can share resources more easily than before.
by [name redacted]
I watched the Academy Awards for the first time, a few weeks ago. The MPAA’s screener ban (instituted in part to cut down on indie competition, under the ruse of piracy prevention) had apparently backfired, as the 2003 nominees consisted of perhaps the most well-chosen bunch of the right movies, for the right awards, that the Academy had ever selected. I thought, hey. Why not.
After an hour and a half, three hundred commercials, Billy Crystal’s singing, Billy Crystal’s unfunny jokes, Billy Crystal’s just-this-side-of-unkind remarks to Clint Eastwood and others, endless Hobbit awards, and Billy Crystal, I wandered away. I now thought I understood, first-hand, the general antipathy for award ceremonies.
With this in mind, I was unsure what to expect when I walked into the IGDA Game Developers Choice Awards. I had read about the Gunpei Yokoi ceremony the year before; that had sounded unconventional and sincere. Yet: it was still an awards ceremony. How long could I tolerate the pomp, I wondered.
by [name redacted]
BioWare consists of the most Canadian people I’ve seen in my life. I’ve heard it elsewhere, but it’s true! This is as much an underhanded compliment as it is an abject observation.
Honestly, I expected something a little different from our meeting. I wanted to talk more extensively with some of the developers, to ask about the whole process of running a company of their specific ilk. Unfortunately, we were hit with yet another dose of scheduling difficulty.