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By Rebecca Greenspan More than 400 college and high school students, industry professionals and other interested parties attended the first-ever Game Developers eXchange at SCAD-Atlanta May 6. The inaugural GDX included sessions from speakers working in all aspects of the game industry, beginning with keynote speaker Peter Lee’s “All Grown Up and Nowhere to Go: The Future of Video Games.” Lee is the president of the game development company gameLab, which strives to create games that break new ground by finding new audiences, inventing original forms of gameplay and exploring narrative content and visual and audio styles that aren’t normally found in games. They act as an “indie” company in the interactive entertainment industry. To that end, Lee spoke to a packed room about keeping the independent spirit alive and giving attendees a look at career alternatives to big game design companies. Other sessions included “Each Player’s Story: Narratives in Live-action and Digital Games,” by Nick Fortugno, Playground game designer and co-creator of the “Big Urban Game,” a large-scale citywide game for the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis; “Creating Characters for Games,” by Les Pardew, president of game developer company Alpine Studios, which has created games for PCs and Sony Playstation2; “The Groundwork of Simulation: Event Modeling,” by John Flynt, Ph.D., a programmer and software engineering professor; and “Shaders for Programmers and Artists: RenderMonkey 10” by Sebastian St-Laurent, Xbox lead engineer for Z-Axis Ltd. SCAD illustration alumnus Mike Wikan (B.F.A., 1987) led two sessions, “The Production Pipeline, or How to Make a Video Game in 10,942 Easy Steps” and “Sprinting into the Rat Race: Getting into the Game Industry as a Designer.” Wikan is senior designer for Retro Studios Inc., a Nintendo company. His credits can be found on the high-profile projects “Metroid Prime,” “Metroid Prime 2: Echoes” and “Duke Nukem: Time to Kill,” among many others. Wikan’s sessions were among the most popular, the first even lasting an extra 20 minutes as conference participants asked question after question. As an added treat, Fortugno also ran concurrent role-playing game sessions for attendees. During lunch, SCAD students were offered the exclusive opportunity to meet with interactive entertainment industry executives in and around the Atlanta area, including Michael Capps, president of Epic Games, and Marcus Matthews, chief operating officer of Blue Heat Games. Nick Otto, a Master of Fine Arts candidate in interactive design and game development from Pennsylvania, said that the best part of the conference was meeting with the industry professionals. “By far the best thing I got out of GDX was having lunch with Michael Capps, the president of Epic games,” Otto said. “He gave some really good insight into getting a job with Epic, and some of what he said could be applied to other companies as well. [He] was so friendly that he even stayed after the lunch was over and was still fielding questions for about a hour.” Josephine Leong, chair of interactive design and game development, agreed that making contacts is an important part of any conference. She noted that conferences offer students the opportunity to hear from renowned industry speakers first-hand. “Most conferences of this type are held on the West Coast and are costly for students to attend,” Leong said. “But GDX brings the same quality conference to our students and local industry at no cost.” Leong declared the conference a success, observing that SCAD students and other participants came away from GDX with new knowledge of what potential employers expect of them, better preparing them for the industry. Greenspan is assistant director of public information. |
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