Cross posted with Communitech and CDMN
When you talk to people outside of our country, ask them what they think of when they think Canada. More than likely they will tell you natural resources. We want people to say Digital Media. We want people to think smarts, talent, technology instead of lumberjacks and tarsands.
Last week I had the good fortune of being able to attend the Digital Interactive Gaming (DIG) Conference in London, Ontario. It was a two-day affair featuring panels, keynotes, success stories and Ontario’s top gaming companies. Also present were a host of educational, government, software, legal and business services organizations
Did you know that Canada is the third most prolific game producing country?
The Canadian Digital Media Network‘s (CDMN) own Glenn Smith had a great presentation describing what the government is trying to do for this country and they are trying to change the way we are viewed by the world. One of the big things that stuck with me, something I never really realized, is that when you talk to people outside of our country, ask them what they think of when they think Canada. More than likely they will tell you natural resources. We want people to say Digital Media. We want people to think smarts, talent, technology instead of lumberjacks and tarsands.
Glenn did a great job of highlighting what the CDMN’s mandate is, why they exist, and how they are helping. He brought up great points about their key collaboration spaces across our country working together in unison, instead of competition. I was happy to provide examples to him of how this was already working, about how my startup and a few other local game companies (Footloose Games, Infinidy and Industry Corporation were meeting with the folks at Ngen in London, about how we were all going to go to DIG together.
I must say it was great to hear that people are working to make Ontario and Canada a better place for game companies.
While the rest of the media industry falls to piracy, games will emerge as the 8th art form
Talk about gaming’s future pushed the right buttons
There was a truly riveting and thought provoking talk by Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights first thing on Thursday morning. It started slowly, but swirled together into a masterpiece that widened the eyes of the audience. Mr. Dyack’s clairvoyance and the implications of his thoughts inspired much reflection afterward as we all pondered our futures.
The gist of the talk was that in the future the cloud will be king, that no consoles (save maybe one) will need to exist and that we will subscribe to content channels, like tuning into a television station of branded content. Perhaps his most interesting idea was that Call of Duty was greater than Star Wars. It was a statement that would irk a SW fan, but being one of those fans I could see his point. He pointed out the following:
If you were to place a video camera over someone’s shoulder while they watched Star Wars, you could in fact share most of their experience. If you did the same for someone playing Call of Duty, however, you would only see someone playing Call of Duty, most of their experience would be lost to you.
Dyack’s point was that you cannot copy nor steal an experience, you have to buy it. By providing the ability to play games over the cloud, there is nothing you can steal, no physical copies of games, recordings are meaningless. While the rest of the media industry falls to piracy, games will emerge as the 8th art form. He left us thinking about how cable companies are perched perfectly to cater to this impending shift, as they already have the infrastructure to host nodes in every city of content channels that users can subscribe to. With this model, the cloud can easily scale to demand. Users will subscribe to the EA channel for $15 a month to play EA games, and so forth with other companies.
I could tell that there was a strong community in the gaming world of Southern Ontario
Social Gaming and Socializing
Another great talk I witnessed was the panel on the new social gaming paradigm. It was definitely a raw and real discussion about people currently in the industry making money and what they believe this game space means. On the panel were successful companies making money today and talking about the ethics (or lack thereof), entertainment and psychological effects built into social gaming. It was great to hear things from real people, not just the thousands writing blogs or opinions about how things work.
It was also great that they defined, or at least tried to define, social gaming as a buzz word that doesn’t really mean social. One of my favourite concepts from the panel was that social gaming is akin to giving everyone a disease and then selling them the cure. It really speaks to the psychological tricks that are engineered into these games in order to squeeze more money out of people. They are brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but to argue that these games are even truly “games” is questionable in my opinion.
Probably the best part of DIG was the networking! I got to meet with so many great people from all over the map that share a common thread: they support games. Digital Media is the new buzz word that we gaming companies fall under, but it’s not a bad place to be as the Ontario government is pumping out millions and millions of dollars for support and are helping make Canada the #1 country in the world for Games; we are currently #3.
I missed several panels during the day simply because of the great one-to-one conversations I found myself in. Surprisingly enough I’ve found that the best way to meet people from Waterloo is to find them at events outside the city!
It was also great for me to meet a number of people who I’ve only spoken to only via Twitter. I could definitely tell from the various people at the event that there was a strong community in the gaming world of Southern Ontario, where developers, students, indies and AAA’s alike could engage in casual conversation as if no barriers existed. It’s liberating, exciting and incredibly productive to be in a situation where you can just walk up to the president or executive of a AAA and start talking, asking questions and shooting the shit without feeling like the little guy or that you should be intimidated.
There’s something different about these people that separates them from the rest of industry and I think this something will take us to the next level of success. People just want to make fun games and play fun games and we are all here to help each other do just that.