Boston Gameloop 2008
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Just returned from Boston Gameloop. It was a great crowd with terrific conversation. Simply awesome! The event was held at the MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Cambridge. The event was organized by Darius Kazemi of Orbus Gameworks and Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games. Companies that participated included Harmonix, Rockstar New England, 2K Boston, Demiurge Studios, 38 Studios, Turbine and many others. It was organized as an unConference in the spirit of events like BarCamp.
I thought I’d give some insight into the roundtables and discussions I participated in:
- Starting an Indie — this was a roundtable discussion about starting an indie game studio. We discussed a number of the financing options available including publishers, venture-capital, angel investors, and friends-and-family. The main advice I shared: be careful with friends-and-family money — and make sure you have good legal and accounting advice at the beginning of your venture, because it always costs more to fix things later.
- Boston Game Industry: What’s Next — discussion of some of the opportunities to expand the local game community, the importance of participation from larger publishers, and differences/challenegs between Boston and the West Coast (i.e., weather IS apparently is a big concern in attracting talent to New England). I suggested that participations visit a Web Innovators Group meeting to see one of the ways the dot-com industry is creating community events around Boston.
- 45 Awkward Minutes with Harmonix Designers — I expected this to be more about game design in Rock Band, but it ended up being a great window into the corporate culture at Harmonix. I asked what they felt their greatest cultural attribute was, and they said “trust,” which I think is great. Trust is the basis of any great business, but it’s amazing how often it is missing from companies.
- Experimental Games We Love — I tweeted about these during the session itself, but here’s the quick recap: Gravitation, Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, Dwarven Fortress, Forumwarz, Everyday Shooter and Cursor*10.
- Agency/Complicity in Games — Jeff Ward and Andrew Plotkin discussed theories regarding how game design is fundamentally about giving a player the sense of meaningful control over their environment (agency) and a sense of influence over the outcomes (complicity).
- Viral/Social Distribution — a roundtable I put together, this session talked about the viral mechanisms built-in to games ranging from Magic the Gathering, to Facebook games, to MMORPGs like World of Warcraft.
I’m looking forward to future iterations of Boston Gameloop. All the discussions offered some fresh insights. The website for it is here.
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