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This is the second time they’ve run the Edinburgh International Games Festival during the Edinburgh Festival (alongside the Edinburgh Fringe, Film Festival, and so on), and I visited it myself for the second time to see if they’d improved on what they did wrong, and expanded on what they did right, from the year before. Well, this year, they’d extended the industry conference from one day to two days, and they continued to hold the ‘Go Play Games’ exhibition at the Royal Museum of Scotland.
But wait!
This year there was even more! They, obviously having read my scathing critique of the festival from last year (I doubt they did, actually) decided to open up the festival to the public in a more meaningful way than simply a room full of games in a museum, by holding several ‘Game Screenings’ at the Odeon cinema, in which such industry luminaries as Ian Livingstone from Eidos discussed Hitman, and Neil Young from EA discussed The Sims 2, showing the games on the big screen. There were 8 screenings and I’m sure they were great. I say I’m sure because despite calling for such an inclusive direction for the festival, I didn’t actually manage to go to any of them, due to their unfortunate scheduling either during the industry conference or at times when I couldn’t get myself to the Odeon. It seems they all sold well and were well received by the general public, which gives great hope for the future of the festival.
I did manage to cover the industry conference itself, however.
Thursday 12th August
ITV football commentator Clive Tyldsley returned this year as the compere, and in his opening address my notes simply say ‘MANHUNT!’ and ‘HOORAY FOR CHILDREN!” which, to my memory, was probably some pre conference fluff that we’re all worried in the UK that Manhunt was implicated in a murder, but, it’s not for kids, and hooray for the little darlings never, ever playing games which are not in their age range and growing up completely well adjusted.
Session 1 – Videogames – The New Rock and Roll?
This title made me groan. “Jesus,” I thought, “Last year we’ve got a bigger boner than movies do this year it’s music?”, but thankfully Steve Schnur came on and blew me right out the water. He’s an music industry veteran who’s worked with Metallica and the Cure. (We’ll forgive him for Sarah McLachlan, lets.) And had actually, spontaneously (and quite amusingly) had chosen to work at EA in Vancouver because he could ‘feel the buzz’ from the lobby when he went to check out a job offer. I mean, pretty much the moment he started talking, I thought to myself, “I’ve got to talk to this guy.” But he disappeared straight after his talk. I guess he was in his hotel room, yelling over a cell phone at Snoop Dogg to get his track for Need for Speed Underground 2 done, or some other stereotypical music industry executive behaviour (I’ll leave it to your imagination.)
He began with an impassioned speech about the power of rock and roll he was talking about videogames all along! He then fired into the meat of his talk, which actually appeared to be just a giant description of how amazing EA are and how good they are for recording artists. Case point – Good Charlotte had sold 30,000 copies of their album till a song of theirs was in Madden 2005. They sold 3 million or something. Actually maybe I hate Steve now.
Session 2 – Virtual Cash – New World Order
So the people giving this talk didn’t turn me on the way Steve did, but it was actually a genuinely interesting talk. Apparently Everquest, if you count up all the money that changes hands on Ebay and do some complicated maths on it, is the 77th richest nation on earth. If you play the game, farm gold and sell it on Ebay you can make $3.42 an hour. Which is more than you’d make in Albania or Hungary working an average job.
The panellist from EA, who’s… name I can’t find, (but he's centre left in image) appeared to be there simply be incredibly scathing about the players who feed such a market. The guy sitting next to him, from Gaming Open Market was so sweetly, stereotypically Canadian it actually brought a tear to my eye. His question to Mr. EA, to do with the tripling of Simolean value on the open market due to something being removed from the Sims Online, led to the simple response –
“I’ve got to be honest with you, I have NO IDEA what you’re talking about.”
You know, this was maybe the kind of thing you could happily watch a whole television program on, looking in depth at the legal implications of the sale of nonexistent property (For example: If you sell someone a sword over Ebay and then steal it back using in-game theft abilities, is it theft?)
Session 3 – Pitch Idol!
After two good talks, it was too much to expect this to be any good. It wasn't. Chaired by Dominik Diamond, well known in the UK for presenting Games Master in the mid 90’s, well known to me for that if you see him in the urinals at a music venue and remember Games Master, that he’ll not find it funny at all if you ask him how to get the magic whistle on the first world of Mario 3. He’s currently the (and I quote this verbatim from his biography) ‘comic reporting monkey bitch’ for dire coffee morning in the afternoon discussion show Richard and Judy.
This seemed to be a genuine and not funny at all pitching competition. I think the pitchers (lawyers, PR people, and journalists) got confused or something because I’m pretty sure it was meant to be funny. Not tragic. It was so bad that I think Jez San actually started to vomit behind me.
And the next session was so bad I’m not even going to mention it.
Session 5 - World View and Industry Panel
Sitting down I realised who I’d sat next to – Mark Rein, Epic’s Vice president. The first thing he chose to do as I sat down was to engage me by opening up one of the flyers from the delegate bag. A Maya one, portraying in poster form a weird lookin’ chick, basically. “Pretty cool, huh?” he aided. “I don’t know,” I responded, “I always find rendered girls pretty disturbing. The uncanny valley and all that. The NVIDIA girl always freaked me the hell out.”
It’s true, she did.
The world view lecture, from Doug Lowenstien, president of the ESA (The Entertainment Software Association) was insanely boring but had just about the most unintentionally funny quote of the day. Discussing the previously mentioned furore surrounding Manhunt’s implication in a murder and subsequent removal from shop shelves, Doug’s defence, comparing it to other media, included the shrilled ‘Look at the lyrics in rap music!’ The fact that no one else laughed quite as hard as me, not even my good neighbour Mark, made me worry for the entire room. I’m sure Steve Schnur would have enjoyed it. Hell, DMX plays when you’re on the fairway in Tiger Woods 2005. He did that.
The following Industry Panel was quite forgettable, except for Mark. A frenzy of unusual activity beside me. Attempting to sleep, fidgeting, switching between working on his blueberry and fiddling with his phone, and (unasked for) screaming his opinions at the panel, including an unusual prediction on the likelihood of a unified console platform - “That's 40 years from now! We'll all be dead!’
Speak for yourself, man.
The Awards Presentation
The Edge Award, trimmed down from the original, cumbersome title of ‘The Edge Award for Excellence and Innovation’, was presented by Edge’s Games Editor, Margaret Robertson, with a show reel and some hasty descriptions of the short listed games, which were –
Project Gotham Racing 2 (Microsoft, Xbox)
Viewtiful Joe (Capcom, GC)
Made In Wario (Nintendo, GBA)
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords (Nintendo, GC+GBA)
Katamari Damacy (Namco, PS2)
Eyetoy: Play (Sony, PS2)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Ubisoft, Multiformat)
In Memoriam (Ubisoft, PC, Mac)
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tommorow (Ubisoft, Multiformat)
Manhunt (Rockstar, Multiformat)
The winner, Made In Wario, was ‘Stupid’ in Mark’s mind. Considering I’m the only writer at IC who likes Wario Ware, maybe it is.
It was my girlfriend’s favourite game at Go Play Games at the Royal Museum, though, so maybe not.
The BAFTA Interactive New Talent Award was a weird one. Presented by Chris Deering, who is pretty much exactly like the Bill Murray’s dead boss from ‘Scrooged’ except with less of a sense of humour, just talked for ever, until finally the award went to Sony employee Paulina Bozek. Never in my life have I felt more like I was at a boring corporate dinner than watching a boss give his worker a swish award. This was saved for me of course by yet another interjection from Mark.
“They're both Americans!” he noted, loudly.
I decided this was the time to make my conversational gambit, maybe get an interview out of him.
“So, uh, what do you take from that?”
He looked me straight in the eye, eyebrow raised, and responded.
“That a lot of Americans work for Sony Europe.”
[next: Day 2]
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