Imagina 2004 impressions

Imagina 2004.
Mostly an industry event which traditionally has focused on graphics but is beginning to have more game stuff. You could tell that a lot of resources had gone into flying in top speakers.

I thought the top event of the conference was the panel on "Video games: Where do we go next", one of those panels with a dangerously big scope but where the 90 minutes of conversation between Doug Church, Jez San (who wrote Starglider for the Amiga!), Peter Molyneux, Ken Perlin, Noah Falstein and Charles Cecil covered a lot of interesting ground. The meta-issue became the question of how to have more interesting emotional content in video games – which isn’t easy, of course. The discussion circling around AI questions and some of Perlin’s charming animation experiments. Charles Cecil was perhaps overselling the comparison between games and the movie industry, but so it goes.

Also of interest was Jordan Mechner’s keynote on Prince of Persia, and panels on MMOGs and AI.

As an academic, I was perhaps slightly marginal but had an enjoyable time talking mostly to game developers. Here’s a pic with Patrice Désilets of Prince of Persia fame, me, Jurie Horneman (Rockstar Vienna), Martin de Ronde (Guerilla Games), Robin Hunicke, off the right edge of the picture is Jordan Mechner (who I got to tell how much I loved Last Express) and to the left is the right arm of organizer Sophie Revillard:

View from outside my hotel along Avenue Princesse Grace towards the Grimaldi Forum which is hidden behind a Japanese garden thrown in for good measure:

It was only the last day I actually saw a supermarket. Until then I’d only seen jewelry stores and Lamborghini sports car dealers. With a technical term, Monaco is "obscene". It’s expensive apartments, bellboys, room service, women in fur coats. I did go to the casino and the heavy late-fifties American man next to me at the roulette placed for €500 chips, 22 came out and he confided to me:"That 22 has cost me a lot of money tonight." Apartment buildings in suitable colors and properly clean facades with spotlights on in the evening, private rooms for playing. The city is set against a background of small mountains with lots of paragliders coming down. It’s all very James Bond, really, and it’s great fun. But this makes sense on another level because there is a feeling that to stay here, you would have to become a spy or an assassin or you’d go crazy from boredom within months.

It turned out that my young researcher award was to be handed over at a ceremony in a big theatre. Lots of music and lights and I got to get called on stage after the opening of an envelope. I had planned a small speech but the slightly, ahem, in-character announcer apparently thought we weren’t quite on par with the other recipients. Here’s the speech:
It is a great honor to receive the Imagina young researcher’s award. And it’s a great honor to be here as a video game theorist at an industry event. Initially, the industry has often regarded video game theorists as conceited backseat drivers … which we are, of course. But there is a lot of synergy to be had between academia and the industry. So let’s have some more of that. Thanks.

And here’s my glass teapot award, shot from the hotel balcony:

Great fun, and it’s not every day your 8-page academic paper earns you the right to parade along other prize winners who had worked on such small matters as Prince of Persia and Lord of The Rings. Prince Albert of Monaco then congratulated each of us. Yep, ludology just is that glamorous.