Witchboy Goes to Honk Kong
Day Two
Having slept very little, I woke up with a splitting headache. After showering, I headed
downstairs and had breakfast. The restaurants within international hotels are
so strange: Two Norwegian guys were arguing with a HK waiter over some totally
unrecognizable, bottled sauce when I walked in. I think the bottle (which was
baby blue and featured some acronym in large letters) was empty; it seemed super
critical to the bulging-eyed Norwegians that a replacement be found instantly.
It's amazing to me that since food is such a huge part of life and since eating alone is
lame, we don't have some practice like joining another lone diner in such situations.
I was faced with a super conservative business culture, so I did my best to
appear indifferent and superior. Maybe we should start booking bed and breakfasts
for game industry events.
Morning has broken... |
I had a few hours to kill, so I set out, walking around in the city, looking for urban
elements that reminded me of Deus Ex locations. (Maggie Chow's apartment, Red
Arrow - Luminous Path triad fights, etc. HK was as magnificent by daylight
as by night. I walked through a semi-enclosed, outdoor mall
that looked just like the one in Steve Power's DX1 mall map. No Lucky Money,
sadly. (Those places were located elsewhere...)
I took lots of photos with disposable cameras, trying to catch anything that seemed interesting:
The amazingly jumbled verticality of the surrounding
buildings. A woman using a wooden shovel to
fill up a wheelbarrow with gray sand. (The
sand had been tunneled crudely from beneath an otherwise pristine stretch of
sidewalk about a block from the super civilized HK convention center.) White,
bloated 'Star' cruise ships, industrial flat barges, ferries and old-style Chinese
fishing boats all maneuvering through the same misty harbor.
A tall tower supporting cameras and what I suspect were acoustic
gunfire sensors. (I bet theirs work better than the ones we included in DX1...)
Eventually, I headed back to the convention center.
The HK Convention Center |
The HK Convention Center itself is a marvel: Organically curved, many-tiered, huge, clean
and crowded, it sits on the water and offers an astounding view of the harbor.
The harbor is busy *all* the time.
The conference, as it turns out, was small. (So much for pre-speech anxiety.) I listened to
Doug Church (from Looking Glass) speak on the
myths associated with game AI, then we sat on a panel together about designing
games for emerging foreign markets. If you are wondering what the hell, if anything,
I know on this subject, you are not alone -- so was I. Still, it went well. Doug
and I shared time with Robert Westmoreland, the cool redneck biz exec behind
Deer Hunter. He claims that he looked at data on how much software Wal-Mart
was selling at the time, thought about the average Wal-Mart shopper, thought
about what kind of games the average Wal-Mart shopper would want to play (which,
with the exception of Bass Fisherman, was at odds with the kinds of games being
sold in the store), and then pitched the concept of Deer Hunter. Multiple publishers
turned it down, calling it ridiculous in some cases. It cost about $110,000
to make. The franchise has allegedly sold 10 million copies. I bet Robert drives
a really nice truck.
Star Ferry |
After making small talk with attendees, Doug, Bernie Yee (from
Sony Online) and I left the conference and headed out into HK. Our goals included
dinner and the night markets. We walked over to the Star
Ferry and waited. Eventually, crowded by commuters and other travelers,
we crossed the water. The sun was going down, so the light was odd: In the distance,
huge colored signs were coming on, the buildings were all still visible and
fog was building up in the harbor. The boat deposited us at the Kowloon dock.
We stepped off the ferry and onto the Chinese mainland.
HK Bikes |
We walked through a plaza where one day a week, thousands of Philippino maids allegedly
gather to bask on towels laid out on the concrete. They work for the Chinese,
cleaning houses, and are called amah or something. (Doug talks fast, I am easily
distracted and we were in the land of stimulus overload,
so you can see the problems associated with me remembering the details.) Their
routine emergent social event has been written up and photographed a lot, I'm
told -- the numbers of people who attend this gathering are staggering, apparently
so much so that even walking across the wide plaza is difficult when they're
sprawling there once a week. The plaza sat in the shadow of a weirdly leaning
structure of immense proportions.
Next: Chili Garlic Prawns...
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