Witchboy Goes to Honk Kong
Day Four
After breakfast, it was time to give my speech. Acutely aware that I had been flown to Hong Kong
for 6 days, housed at the Renaissance Hotel and treated really nicely in exchange
for, literally, 2 hours of work, I really wanted to do a good job. GTEC is a
great idea for a conference and the organizers are very cool. While the conference
was fairly small (and probably covered too wide a range of development-related
topics) this year, upcoming years should be an extremely useful part of developing
the nascent HK game development community.
During the conference, I saw people speak on topics related to game design and technology,
combating software piracy in Asia, localizing games for the Asian market and
others.
Games |
At 0930, when my talk was supposed to begin, no one was there. Perhaps this will come
as no surprise, but I decided to wait a while before starting. Five minutes
later, an older couple came in. There were both wearing black business suits
and looked very much like investment execs. Oh, boy, I thought. Ten minutes
later, a few more people had arrived, including some people who looked like
they could be developers or journalist. So I started.
Within the next fifteen minutes, the room mostly filled up. So ultimately, about 16 people
attended the lecture. Of those, there were 4 or 5 people in the room who were
really interested in the subject and who asked some very insightful questions
(like, "In a game with potentially emergent gameplay, how does the QA process
work? How can you test for outcomes that do not occur to you, that you did not
plan?"). The lecture was really casual -- the struggle was figuring out what
to gloss over and what to further detail, based on the needs of the audience.
I've heard people say that if you give a talk and can connect with 2 or 3 people in a meaningful
way, that makes it worthwhile. Some of the people who gathered after the talk
were really excited about emergent gameplay. Some of them even sort of bashed
some traditional games as being all about graphics and pre-canned story. So
I stood around and chatted with them for another half hour. Then I was officially
done with "work" for the duration of the trip.
Wanting to take a break before lunch and more sightseeing, I returned to my room to
listen to JJ72 MP3's and to work on this account on my laptop.
That evening, Doug, Bernie and I were scheduled to meet Harry Miller and a friend for dinner.
Beforehand, we headed over to a store called "298"
(located at 298 Hennesey Road). This place was filled, floor to ceiling, with
pirated software. It was crowded with people, picking over glass shelves lined
with every game or piece of business software you can imagine. The store featured
multiple stories, even...nothing but racks and racks of software, lit by fluorescent
light, and literally hundreds of shoppers streaming through. We finally left,
just stunned by the overload.
More escalators |
After using the escalators again, we finally met Harry and his
friend Holt at Harry's posh, but tiny, apartment at mid-level. (Holt was the
lawyer for GodGames, I think.) By the time we rendezvoused with them, night
had fallen. The view from Harry's apartment was staggering, looking down of
the skyscrapers, due to the apartment's position on the mountainside. We headed
up toward The Peak for dinner.
The trip to the top required the use of an allegedly century-old tram track. Before boarding
the tram, we rendezvoused with Trevor Chan, a HK programmer/designer
who creates micromanagement strategy games. Everyone was amused that the tram
travels up the mountain at something like a 45 degree angle. You can stand in
the center of the tramcar, as it slowly climbs up the dark face of the mountain,
and lean forward at an insane tilt.
While we were playing around and laughing at how we looked leaning forward so far, I
happened to look out the window...the tram cleared some shadowy buildings and
trees sitting next the tracks and suddenly the ground outside the windows dropped
away, revealing a dizzying view of the downtown area, far below. This is hard
to put into words -- along with the view of downtown HK from the Kowloon side
of the harbor, this constituted one of greatest views I've ever seen. We were
high up, the night was very dark and the buildings glowed like some impossibly
large spirit castle, rising up from the slopes below. All of it was seen as
the tram's strange angle. It just seemed mystical. At the top, we ate in a restaurant that looked down on Hong Kong through an endless glass window. As we ate, the fog poured over everything, masking the view.
After dinner, the group split up. Bernie, Doug, Trevor and I headed off for a little street
featuring a bunch of clubs and a street party of sorts. We ended up in a basement
bar populated almost exclusively by locals, drinking coronas, listening to a
weird, but competent 80's style synth-rock band and playing a HK bar game called
Liar's Dice. Trevor is great fun -- he explained the rules of the game, then later
showed us some variants. Eventually, Bernie got tired, so he took off. Doug,
Trevor and I walked around in the crowds; Trevor
grilled us about what it was like to license Unreal, then headed home after
a while.
I started to regret that my last night in HK was coming to a close. The place is so vibrant -- I
could easily see living there for a year or two. After talking for a while,
Doug and I said goodnight and headed down opposite sidewalks, him for his apartment,
me for a cab. ("See you in Austin.")
Next: Day Five...
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