Melbourne Travel Log

Day 2

When I woke up at 7am, I was experiencing a terrible caffeine-deprivation headache, recognizable across all cultures (and eras, I assume) by coffee drinkers. My body-due to the time change-had expected a heavy dose of caffeine at 4pm the evening prior. Staggering like a zombie, I made my way down to breakfast without showering…that's how bad I felt. An hour after having coffee and breakfast, I was back to normal.

At the conference, a company called Nocturnal had sponsored a breakfast. I briefly talked again to Casey-the conference tech director, who was an expatriated American from Chicago-and then I went to fetch us both some more coffee half a block away at a deli.

The deli was small, but friendly. As the woman behind the counter made us two coffees ("tall, black," as Casey had described them, using the Aussie vernacular), I listened to a man and woman at a nearby table talk excitedly about 3D graphics-related math; Free Play spillover, no doubt.

Smoke Break

Back at the conference, I talked to some more evocative people, including a media-arts guy named Adam, who had filmed my keynote speech and planned to show it later in the month to a bunch of students. (Very cool-normally only the privileged people at a given studio or school get to attend conferences.) Adam also had an exhibit showing (the following day) at the conference.

I listened to a speech given by Damien Scott, the game designer and mod community advocate who had created Team Fortress. Nice talk-he and his partner seemed like smart, fun people. Listening to them made me wonder, once again, as to the exact definition of a mod developer. (Was Deus Ex an Unreal mod?) Several things they said resonated with me; in ways, the distributed development some more mainstream developers are starting to employ resembles the way the mod community works. I'd bet a lot of the problems have already been experienced (and often solved) by mod makers.

I wanted to corner Damien Scott for a chat, but never got the chance.

An hour later, I sat on a panel moderated by an art curator and designer named Rebecca. Also on the panel were Brody Condon, an innovative interactive artist from C-Level, and Ian Bell, who had co-created the classic game Elite.

The panel was on politics in games. It was inspiring and humbling at the same time. Inspiring, because it's cool that people like Rebecca, Brody and Ian have put so much thought into activism. Humbling, because games like Deus Ex only barely scratch the surface of dealing with thematic issues like violence or gender politics in games, and really I am much less thoughtful about politics than a bunch of the game developers I know. Ian Bell, for instance, was a fountainhead of mindful comments about how games carry political messages whether intentional or not. (It struck me that if Bell and Will Wright ever end up in the same room for more than an hour, the world itself might instantly change in some good way.)

At some point during the panel, a person named "Kipper" was piped in through virtual chat with speech synthesis 'reading' the chat log. This was fairly interesting in and of itself, but apparently Kipper is someone associated with a very impressive political game project called Escape from Woomera. Prior, I had no idea there was this big point of contention over the unethical treatment of refugees in Australia. (It sounds horrible, and just goes to show how unethical behavior on the part of governments and law enforcement is a potential danger everywhere.)