Melbourne Travel Log

Day 2 Continued

After the panel, a group of around 7 people approached me and said they'd heard from friends that my keynote was good. They wondered if I could cover the high points. Instead, I offered to give the speech again, at some nearby restaurant of their choosing. We all took a long walk back to the hotel so I could grab my laptop. (Along the way, I stopped once to get more coffee, at Starbuck's no less, and again to browse the D20 section of an Australian RPG store. The guy working behind the counter looked just like Andrew Leker, co-designer of Oasis.)

At the hotel, I gave my talk again for this small group, downstairs in the hotel bistro. They drank orange and pineapple juice, while eating potato wedges and listening. Afterward, we hung out and talked for another hour. Some of them in the group were developers and some of them were students. One of them fondly mentioned that-two years earlier-Doug Church had come to Australia and had given a meaningful talk at a development conference. One of them, Mark, had developed MS and had lost the ability to walk a couple of years earlier; he had not given up on his game development dreams, though, and talked passionate about his future plans. Game culture people never cease to amaze me. Eventually, I bowed out and returned to my room for a while.

At 830pm, I met some of the conference people at Lebanese House, a restaurant. Dinner was great; we talked about games and world politics which are, at the moment, the dog's breakfast, as some of the Aussies might say. I sat next to Katherine and Fiona, from the conference, and Ian Bell (who is also a vegetarian).

Afterward, Ian and I went out for a beer with Brody and Ian Shanahan, a mod developer who had worked with Kieron Gillen on the Deus Ex mod called The Cassandra Project. We walked seemingly forever, just to find something resembling a bar. (Discos were everywhere; quiet pubs were rare.) We finally rested at the oddly-named Spaghetti Tree and ordered drinks.

For me, this conversation was great: Ian Bell (a veteran game developer whose game Elite touched many of people I know, putting a permanent watermark on their memories), Brody Condon (a world class interactive artist, who boldly works on projects like Waco Resurrection), and Ian Shanahan (an exceptional mod game designer and a really fun, smart guy). I would nerd out with one of them about games, only to have someone else at the table pull us hard in the direction of art or political message, then we'd drift back toward talking about gamer-thrilling features that wanted to eventually see in games.

This conversation was essentially a commercial for the value of having a diverse game culture. We talked a lot about what game designers, mod makers and artists might be able to do in the next two rounds of games, using some of the Ken Perlin-style emotive animation tech. (We really wanted to use this same stuff for Deus Ex: Invisible War, before our total mismanagement of the technology we were creating ate our freaking lunch and cost us a bunch of our game features, aesthetic goals and polish.)