ulo.tricho.us

Back in February, I got an email from an address at playstation.sony.com. It was from Alan Heirich, an Ann Arbor expat who’s been working on the graphics architecture of the mighty Playstation 3. He was on a committee that was putting together ACM’s first ever videogame symposium, and they wanted to have tournaments as a part of the event. And they wanted me to organize and run them! Once I got a hold of myself, I found myself an events chair on a committee consisting of some very amazing people from around the growing academic videogame world, led by Drew Davidson, recently named director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon.

SIGGRAPH is the annual conference and expo for the ACM Graphics Special Interest Group, which drew a crowd of around 30,000 in 2005. As a large conferences, SIGGRAPH has a little fleet of colocated pre- and post-conferences for smaller audiences. The Sandbox Symposium would be the two days right before SIGGRAPH in Boston, and ACM was interested in the idea enough to fund an inaugural conference just about videogames. Not Interactive Entertainment, VIDEO GAMES. Like any Symposium, Sandbox would include peer-reviewed papers (including papers like ‘The Submissive Speaks: The Semiotics of Visuality in Virtual BDSM Fantasy Play‘) and panel discussions. Unlike most Symposiums, it would also include Katamari Damacy, DDR, Karaoke Revolution, Halo, and Soul Calibur III tournaments.

It was great to get the opportunity to envision two days of tournaments and open plays for adults, trying to cover as wide a range of games as possible on the cheap, and looking at the finished schedule, this is something I would be totally geeked to go to if I wasn’t already going. Hey, do what you know, you know? Also, I get to do things that I’d never get to do at the Library, like have a Karaoke Revolution tournament with a Cash Bar.

However, the most exciting thing about Sandbox is that being in Boston, Drew was able to get Harmonix themselves to come run a Guitar Hero tournament, and they’re even going to bring the still-in-development Guitar Hero 2! Nemo and I have been playing Guitar Hero nonstop for the past month or so, and it is simply one of the very best videogames yet made. I’ll provide a full report next week of my Date with Guitar Hero 2 and as much information as I can get out of Elena Siegman, a Lead Designer at Harmonix, a woman responsible for some of my very favorite games.

This should be a very fun weekend. Stay tuned.

Hello Blog, How’ve you been?

I was invited to speak at ALA 2006 by Jed Moffitt, IT Director at KCLS. When I was there in April, Jed took me to XXX Root Beer Drive-In for lunch, which I had seen on boingboing a few weeks previously. It was a fantastic place, and the frozen mugs were quite enormous. Visiting New Orleans at this stage in its recovery, I was led to expect desolation, complete with tumbleweeds, but there was traffic, and a sense of normalcy, excepting the omnipresent tarps and trailers. The airport was a little unsettling, however, deserted, with closed shops and squashed palmetto bugs; but on the way downtown from the airport we passed an oil change place with an LED sign reading ‘Welcome Librarians’.

If I had been there before, I might feel differently, but things seemed ok downtown to me, there was a vibrancy that I was not expecting. A lot of tourist shops were only open because of ALA, and there was lots of construction, but about the biggest inconvenience I experienced during the trip was having to wait for silverware. Being in the French Quarter on a Saturday night was quite an amalgam of sounds and smells, although Erin told me it always smelled like that. I was surprised to find 80’s rock as the dominant live music on Bourbon Street; I actually heard two different bands play Jessie’s Girl near-simultaneously.

Every meal was just amazing, I had étouffée at The Gumbo Shop twice, and fried boudin at Cochon twice, and had corned beef hash with creole hollendaise; the only thing I wanted to try but didn’t get a chance to was a Beignet. Cochon was really an incredible meal; I went there for lunch, and it was so delicious, I went back for dinner, with Jenny Levine, Kathryn Deiss, and Chad Haefele. We had a wonderful waiter named Nathan, who recommended that we get the hamhock, that none of us would have otherwise ordered, and it was just amazing, falling off the bone and all that. I asked Nathan for a breakfast recommendation, and he suggested Stanley (brother to sister-restaurant Stella) where I had the creole corned beef hash mentioned above. I then saw him the next night at Hagen-Dahs right off of Jackson Square (I was having a Mayan Milkshake) and got to thank him for his recommendation and meet his girlfriend and her very cute dog.

Outside the carnival of free crap of the exhibit hall, I was sitting on a bench in the convention center concourse, making some tweaks to my presentation, and a guy comes and sits down to my right and opens his laptop too. Someone walking by looked at the bench, and said, "Hey, it’s like that commercial! You’re the Mac, and you’re the PC!" From his perspective, I was on the right, in my tshirt and rumply blazer with cargo pants and sneakers, and beard and too much hair, with my Mac, and this other guy was on the left, with a dell PC in his lap, dark suit, tie, clean-shaven, and slicked-back. We both lauged, and then the guy said "What are you working on?"

PC Guy: "A Sales Spreadsheet"
Me: "A Videogame Presentation"

I wanted to get a picture, but Mr. PC left shortly thereafter. If only he had sneezed, we could have uploaded it to youtube.

My presentation was opposite a somewhat surprise appearance by Laura Bush, but we still had well over 100 in our session. Jed had asked me to speak for about an hour, and although I lost one lady in the first 2 minutes, it was a very fun and receptive audience. Matt Gullett then talked about all the cool classes and stuff he’d done at Bloomington before his recent move to join Kelly Czarnecki at the amazing Imaginon in Charlotte. Kevin Ferst talked about starting a gaming service as a nongamers, and Beth then talked about Reader’s advisory for gamers (and said I talked in Sound Bites =).

I also went to a YALSA gaming discussion group and got to meet some other people doing gaming events of all types and talk about some of the issues.

The exhibit hall is really quite striking simply for the sheer expense it represents. I can’t help but wonder how much more we pay for every single thing we buy to fund that sort of bonanza. Especially because it seems that it only exists because we, as customers, are too lazy to do our homework. We can only shop at the mall. It is a little unsettling that a trade show is a sign of normalcy. I did notice the booth that sold rolling suitcases you could use to store all the crap you were picking up, and quite a lot of people were pulling them around. I only picked up a few pieces of crap from the exhibits, the best thing being a CD sample of Shel Silverstein’s work of genius, Runny Babbit.

The hospitality was incredible, the food amazing, it was very hot, and just a wonderful trip. It’s hard to understand the devastation when it’s hidden from view and everything seems so normal. Life goes on.