Last week I attended the IGDA Leadership Forum, which is an excellent conference put on by the IGDA that is focused on production, management, and leadership best practices. I won’t provide a full review here but I agree with everything in Brett Douville’s review. You really ought to go next year.

Anyway, one of the evening events I attended was the IGDA Foundation’s charity dinner to benefit the Romero Archives. It was a can’t-miss chance to listen to John Romero interview Will Wright about his own history and his development process. Towards the end they opened up the floor for questions.

I asked, “When you’re building a prototype, a lot of the times it can exist purely as numbers in a simulation. But at some point we want to show that prototype and get its point across so that another human being can understand it. Is there a sweet spot in terms of the level of art assets in terms of the minimum amount needed to aid the understanding of the other person?”

Unfortunately, Wright didn’t seem to understand the question. He seemed to think I meant the amount of art you need to show a prototype to an executive to get a green light, and his answer was (correctly, given the question he thought he was answering), “Don’t use a prototype to sell to an executive. There are better uses of your time.” What I really wanted to know was how much art effort he puts in to get an idea across to someone on the dev team, so that they understand what it is you’re prototyping.

I actually approached him after the talk and was waiting in line to clarify my question, but then the student in front of me shook his hand, introduced himself, and then literally said (I’m not paraphrasing): “I need a job.” Needless to say, Wright came up with some quick answer, grabbed his jacket, and got the hell out of there.

I figured I’d never get the answer I wanted. Later that night I was chatting up a really interesting guy who turned out to be Benjamin Taylor, the Art Director at Stupid Fun Club. As in: he works with Will Wright every day. He graciously offered to give my question a try, and when I repeated it to him, he lit up:

“Oh, I know the answer to that one. See, it’s not really about figuring out the minimum amount of art that’s needed to get the point of a prototype across. It’s about figuring out the maximum amount of art you can add to a prototype before it stops enhancing the prototype and starts detracting from it.“

Wow. Ben gave me exactly the answer I was looking for, and it was an answer just a bit outside of my own mental model of the solution space to my own question.

It’s quietly mind-blowing moments like those that are the reason I attend small conferences like the IGDA Leadership Forum. (In fact, you can read about a similar moment that Jamie Fristom had at the same conference.) Small conferences allow you to have fairly long, in-depth conversations like the one I had with Ben that lead to brilliant little a-ha moments. The hustle and bustle of a giant conference like GDC makes that a lot less likely, though it certainly does happen from time to time.

Jia Ji just wrote an amusing and informative article about how to run a game jam — in this case, it’s a post mortem of the IGDA Health Games Challenge site in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. I get asked often, “How do I run a game jam?” Jia’s article is good, covering not just how you get good games out of your event, but also sponsorship and leadership. Check it out!

I haven’t mentioned it much on this blog, but I’ve spent the last year running for the Board of Directors of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). We just had our elections, and I made it onto the Board!

Thanks to everyone who voted for me. I hope to do right by you for the next three years!

I met with the Federal Communications Commission on January 14th, 2010 to discuss issues around net neutrality and game development. The FCC published our meeting minutes as well as some extra comments we provided, which you can find here (PDF). There’s a post about it on GamePolitics.com, which does a pretty good job of briefly summarizing our meeting — although the original document only takes a few minutes to read, so I recommend you do that if you’re really interested in this issue.

As I stated on the record at the meeting with the FCC, I was there representing the Boston Chapter of the IGDA. I was not representing the IGDA as a whole, although some people on the IGDA Board and staff knew that I would be there, and I will be discussing these issues with them. I didn’t say very much: I was mostly there to listen and to pass things along to the IGDA.

If you’re an IGDA member, I ask that you read my argument that we need better transparency from the IGDA Board of Directors, and if you agree with me, I ask that you sign my petition to make the search for a new Executive Director (Jason Della Rocca’s replacement) transparent to the membership. We currently don’t know anything about the search task force or how they are progressing, and neither does the Board, apparently!

I haven’t mentioned it here yet, but a number of issues that have popped up with the IGDA in the last two months have caused me to decide that I’m running for IGDA Board in the next elections. I’ve set up a campaign blog where you can learn about why I’m running a campaign, for starters.