Last day of Games2006, not much to do or see except for the Pixelboy Awards gala. The crew got up early to have time to pack our stuff and clean up the place we lodged in for the week, leaving time for a quick lunch before the event.
During the conference, Joseph Olin had talked about the importance awards have in driving recognition for the games industry. In Portugal, the Pixelboy Awards were the first of it’s kind and the Arts and Congresses Centre in downtown Portalegre was packed.
We waited around for a bit, while the organization was preparing the last details for the ceremony, having fun trying to identify from all the people present who actually knew what Games2006 was and what the event was about. You see, there were two kinds of people there: people in confortable clothes with looks of sleep deprivation and conference wear and tear, and people who looked like they were going to the opera. I have nothing against it, but the contrast and the way these two “factions” looked at each other was hilarious.
Anyway, the show finally started and it was actually quite good, and it was really nice to see the people that are trying to make games by themselves in Portugal get some well deserved recognition. My congratulations to all of them. You can check the award results in the APROJE website.
In the end of the ceremony, just before we headed back to Oporto we had the chance to talk for a while with Alexander L. Fernandez, CEO of Streamline Studios, who had the time and patience to give us a veritable crash course on the ins and outs of the game industry and open our eyes to lots of potential pitfalls. Alex is a great communicator with a lot of industry experience and if you missed his talk during the conference you really missed out big time.
I hope the conference organizers put the videos of the conference talks up somewhere, because I saw some people filming the whole conference.
And that was it. I still have some notes about the talks and workshops I’d like to post and reflect on, like Leonard Paul’s workshop on audio prototyping or Chris Crawford’s talk on why the industry is doomed versus Jason de la Rocca’s talk about the positive evolution signs in the industry, but I’ll leave these to another time.