Press conference

Good thing when you're French in France: at least, some people speak your language. That was the case in the press conference – part of it was in English, but some speakers chose to speak French. No problem for non-French speaking people: translators were sitting in the back of the room. I remember last year's GDC in France – and French-speaking conferences were criticized a bit. I still believe it's a good thing to have them because not all French people speak English – and damned, we are in France :) (okay, that's a bad reason).

The conference started a bit late. Pierre Carde (from Connection Events) first presented the conference itself. I will skip the "I really thank you" part of that press conference (introduction of the Imaginove and Cap Digital business clusters; they concentrate many companies of the same industry into a small place in order to create synergies). Good bits of this part include: confirmation of the French government's strategy regarding the video game industry (pushing research as a way to improve it); presentation of a few research projects (autonomous characters at Paris 8 by Catherine Pelachaud, the GENAC project (about procedural content generation) with Pierre Deltour of Widescreen Games and the PLAY ALL project with Olivier Veneri).

Figure 4: Antoine Vilette from Darkworks, Media Molecule (Alex Evans and Mark Healey), Pierre Carde, Jamil Moledina, Polina Bozek, Ben Cousins of EA DICE.

The second part of the conference was more industry-minded: guys from Media Molecule (Mark Healey and Alex Evans) were there, as well as EA DICE's Ben Cousins or Antoine Vilette from Darkworks. I think. Not sure about that. Jamil Moledina of Think Services explained why they wanted to bring the GDC to Paris, while other people explained why they came to the conferences. Nothing very new here: they came to share their ideas and to get new ideas from other people – being inspired – or to reward their collaborators (Darkworks sent 60 people to the conference!).

Let's finish with a few good QA:

• While it's still a technical conference, will the GDC turn into a content oriented conference? Yes and No; the market changes, and the goal of the conference is to keep track of the changes – or even better: to be ahead of the change. Content takes prevalence over the technical details.
• The history of the European GDC is a bit chaotic – is it going to change? It seems that Paris is a convenient location for the conference. There is a good chance that future European GDC will stay in Paris.

Lionel Lemarié