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Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2009)LOOP 2009EVA 2009ICIDS 2009 Interactive Storytelling
Pecha Kucha Night
 Wade Tinney (Large Animal Games and chapter coordinator) welcomes everyone to the event, held at the Parson's New School in lower Manhattan IntroductionThe New York IGDA chapter has put on various events in the past few years, most notably the bi-annual Demo Nights that GDNet has also covered. This year however, at the direction of Chris Choi from World Wide Biggies, the chapter held a new type of event, called Pecha Kucha Night. Yea I know - what the hell is a Pecha Kucha? Of course Wikipedia has the answer:The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one night. Therefore the 20x20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up.I know we've all sat through our fair share of long, droning presentations at the mercy of the person behind the podium, so this was something I immediately liked when I learned about it. Obviously it's popular with many other folk as well, and you can find more information and even local events at Pecha-Kucha.org.
So how did the event turn out? Well for one it was another jam-packed event, although the room was not exactly set up properly for the kind of seating that was required - but that was no fault of the organizers. The majority of the presentations worked out very well, it really ultimately fell to the presenter to give a compelling talk within the time limits imposed upon them. A few weren't properly prepared and didn't quite stay in-sync with their slides, or just didn't have the material suited to this type of presentation. One was a bit confusing to even listen to, and another tried to evoke audience participation using the 20-second time limit to create a sort of game show atmosphere. It was a nice attempt but the problem was that it was identifying pictures of old consoles and/or when they were released. In this case, no one wants to blurt out an absurdly wrong answer in a room filled with fellow gaming geeks. So unless people knew 100% what the answers were, they kept their mouths shut (including myself). But still - was it fun? Yes. While it does prove that there's really nothing you can do to save a bad presenter from themselves by doing things like limiting the amount of time they have to talk, it also challenges presenters to be creative and witty in giving their lecture. It's very much akin to those 48 hour game development jams, where you are forced by neccessity to whittle down your game idea to the very core if its mechanics in order to complete anything on time. Pecha Kucha night is planned to return sometime in '09, and we'll be there to bring you the second coming.
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