Yesterday was a busy day. I attended Marc Prensky's "400 (Serious) Games Later: Best Takeaways", where I learned that one of the "best takeaways" in NYC is the Shun Lee Palace. ;-) And in the afternoon I discovered that the session I had planned to attend had been moved to the morning and I had missed it utterly. So I went to "Serious Games: 5 Years Out", which turned out to be a very good session. I'll post my coverage of those later.
The evening turned into a succession of parties. Which was pretty cool. It all started with...
The Walk of Game
I hadn't RSVP-ed for this one, but they let us (Sande Chen, Michelle Sorger, and myself) because Sande & I were press and Michelle kept her mouth shut.
Food: Not bad, though all I ate was some slices of pineapple. I had 1 beer, duly recorded for posterity by Drew. Swag factor wasn't bad, though I missed the 2x2x2 Rubic's-cube-like thing, but I did get my picture on a refridgerator magnet and picked up something my daugther will probably like.
Toru Iwatani, designer of Pac-man, was at the Walk of Game, and he signed our badges on the way out.
Mobile Game Party
We walked from the Metreon where the Walk of Game happened to the Thirsty Bear for the Mobile Game Party. Press credentials and a party attitude again prevailed and we just walked in. Food...they had it...lua-style, I guess, though I only had a bit of the chicken (non-toxic). I had a microbrew beer, called the Brown Bear, which was pretty good. Swag was picked up in decent quantity, mostly stuff I expect to take home to the kids. Except for...well...the pineapples...
Here they are, dressed in traditional leis. Sande & I swear, they left with us willingly...
East Meets West
We got to East Meets West a bit late, but we still met some interesting people. No swag, though. And I didn't get anything to eat or drink, but only because I didn't care at that point.
We met Shiochi, a Japanese researcher working on human-sized CG avatars that interact with people (via a special harness). I don't have his card with me, but I'll post some links to demo videos later. You can see people "boxing" with a CG avatar.
Here a couple of the people we met, Zhan Ye and Gino:
We also met some people from Gamer Nation (TV) and a New Zealander living in Japan, and some developers from Shanghai. All in all, it was fun.
The pinapples proved to be a big conversation starter, as we caried them with us around the party and then in the streets. People like pineapples.
-David
