GDC Post-Mortem
I'm back in Atlanta! Yay! I mostly survived.

Sadly, I was exceedingly sick most of the time, being a conference assistant meant I had to volunteer a lot, and all the homework meant I was working while they were giving away HD tv's. Bah. On the up side, both illness and toil finished itself Thursday afternoon, so I was able to have one day of being upbeat and cheerful. The job front is actually looking quite good. I got some key business cards which will almost certainly not pan out, since that is their way, but they include a Disney VR Studios contact.

In extra good news, I am expecting a job offer from Microsoft Games Studios User Research. I talked to them a lot over the past week, including getting taken out to lunch and being introduced to the ueberboss who is actually allowed to hire people. I was a bit dubious about working for Microsoft at first, but these particular guys seems to really know their stuff and the work is way cool. Apparently it's not just sitting in a room coding video like I'd feared, they work pretty closely with the designers to make sure they're testing the right features and suggesting fixes that mesh with the overall design. The hours also sound much more sane than most game industry stuff and several group members have gone on to become game designers, if I decide I want to do that in a couple of years, so the way things are going, I shall end up in Seattle.

The last day of the conference was also extra-good, not because of anything particularly conferency, but social stuff that happened afterwards. My fellow Space Pirates – a design project I was on last term - dragged ricedog and I off to a Store of Pyrate Thyngs. It wasn't called that, but it should have been. It also should have had books of sea chanties, but it didn't, alas. The store also had many nooks and crannies to explore, so it was a neat adventure. Next I went to dinner with ricedog, justom, erinp, Harwin, and two of erinp's square dancing friends. Harwin wasn't part of the original plan, but he was at the conference and was dragged along like a helpless bystander on a katamari ball. But then he went to a concert instead of Chateaux des Jeux, so missed the games party.

The games party was fabulous! It contained the geekiest RPG I have ever played! First of all, it was a pick up game run by Erick Wujcik, creator of the Amber Diceless Role-playing System. The players were a game designer from Maxis (also the gent who brought Mr. Wujick), a professional vocal percussionist, and the son of Smoot of MIT smoot fame.

The game itself was pretty wacky. We were all employees at a start up, where thatwesguy was the CEO, I was the marketing person, and the other two were lead techies. We were making software radio, handy because justom was there and I would go do "market research" by asking him. There were a bunch of other people at the party who we could bring into the game as needed. A guy from Blizzard became our VC guy, and ricedog got pulled in briefly. Let me tell you, if ever you find yourself in an Assassin game and can select your teammates, pick thatwesguy. He is the most amazing schmoozer. Anyway, we accidentally came upon this configuration of chip that caused it to explode very violently, causing a few minor injuries and blowing a hole in the wall. We had to bribe the fire marshall to put off his inquiry for a week.

Meanwhile, the techies started looking into the crazy breakthrough, which was very humorous, because we were balking because we thought we might have just have invented a bomb the size of your thumbnail and were having some ethical and practical concerns, and thatwesguy was the ruthless CEO just driving us all along, which he did amazingly well. After some more research, we discovered that what we actually had was a power generator that required no resources - the explosion was a side effect of not draining off the power fast enough. After consideration on what to do, we decided to set up a power company in Tanzania, where no one really knew how power companies worked anyway so there weren't too many questions on how we were making this power. We pretended it was solar power and became a model of ecopower and benefactors to a developing country, as well as making truly ludicrous amounts of money.

Erick said we did pretty well. He said there were all sorts of points where the government could have gotten involved and we could have been left with nothing or thrown in prison, but we dodged them. Go us!

Anyway, so I just got back last night, where I was met by Blondie and Flamesplash with mimosas and Smirnoff Ice. I can't quite decide whether mimosas are ok or simply a waste of perfectly good orange juice, but watermelon Smirnoff Ice can be good if you drink it slowly.

And I just found out I have jury duty.