Videogame Expo - kind of a disappointment

The Videogame Expo was held this weekendin Philadelphia, PA. It bill's itself (I"m looking at the logo on my wristband) as America's Videogame Expo.

Well - if that's the case, the videogame industry must be hurting. There are many fewer people here than last year. The number and variety of panels has decreased. There aren't as many exhibitors. Last year's expo had space in both wings of the convention center. The Retro-Con had it's own exhibitor space. Tey had more classic games; this year there's no pacman or ms pacman, no qbert, no lunar lander... This year, the main exhibit hall isn't even full and Nintendo takes up a huge chunk of the front of the hall.

We came for the career seminar that last year had panels on both Saturday and Sunday, including on on pitching your game. This year there are 4 panels including one on picking the best college. Remember me mentioning the dearth of exhibitors above - well, colleges are strangely absent. As are developers and game studios. Granted there aren't as many on the east coast as the west, but where are the ones we do have?

One cool panel - well, we all laughed - was from a voice actor. It was supposed to be about creating characters, but really it was about being a voice actor and creating some characteristics of the character with your voice. Interesting, but not as much info as we expected.

Here's a couple of pictures. Enjoy. Here's a link to a full set of pics I took - click here.

Want more pictures - here's the flickr picture stream labeled "vgxpo" - I don't guarantee they're all from this year's expo, but the most recent ones should be. Click here for the vgxpo stream.

Just a thought

Image via Wikipedia

I think I"m going to have the freshmen game students create a Halloween event in SecondLife - dress up a section of the island and host a dance party or something. They have to wear costumes, decorate the space, invite people, be hosts. They could go shopping for the decorations and avies. Make notecards to hand out. Might be fun and good skills. I"ll have to think about that a bit. Unfortunately Halloween is on a Saturday - but we could do it a bit early I think. People in SecondLife never need too much of a push to celebrate.

I have to see if they know any people outside class. Tho maybe we just do the dance during our class - 30 avies all dancing at once = lag lag lag. Still could be fun

It's VideoGame Expo Time again.

Not as exciting as the Game Developer Conference or E3 but...a heck of a lot closer and more affordable. And still pretty exciting in its own right.

Videogame Expo: http://vgxpo.com in Philadelphia October 9-11

I went last year with 3 students - here's a link to a post from there and some photos I took  . Going again this year with some students to check out the classic arcade games and retro videogame section and the career seminars. They may take part in some tournaments too, and hopefully, meet some other game development students.  At least one group will be videotaping tings at the expo for a project; if they like how it turns out, I"ll include a link to their project in a future post.

Last year there was a little bit of anime and a room with a giant multiplayer DDR set up - multiplayer as in 30 or 40 people at a time. It was a hoot.

Cool things I did in SL this weekend

I went to the Cinese Moon Festival this weekend. Live actors - well, their avatars - in great costumes. A video with avatars. All to tell a chinese fairy tale about the moon. Then we watched part of a martial arts movie made in SL. Lots of blood and action! There was a great audience too. Classical CHinese music and moon cakes. Here are some pics I took. We had the time of day set to midnight for the show but the pictures didn't come out so good.