The Simon Carless Experience

Well, it’s been a little while yet again - so I thought I’d post quickly in between trips which seem to have piled up in recent weeks, and list some of the fun stuff I’ve been doing workwise.

Myself and a number of us at the UBM TechWeb Game Network are recently back from Shanghai on a trip to check out ChinaJoy (the big consumer video game show in China) and have the GDC China Advisory Board meeting for this year - lots of great business done there, and looking forward to the show this December.

Other recent - only semi-work related - jaunts have included a trip my first-ever San Diego Comic-Con with Holly, where we took lots of pictures, of course, checked out W00tstock with Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage and friends, greatly enjoyed the Rifftrax panel, and I went on a bit of a tear at the Weta booth.

Those New Zealand wizards behind effects for The Lord Of The Rings and District 9 make some amazing steampunk guns under the Dr. Grordbort’s line (booth pictured, Cliff Bleszinski is also a fan, apparently), and at the show, I picked up the super-custom Iron Tiger gun, as featured on Wired.com recently. It’s got anti-magnetic paint like the German tank it was modeled after, and, uh, camouflage foliage. Don’t ask.

In a couple of days I’m off to GDC Europe in Cologne, Germany alongside the Gamescom consumer event. As you’ll note in our news blog, we’ve been adding a plethora of high-profile lectures, including talks on Microsoft’s new Kinect motion control device from some of the third-party devs working on it, plus a talk on acclaimed XBLA game Limbo (previously a winner at our own Independent Games Festival) and a keynote from seminal Deus Ex and Epic Mickey designer Warren Spector. Can’t wait.

In other news, we recently hired our first in-house staff member for Game Advertising Online, our free-to-play B2C game ad network, and he just started (hi, Fabian!) We have other notable hires coming, and we’re currently working on test or full campaigns with companies like BigPoint, Ubisoft, Turbine, Gameforge, Nexon, and Jagex. We think serving developers of _all_ sizes by finding them new players for their games will be a key part of our job going forward. 

We’re still ramping up on our other events like GDC Online, but we already have an (unannounced!) keynote lined up for the Austin event in October, as well as Summits on hot topics like 3D stereoscopic gaming and the iPad, and we’re very heartened by the buzz around the event’s renaming from GDC Austin. We’re also feeling well positioned for GDC China - and, indeed, GDC 2011 in San Francisco, the 25th anniversary, for which you’ll see some awesome visual stylings revealed soon.

So that’s where we are right now - and I never even mentioned E3 (fun, although I had to sneak out to Boston for a corporate meeting halfway through the show!), the holiday with Holly and parents to Yosemite/Sequoia National Parks (wow, cold!), GDC Canada (Vancouver is a really nice place), and various other sundries. Catch up later in the year!

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[Popping up from blog radio silence mode long enough to pass on this announcement. Now that I'm running all the Game Network's products, it's really difficult to give the IGF the love it deserves - and who better to take over than Mr. Boyer? I'll still be involved behind the scenes, though...]

The UBM TechWeb Game Network, organizers of the yearly Independent Games Festival and Independent Games Summit has announced that scene notable Brandon Boyer has been named Chairman of the IGF, as it continues to expand its role in evangelizing and rewarding the best indie games.

In his new role, Boyer will oversee submission and judging operations, provide community outreach and support, and help shape the structure and continued growth of the IGF — the longest-running and largest event relating to independent games worldwide.

This follows the event’s all-time record 607 game submissions in 2010 across the IGF Main Competition, Student Showcase and IGF Mobile competitions, including high-profile titles like Monaco, Limbo and Super Meat Boy.

The 2010 Independent Games Festival saw thousands of visitors to its Pavilion [picture gallery] and more than 3,000 attend the IGF Awards Show [picture gallery] in March 2010. The associated Independent Games Summit [picture gallery] had nearly 1,000 attendees for its 2010 keynote session on the Indie Fund.

Both events are part of the larger Game Developers Conference, which is returning to San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center Monday, February 28 to Friday, March 4, 2011.

Boyer has previously co-founded and served as editor of Offworld.com, an independent-game-focused site operated by seminal weblog Boing Boing, where he currently serves as contributing editor. Boyer has also served as judge for the IGF since 2007, and was previously an advisor at multiple Independent Games Summit events. He has also contributed to various games publications including Gamasutra.com and Edge Magazine, and brings a wealth of knowledge on the independent games scene to the position.

Boyer is taking over the role from former Chairman Simon Carless, who is now Global Brand Director for the entire UBM TechWeb Game Network, including the GDC shows, Gamasutra, Game Developer magazine, and new acquisition Game Advertising Online. Carless will continue to contribute to the IGF as Chairman Emeritus, and as part of a Festival/Summit organizing committee that includes Boyer, Carless, and vital continuing IGF contributors Matthew Wegner (Flashbang Studios) and Steve Swink (Enemy Airship).

“The Independent Games Festival has consistently been my highlight of the Game Developers Conference for as many years as I have been attending,” said Boyer. “I’m extremely honored to help shape the future of the festival and bring ever-wider attention to the indie games community, a group that is truly defining the future of video games as an artistic medium.”

The Independent Games Festival was established in 1998 by UBM TechWeb Game Network to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers. Previous honorees have included many of the pioneering independent games of the last decade, including World of Goo, Gish, Everyday Shooter, Crayon Physics, Braid, Castle Crashers, and Audiosurf.

Specifics on 2011’s competition details and deadlines are expected to be announced in the next few weeks - for more information on the Festival, please visit the official IGF website.

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Sorry, it’s been a while! Among the things I haven’t discussed since the last post were a trip to Las Vegas for the D.I.C.E. Summit for game execs, and the fact that we did the deal I’ve been sideways mentioning for months, and bought ad network Game Advertising Online, which is really a transformative acquisition for us at the UBM Techweb Game Network.

But the big news is Game Developers Conference 2010, which ran from last Tuesday (March 9th) to Saturday (March 13th) at Moscone Center in San Francisco. As our ending press release reveals:

“Organizers of the 2010 Game Developers Conference, the world’s largest industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of interactive entertainment, has announced an all-time record of 18,250 game industry professionals attending San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center for the March 9th-13th event. Surpassing last year’s total of 17,000 attendees, the event - created by the UBM Techweb Game Network - brought together experienced game developers, publishers, deal makers, industry aspirants and working press for more than 400 lectures, panels, summits, tutorials and roundtable discussions.”

The highlights are almost too numerous to mention, but we had major announcements at the show - including Sony debuting its PlayStation Move motion controller and buzzed-about cloud computing/gaming company OnLive revealing its pricing and release date - as well as new product and game announcements from Microsoft, InstantAction, MySpace, Palm, Valve and more.

Along the way, we also had rare and sought-after lectures from big, often secretive names like Nintendo, Google, and World Of Warcraft creator Blizzard, as well as a ’surprise’ secret lecture at the end of the conference from ‘Phaedrus’, aka SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright - here’s a round-up of the top announcements and lectures over on our own Gamasutra.

The big media was out in force, too - with the BBC running a piece on social gaming’s rise at the show and CNET/CNN also running a very positive piece on iPhone games and the show overall. And of course, the major game sites like GameSpot have big GDC microsites — including, in their case, videos of the Choice and IGF Awards — for those who’d like to see more.

Overall, we had a really amazing show, and you can see lots of photos (over 500, in fact!) from GDC 2010 at our official Flickr page - now roll on GDC Canada (Vancouver, May), GDC Europe (Cologne, Germany, August), GDC Online (Austin, October), and GDC China (Shanghai, December) — all of which should keep me busy for a while, blimey!

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Wow, well firstly, thanks for all the comments on my announcement of my net.label Monotonik going on hiatus. I know there were a lot of people out there who cared about it and the musicians on it, but it was great to see feedback from artists and fans alike.

Anyhow, one of the (many) reasons Monotonik is shuttered for now would be my day job, since I’ve just been promoted and will now, well, quoting extensively: “take leadership of Think Services’ Game Group, a division of London-headquartered United Business Media, as Global Brand Director.”

Furthermore: “In his new role, Carless will be responsible for the strategy and vision for the group’s portfolio of products, which currently include the industry-leading Game Developers Conferences (GDC, GDC Europe, GDC Austin, GDC China, and GDC Canada), as well as renowned game website Gamasutra.com, the Gamasutra Network of websites, and Game Developer magazine.”

So, I’ve been involved in some of this already, obviously. But I’m now also officially overseeing the awesome GDC shows, as well as our magazine and websites. As I mention, I’m jazzed to be both keeping up our current lines and expanding the Game Group to help game creators in new ways. Or that’s the plan - watch this space!

Otherwise, I’m just back from a random trip to New York, fortunately not very work-related, and I’m recovering from a cold and digging in for the hectic pre-GDC 2010 season, while keeping up with all the regular fun and games. Happy holidays to all!

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So, it would appear to have come to ‘End Of An Era - Pt.II’ for my electronic music net.label Monotonik, which I’ve been running since 1996 in .MOD and .MP3 form. In that time, we’ve put out over 350 free-to-download releases, initially spanning all forms of electronic music, but settling down into what you might call idm.

There’s a lot to be proud of in our history, which started with the label being called Mono, then a split into two ’sister labels’, Mono211 and Monotonik, and then a concentration on Monotonik for the last few years. For starters, there’s the fact that our discography has almost 2.5 million plays on Last.fm and the MP3 releases are fully documented on Discogs.com by fans and collectors.

And between the main site and the Archive.org collection, there’s been millions of downloads of our music over the past 13 years. (If you want to start somewhere, try Christopher Whaley’s ‘10 Years Of Monotonik’ mix.)

While I’m not saying we wouldn’t do _something_ with Monotonik in the future, I’ve been building up a backlog of releases for much of this year, to little releasing effect. So I’ve decided to debut almost a year’s worth of great content - six releases - at once, and go on hiatus with the label. The releases we’re putting out now are:

- MTK214: Malty Media - ‘Buk Buk Buk EP’ - a New Zealand duo’s Orb-esque sample-strewn frippery.
- MTK215: Casimir’s Blake - ‘The Silence In Fragile Space’ - a UK artist’s full drifting album-length stellar odyssey.
- MTK216: Clark Vent - ‘Scene Sexshun’ - bleepy super-swift idm goodness from another pseudonym of Finnish artist Flutterspot.
- MTK217: Kuu - ‘Pixels EP’ - veteran Monotonik artist Substance returns with uptempo idm/breaks gorgeousness.
- MTK218: Dead Eros - ‘Bone Mountain’ - another stalwart Mtk releaser ends things out with spiky U.S. electronic goodness.
- MTK219: Mike Kidd - ‘Impermanence EP’ - nothing lasts forever, as this drum and melody-strewn debut exhibits gloriously enough.

We don’t intend to release anything else for the foreseeable future and are closed for demo submissions. And in case this really is the end, some things I’d like to highlight as particularly memorable or important to me over the years of running Mono:

Read more…

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Whoa, it’s been a while, and I’m just back from almost 4 weeks away from the Bay Area (and a couple of trips before that!) - all kinds of strange but edifying fun. So let’s go through what I’ve been up to:

- It was my first time at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle (Flickr gallery). I sat on a panel with Spelunky’s Derek Yu and Dishwasheri’s James Silva, and wrote a piece for Gamasutra about why the show is such a delight.

- Next, GDC Austin in Texas (Flickr gallery) was held in mid-September, and I co-organized the two-day Indie Games Summit there, as well as helped report on the full show. We also co-organized a couple of game documentary showings at the amazing Alamo Drafthouse during that week, including the v.interesting ‘Into The Night’ doc with Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford.

- Then it was off on my Eastern jaunt, starting with Tokyo Game Show (Flickr gallery), which was another chance to check out Tokyo and a slightly consolidated, but still fascinating TGS. The ‘Sense Of Wonder Night’ experimental game showcase, which I help judge and also documented, was a highlight again - the presentation videos from it are up now.

- Next, we were off to Melbourne, Australia (Flickr gallery), where I spoke at the Digital Distribution Summit, thanks to the nice folks at Film Victoria, who announced local government grants for XBLA, PSN, and other digital titles at the Summit. After that, Holly joined me and we took some holiday in Melbourne and then Sydney, where we also took a jaunt out to the beautiful Blue Mountains, dodging deliciously inclement weather along the way!

- Finally, it was to GDC China in Shanghai (Flickr gallery), where I helped to present IGF China, for the best Asia-Pacific indie games, topped by Farbs’ rather fascinating Captain Forever. I also spoke about tips for success for Western digital distributed/indie titles, which I’m hoping was helpful for all.

And that’s the end of that slightly insane travel schedule for now, phew. The good news (for my jetlag!) is that, since the Independent Games Festival deadline is at the beginning of November and there’s lots of work to do on that, I won’t be traveling quite so much, leading up to GDC 2010. Until next time…

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Still a little jetlagged from our trip to Cologne, Germany to GDC Europe, which was held ahead of the big GamesCom consumer event, and was a real blast for me and my colleagues (who organized GDCE!) in its first year.

Here’s our full Gamasutra coverage of the event — mainly done by me — and you’ll see some really neat lectures from Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux, Quantic Dream’s David Cage, and CCP’s Hilmar Petursson, whose announcement of the Dust 514 console MMO was one of the neatest surprises of the week.

Naturally, there’s a Flickr gallery of my Cologne visit which includes bits and pieces from GDC Europe, GamesCom, plus the rather delicious Chocolate Museum. Browse it at your own calorie-related risk.

Otherwise, we’re keeping on - Game Developer mag EIC Brandon Sheffield compiled an awesome ‘dirty coding tricks’ piece that we reprinted on Gamasutra this week to gigantic page views, so wanted to point that out. And just saw District 9 - man, what a great movie - and it’s time to wander off for dinner. After that, a full work week and then the GDC 2010 Advisory Board meeting in Napa - hoping to blog about that to give an idea of the behind-the-scenes effort. Hurrah!

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Well, it’s a busy (and also air conditioning-compatible!) summer down here in San Jose, and I haven’t been going full-bore on our various projects _all_ the time.

So I’ve been trying to break up work with a modicum of leisure - hence the attached picture from San Jose’s Obon Festival, a fun yearly local event in our little Japantown - which even has a ukelele store, nice. For further relaxation, me and Holly are off to Yosemite next weekend - should be fun.

Other than that, some random notes - since more and more people are using Twitter and Facebook to keep up with the news, we just added a Gamasutra Twitter feed (and a Gamasutra Jobs one) and fixed up the Gamasutra Facebook page with proper updates, hurrah.

After Yosemite, there’s a couple of weeks and then I get into a pretty unprecedented travel period, which includes GDC Europe and GamesCom in Cologne, Germany, then Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle (where I’m on a panel about indie games, I do believe), then GDC Austin, then… Japan, Australia, China?

We’ll see if I actually make it to all of those, or whether I short out from jetlag like a grinning loon. More soon…

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Time for a little update, then, and the most important thing that’s happened since my last post was the 2009 E3 Expo in Los Angeles, of course.

(Forgot to bring my camera, doh, but Vincent Diamante took the above picture, and has a great gallery on Flickr for those who want to check out visuals of the game industry’s big publisher-side showcase.)

Anyhow, the E3 week at the Los Angeles Convention Center (and the subsequent GDC Board Meeting in Century City) were both a lot of fun, but now it’s back to the grindstone!

We just announced that we’ll be doing an Indie Games Summit and an iPhone Game Summit at GDC Austin this September, and I’ve been grading submissions and dealing with invitations for those two events of recent - v.excited to see the indie/iPhone spirit get added to GDC Austin’s awesome existing focus.

Other than that, we’re still plugging along with all the awesome magazine, websites and events that we generally run, and we’re ramping up for an interesting announcement soon (hopefully!) about a new partnership. In the meantime, I’m off to the Great American Food And Music Fest this weekend, so if I turn up in a meat-related coma afterwards, don’t blame me!

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As we wander into May, we’re having fun and ramping things up for summer. Oh, and first, let’s mention the awesome Katamari Damacy thrift store painting mash-up we picked up on Etsy recently (see pic!) - thanks to loudxmouse’s painting Katamari-zation services for that!

What else is happening? Me and Holly wandered off to Sacramento the other week to do the tourist/relaxing thing. There’s some pics up on Flickr, of course, but we didn’t see Mr. Schwarzenegger - I think he retires to the OC at weekends. Oh, and it was blissfully rainy.

Otherwise, work is going great - our dynamite team on Gamasutra, including Leigh Alexander, Kris Graft, Chris Remo and Christian Nutt, are doing an amazing job of providing incisive news and article writing/procurement. I’m also really delighted that Eric Caoili, formerly a Gamasutra editor, is co-editing our alt.weblog GameSetWatch nowadays, really helping bulk it up with interesting and alternate game links. Back soon.

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