Visceral Games Montréal Party following the first day of MIGS

As my first day of the Montreal International Game Summit ends, I'm about to head back to downtown Montreal for the MIGS Party, courtesy of Visceral Games Montreal, formerly known as EA Montreal. This is my first attendance at MIGS and hopefully not the last. Coming out of the first day, I can already tell you that I'm very impressed with venue, the speakers and with the overall conference itself.

Since I need to leave for the event, I don't have time to tell you about the various sessions I attended earlier today, but I can tell you that Ed Fries' opening keynote surprised quite a few people, that GameSpy's Todd Northcutt sessions on leaderboards was very interesting, and that Funcom's CTO, Rui Manuel Casais, session on the Technical Challenges of Developing MMOGs was very interesting and full of real-life experiences. More on that later!

Now if you don't mind, this is where I'm heading tonight:

[Note to self: before you rush out the door, hit the Publish Post!]

Looking forward to the Montreal International Game Summit 2010

Besides Fanfest, I've never been to any other gaming convention. And though I do plan on one day attending E3, GDC, PAX East, and a few others on my bucket list,so far I haven't had the opportunity to attend one of those. But that is soon about to change, and it's a lot closer to home.

Actually it is home! Early this fall, on November 8th and 9th, I'll have the chance to attend MIGS 2010 - the Montreal International Game Summit. Over the years, this developers convention has grown into something quite important in the industry. With Montreal being a major game development hub, it's no wonder that the MIGS has grown to such importance.

So earlier last week, when they released their schedule, I was quite excited. See, despite the fact that I'm not a gaming developer, nor do I work in the video games industry, I've always been interested in going further than simply reading video games magazine or websites. Who knows, maybe one day I'll be part of it. For the time being, attending MIGS, and Fanfest 2011 for that matter, is plenty enough to satisfy my appetite. Anyways, let's get back to that schedule of mine!




So after perusing their program schedule, I started picking the sessions I was going to see. The following is the schedule for those 2 days, with session and the speakers name.

Monday, November 8th
11:15 Collective AI for Next Generation Gameplay (Jeff Orkin, PhD Candidate @ MIT Media Lab)
13:30 The Art of the Sell: Pitching Your Ideas (Chris Ferriera, Creative Director @ A2M)
14:45 Leaderboards Can Suck It: 7 Better Ideas for Visualizing Player Data for Fun & Profit (Todd Northcutt, General Manager @ GameSpy Technology)
16:00 Marketing and PR: The New Rules of the Game (Scott Steinberg, CEO & Author @ TechSavvy Global)
17:15 Positive Play, Real World Gains (David Edery @ Fuzbi, Ann DeMarle, Dante Anderson @ Seriosity, Genevieve Lord, Chris Crowell @ Woozworld, Michelle Hinn @ Pursuit of Happiness Foundation and Alex Hutchinson @ Ubisoft Montreal)
21:30 MIGS 2010 Party @ B-Side Bar

Tuesday, November 9th
11:15 Post-Mortem of Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions (Stephane Gravel & Martin Rhéaume @ Beenox)
13:30 Feature Animation Techniques vs. Gaming Animation Techniques: Bridging the Gap (Samantha Youssef, Artistic Director @ Studio Technique)
14:15 Cloud Gaming is the Near Future (Steven Thomas, Senior Software Engineer @ HaiVision Network Video)
16:00 Building Your Game Studio (Greg Boyd, Attorney @ Davis & Gilbert LLP)
17:15 New Kids On the Block: Studio Heads Tell All (Ken Schachter @ Trapdor, Miguel Caron @ Funcom, Jason Della Rocca @ Perimeter Partners, Martin Carrier @ WV Games Montreal, Yannick Roy @ Bioware)

Quite a busy two days, but so many great topics to cover and learn about. I'm excited!