Royal visitors

Her Royal Highness Victoria – Crown Princess of Sweden – and her husband Prince Daniel spent a day on Gotland today. Naturally they couldn’t ignore the presence of a certain unique and rather successfull game development education. 🙂

Victoria and Daniel recieved a live demonstration of our motion capture studio and met with several of our student entrepreneurs. Max Tiilikainen from Meow Entertainment, Marcus Petersson from Lucid Dreams and sisters Albertina and Pernilla Sparrhult from Digital Nature all showcased their work.

What happened to the GGA?

Gotland Game Awards has been re-fashioned as the Gotland Game Conference.

What has changed? The short story is that the amazingly extravagant awards ceremony of the past couple of years has been replaced with more meaningful content; lectures, discussion panels and industry collaborations. We’re modelling the event closer to the international Game Developers Conferences, rather than the Oscars. 😀 Our goal is to create a better space to learn, find inspiration, connect and network.

We still have a huge public exhibition of games and animations. We still bring in experts from all over the world to play, examine and give feedback to the students. We still have a great party planned for the last evening. But we’re also opening the exhibition floor to sponsors, partners and industry. We’re having jurors perform double duty – both spending quality time with our students and giving public talks and hosting discussion panels. The focus is no longer handing out awards but rather to talk, listen and learn.

Expect a more diverse jury than ever – more journalists, more publishers, more moving pictures people, more researchers and more diversity. It is still too early to start dropping names of all attending talent, the list is still very much in flux but we’re making good progress. The website is a timeline (scroll left to go back in time), publishing names and faces as we confirm speakers, exhibitors, partners and jurors.

Stay tuned and get in touch!

The Alumni Days 2010

The Alumni Days is such a great tradition at GAME. At the end of the winter semester we invite former students and industry contacts to share insights and inspiration with us. This year saw two days of events.

Some of our invited alumni provided talks on topics of their expertise such as “effective tweaking of gameplay variables” and detailing the role of an art director. But then they all ganged up and arranged a panel discussion – talking about life in the Swedish game industry!

Leo Sandberg talked about his business and how he made himself a professional illustrator. Our “permanent guest lecturer” Carsten Orthband shared his wealth of experience; fifteen years as an international white label developer and from creating and running two successful studios. Bonnie Ruberg flew all the way from the University of California at Berkely, to enlighten us further on the topic of (sexual) representation in games.

She had a great lecture custom made for us, followed by an insanely insightful Q&A with our students. She followed it all up with a workshop where student teams produced game concepts and -designs on order, requiring attention to issues of representation in narrative, character design, mechanics, marketing, public relations and much more. Superb!

Our local incubator Science Park Gotland helped us complete the friday with their evening gathering exploring modern collaborative company structures. All in all it has been a great couple of days and we’d like to thank all our alumni, friends and guest lectures for taking their time and graciously helping out!

Invited alumni for 2010:
  • Staffan Persson (Avalanche, Lionhead, Avalanche)
  • Niklas Norin (Game Design, Avalanche),
  • Mats Andersson (Game Design, Avalanche),
  • Tobias Lundmark (Quality Assurance, Starbreeze),
  • Johannes Wadin (Level Design, Avalanche, Lionhead, Tapeduck)
  • David Hammarström (Art Director, B-Reel)
  • Mikael Karlsson (Programmerare, IP Solutions)