Back from GamesCom Germany

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Gotland Game Awards is GAMEs great finale of the academic year. During a couple of days – just before the summer holidays – our students get to exhibit their work publicly and to a jury from the entertainment industry. Students are given great feedback, opportunities to network with brilliant people and are awarded some 400 000 SEK worth of sponsored prices.

Whats more; the best projects are invited to come with us to the annual Games Developer Conference and GamesCom in Germany. With 245 000 visitors, 4 100 journalists and 458 exhibitors from 31 countries, it is the largest games trade fair in the world!

Matching the enormous momentum of GGA 2009, GAME flew almost 40 people (students and staff) the 3500km to Cologne to show off our games and education this year. Our troop was so big in fact that GAME occupied two booths at the convention: one in the Business Area where (only) industry people hang out and mingle. And another in hall 6 (the big one!) where we shared the floor with (among many others) Blizzard, Rockstar, Square Enix, Bethesda and Microsoft!

Four schools from other parts of Europe attended the convention, but none could compete with our massive presence: eight games in total, three arcades and two booths entirely built and manned by the students themselves. Check these pictures out!

Game Developers Conference Europe 2009

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking. The event comprises an expo, networking events and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.

From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

With three days of sessions that included keynotes David Cage (CEO of Quantic Dream), Klaas Kersting (CEO of Gameforge), Matias Myllyrinne (Managing Director of Remedy), Hilmar Petursson (CEO of CCP), and Cevat Yerli (CEO of Crytek), and a full line-up of more than 80 sessions, 130 speakers, and over 40 exhibitors and sponsors, GDC Europe has become the largest professionals-only game industry event in Europe.

Human Rights and Diversity in Serious Games

There is a series of public lectures hosted by GAME this autumn, for our course in Human Rights and Diversity in Serious Games. Every Friday – weeks 35 to 44 – we’ll invite interesting and amazingly experienced men and women, to discuss human rights and diversity in the context of modern interactive and ever more social technology.

All lectures are free and open to the public!

Dagens Nyheter – Swedens largest morning newspaper – published a short interview with Don Geyer (our program director) about the new course. It’s in Swedish only, but this automated translation gets the point across.

More information about each lecture will be published continuously under Guest Lectures; so make sure to subscribe to our feed!

Want to take the course? Apply at studera.nu!
The application date has been extended to 18th of September.

Pure Data – A Teacher-Teaching-Teachers Workshop


It might be summer and all the students are long gone; perhaps at the beach barbecuing and enjoying the so famously supreme weather of this island. But we the staffever the diligent and hard working people that we are – obviously stay on board to deal with the summer courses and preparing the autumn semester.

This week we had another superb reason to stay indoors, as Iwona had invited Marco Donnarumma to do a two-day Pure Data workshop with us. Pure Data (Pd) is a language for collaborative real-time graphical programming, with a special focus on hardware interactions and audio / video processing.

Pd is free, platform independent and fundamentally different from anything we’ve ever worked with before; and that includes Blender Gamekit (graphical programing ni Python) and Kismet (graphical UnrealScript). It’s a real-time language, which means that your program is running while you’re building it! And the syntax – the graphical representation of the language – is also your GUI.

Objects like “number”, “dsp”, “slider”, “colorspace”, “toggle” and “checkbox” are both instances used in the logic, and actual GUI-components that you can manipulate! The editor therefore has two modes: one for programming and one where you manipulate your program’s settings and inputs. But everything is running all the time, so the modes are mostly a convenience.

Platform independence was not a joke either; we were five Apple machines, two Ubuntu installs and a mix of Windows XP, Vista and 7 attending the workshop. It took 10 minutes for us all to install and have hardware accelerated rendering (OpenGL), high-precision audio and low-level access to webcams, microphones, network and practically any kind of input you could imagine.

Pd is an incredibly powerful tool, for the right set of problems. Though I’m not an artist like these people it has been extremely interesting and great fun to learn, and the experience left me marginally less envious of my summer-celebrating students. 😀