It was a busy week last week.  Beer and Pixels was in Club 77 for the first time, it was also the new merged ‘Beer and Pixels’ / ‘Bits and Pieces’ format.  Then on Thursday I spoke at a new arts space 107 Projects as part of Television is Dead by Bravo Child.

Beer and Pixels ran really smoothly at Club 77, the back door isn’t too hard to find, so hopefully that didn’t put too many people off but it was more than made up for by the fact we had a private space, the ability to control our own music, and power a plenty for those with games to show.

It was a good turn out too especially with regards to the number of test games brought along.  I think for the next one we’ll try to sort out an area for the testing to take place, just tweak the layout a bit.  This time a couple of card and paper games lost out by not have a space in the light so we might try to get a list of games in advance to make sure there’s spots for everyone.  Speaking of the lights it was also a bit dark, which makes sense in a club but just as everyone was leaving the main lights got turned on and seeing that we’re primarily a networking and testing event we were thinking we might just keep those light on all night next time.

I tried to run local game composer’s music over the PA for the event.  Well, I did play the music.  The problem lay in letting people know it was special.  I don’t want to crank it so people are forced to listen so that’s a problem I’ll need to think on.

I had a great time and I really hope we’re able to keep using Club 77 and grow the event.

 Television is dead was a set of talks followed by ice cream and live music with art and whatnot.  It was the first time I’ve been to 107 Projects and I was really impressed by the space.  It may even be suitable for the big event that I am trying to setup.  There was a quite a good crowd and I talked about music in videogames.  The night was focused on the future so I talked about the games I think pushed the boundaries and where I think we’re heading.  Mostly I was very positive though I did make some fairly dire predictions for the handhelds.

The other talks I saw were on whether videogames are a story telling medium, I won’t get into the details on this because I understand there will be an article published and my third hand account won’t do the idea and justice.  Suffice to say it was really interesting and informative, inspired me to setup yet more events and do some research.

There was a talk on 3d modelling and the future of the industry.  The stuff we were shown was mind boggling but mostly only possible for huge budget projects.  The last talk I saw was on the future of AI which was giving by an industry veteran who is also an aspiring stand up comic; needless to say it was both informative and hilarious.

All in all there’s so much going on in Sydney at the moment in arts and games.  It’s an exciting time to be working in the creative arts particularly with technology.

Now I guess I should get back to building the website.

Jack