Since the Mobile Games Seminar in L.A. was cancelled, I spent my September travelling week in Seattle meeting interesting people. My host for the week was Alex Thayer from Microsoft Hardware and I had a chance to give a small speech to their team on Monday. Again, I was preaching about casual in games cultures and giving similar presentation as I did for the Nordic Game audience. Hardware team was eager to discuss about the issue and the presentation hour was rather pleasant for that reason. Later on that day I gave the same presentation to Microsoft Research (hosted by Daniel Pargman) and they recorded and streamed the speech. I hope that someone saw it online, since in the audience I had only two people. Well, the lecture was notified internally rather late, but still: I felt weird almost talking to myself. Later that week I had also brief discussion with Marc Smith from Microsoft Research.
Later that week I also had meeting in downtown with Big Fish Games dudes Nate Webb and Patrick Wylie. We had interesting talk about the casual, even though the lunch time was too short for deeper conversation. I am myself a big fan of Big Fish Games and I wish all the best for their team.
I had a meeting scheduled also with John Vechey from Popcap, but unfortunately I did not manage to get together with him due to changes in the schedule. Fortunately I had a really pleasant conversation and office tour at Microsoft Casual Games division by Kim Pallister who showed interest on my Nordic Game slides earlier this summer. Kim seemed to be well aware of the “casual” on that same perspective that we in GameSpace project and we ended up also sharing some memories of C64 games. He seemed to be very sharp guy. Ok, it seems this feeling is mutual.. 😉
Here are some pics of the meetings (mouseover for explanations):
AaKoo's Game Lab 