Just a quick heads-up that I will be presenting at Pecha Kucha Night in Tokyo this week. Specifically Wednesday night, 5/27/2009.
The topic of my presentation is “10 games in 10 hours”. I built 10 games in less than 10 hours to see if it could be done and to record what lessons I learned from this attempt at extreme prototyping. Admittedly, most of the games, if you can even call them that, are rubbish. One or two interesting ideas came out of it though and I did learn how some lessons on how to optimize prototyping speed from the experience.
Don’t know what the event is? I’ll let their site explain it:
What is Pecha Kucha Night?
Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.
I’ll post info about the games on G-Mixer after the presentation. Thanks go to Jean Snow for the alert of the speaking opportunity.
Good luck, man! I’ll be there to cheer you on or, if it goes really badly, pretend I have no idea who you are. ;)
Yeah, I have no idea how this presentation is going to go over in a room full of architects, photographers, and other non-game people.
I appreciate the support though. ;-)
Hopefully a Vimeo or YouTube video will appear so we can all watch your performance afterwards. I’m interested to see how the time limit works for improving everyone’s pressies (or not).
I think the popularity of the event is 99% due to the choice of format. I’ve been to the event once before and my experience was that:
1) If many presentations are interesting it’s good that they are short because you get to see a lot of material.
2) If one or more presentations are boring they are over quick enough that you don’t want to leave.
Understanding that people have varied tastes and that there is no specific topic at the event it is unlikely any one presentation will appeal to the entire audience. That’s not a big problem though because if you don’t like one presentation there is a good chance the next one in 6 minutes 40 seconds will be more interesting for you.
If the topics were more targeted a longer presentation format would work but it would result in many fewer attendees. The ability to meet people from so many varied fields is fun so its nice to have at least one event that uses a format like this.
The most memorable presentations from GDC this year, in terms of if you asked me to name some, were from Cactus Squid who just did everything via a Game Maker short, and the short talks given by indies about a specific topic e.g. “Your first time” turning sex into a game. Different and short definately seem to work best.