Friday, March 11, 2011

Game events kick off PAX East

By Rodney H. Brown

The massive gaming conference PAX East, which starts today in Boston, got a couple of launch events Thursday – one official and one unofficial.

The unofficial starting gun was sounded by the third annual MIT Business in Gaming Conference that had grown so fast it had to be moved for the first time outside of MIT, landing this year at the Seaport Hotel on the South Boston waterfront. According to MIT BiG team member and Babson University MBA student  Gabriel Goldwasser (while it is branded as an MIT event, BiG includes students from Babson and Suffolk University), this year saw an approximately 30 percent jump over attendance from last year’s event.

“We’ve also grown in the depth of our speaker lineup. Last year was much more Massachusetts focused, and this year we have brought in some perspective from outside of Massachusetts to do some compare and contrasting and also get a wider view of the industry,” Goldwasser said.

Among those outside voices were Richard Bartle, professor of computer game design at the University of Essex in the UK; Eric Monacelli, product marketing manager at Capcom and Gordon Bellamy, executive director of the International Game Developers Association.

It was on a panel titled Mass Effect 2: The State of Gaming in Massachusetts that Bellamy – himself a Bay State native and Harvard College graduate – called out the Massachusetts chapter of the IGDA, an organization called Boston Post Mortem, as the most active chapter of the group in the world.

Ken Levine, founder of Irrational Games in Quincy, followed up on that point by noting that, while the size of the industry can’t touch a region like California, the passion of such devoted game industry employees means the relative quality of the game companies is top-notch.

“I think that, per capita, if you look at the good studios that have come out of Massachusetts, the quality level has been insane,” Levine said. “There have not been a lot of mediocre companies coming out of Massachusetts.”

Last night, the official kick-off to PAX was the Made in Mass Pre-PAX Party put on by MassTLC and Boston Post Mortem at Microsoft Corp.’s New England Research and Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge. A sold-out crowd of 1,200 showed up to celebrate the growth of the games industry in Massachusetts, according to MassTLC director of communities Christine Nolan.

In addition to game industry employees, from job seekers to Larry Hryb, director of programming for the Microsoft gaming network Xbox Live, better known by his XBox live gamertag of Major Nelson, the event also was attended by academics and politicians interested in the growing game space.