On The Couch Seminar
Listening to: Tenth Avenue Freeze Out (Live) - Bruce Springsteen
The second of the ‘The New Cool’ seminars was held at Weltec on Saturday. Being a
lot more zen I was able to avoid a traffic ticket this time ’round. I think my own
experiences marred my enthusiasm for this seminar. Half of the speakers were from
computer games developers… and it’s not really an area that I find terribly ‘cool’,
just terribly hard work. This week it featured:
- David Read - First Floor Publishing
- Mark Albiston and Amy Bardsley - Sticky Pictures
- Maru Nihoniho - Metia Interactive
- Mario Wynands - Sidhe Interactive
The first presentations were from David Read and the Mark Albiston. Both of their
companies have been responsible for products that I love; Manual Magazine and ‘The
Living Room’ respectively. Manual magazine is
an incredibly readable skate/snow boarding magazine which seems to have (by and large)
lifted itself out of the puerile morass that is skateboarding literature. The
Living Room is, for me, probably the single best NZ arts programme I have ever
seen. The Living Room is a constant reminder that even though NZ can be a sleepy little
village it is also a source of unequalled creativity (I always feel much better about
living here after seeing an episode of The Living Room). The values that I price so
highly in each of these products are imbued in them by the directors of the companies…
and the importance of this transferal came out loud and clear from their presentations.
You lead a company from the top and the products of a company carry the values of
the leadership. I know this already, but it’s always good to have clear examples.
While I wasn’t as enthused by the products created by Nihoniho or Wynands they both
had some very useful things to say and lessons to pass on. From Nihoniho the value
of stubbornness matched with naivety can be high. She said that if she had known what
she knew now there is little chance that she would’ve been where she was today…
she saw value in being hungry and foolish. Wynands, who is a delightfully engaging
speaker, made a very, very important point; by and large the quality of his product
had little to do with the success of his company to capture development contracts…
it was all down to personal relationships.
What I found most interesting about both Metia and Sidhe was how the Sony PSP has
opened up opportunities for both of them. When I asked whether or not the PSP had
lowered the entry barrier for them… they both agreed that this was the case. Metia
have been able produce a prototype of their new game and Sidhe have been able to bring
some of their own IP to market. In both
cases this was done for considerably less than for the equivalent stages of development
for the current second generation consoles.
