There’s often a lot of things going on in my life, professional and otherwise. I really like being involved in a lot of things, which is no surprise to the people that know me really well, especially those who have seen me on the verge of insanity when attempting to do everything at once. I’ve fortunately been able to remain self aware enough lately to maintain a certain level of balance in my life while still getting up to the stuff I love to do. For example, I’ve managed to get some solid game design work done, speak at a few conventions, take care of my responsibilities with LevelUp – IGDA Victoria and still maintain a decent personal life. Mostly. But I don’t always think to take a moment to write about it. That’s right: I’m a bad blogger. I do tend to send the odd note to Facebook or Twitter or the like, so if you’re ever wondering what I’m up to on a regular basis, you could do worse than tune in to one of those. I do try to keep my portfolio and presentation pages up to date too, even if the blog looks like a barren wasteland.
One thing that I’d like to talk about is my recent PAX Prime 2014 Panel titled “You’re So Mature! Is Storytelling in Games Coming of Age?” It was a difficult subject to tackle, but fortunately my panellists were up for the challenge and I thank them for volunteering their time and brains. One of the cool things that came of it was that our panel was covered by journalist Derrik J Lang who wrote a very insightful article about it called “Game creators seek mature storytelling in games“. Most interestingly to me, he wrote it for the Associated Press, which means that it ended up getting picked up by various other media outlets throughout the world. I was able to watch as the story turned up on more and more media websites in North America such as the Calgary Herald, Fox Business, and Salon, and internationally as well from such diverse places as New Zealand, Taiwan and India. Not having personally encountered this before, as projects I’ve been involved with have not been covered by the traditional press, I found the process utterly fascinating. Hopefully I’ll get more opportunity to witness this again in the future.
Ironic Iconic Studios 