The ideas of virtual attendance, remote experience, and partial presence have been on my mind constantly at work — from building the autoshow RSS portals for fans to share the excitement of the autoshow experience, to connecting the five offices via persistant video connections to spread the buzz and enerfy from one office to the next, and finally to the “extreme experience development” portal I just finished in New York «internal link» to connect Detroit, Toronto, and NYC as we built our latest streaming flash video site.

What does it mean to share in an experience remotely? How do we deal with the hierarchy of present-ness — physically there all the time, physically there some of the time, remotely there all the time, remotely there some of the time? How do we balance communications at a table where not everyone has a [physical] seat?

An excerpt from yesterday’s International Game Developers association newsletter about attending the E3 conference electronically, muses on these same issues:

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0: A Word From Bob Bates
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Dear Members and friends,

I didn’t go to E3 this year.

I followed the event through blogs and newsite coverage and ­ oddly enough ­ I felt more in touch with what was going on than when I attend the show itself.

But it’s weird when most of your friends are gathered somewhere that you’re not. And even though E3 is more of a marketing and sales event than a developer gathering, and even though I’m grateful I missed the crowds and the bad food and the two-hour wait to get into the Nintendo booth, I still felt left out somehow.

I think it’s because, behind all the overblown hype, video walls, booth babes, billion dollar sales figures, movie tie-ins and celebrity appearances ­ behind it all stands the game developer. It really is our show, after all.

Happy gaming!

- Bob Bates
Chairperson, IGDA

1: E3 Follow-Up Stuff: Party pictures, blog post, etc.

The IGDA hosted our third annual “members only” party at E3. With so much of E3 focused on the media and retailers, we wanted to give actual game developers a chance to connect, chill out and have some fun. Close to 1200 members RSVP’d for the party, which was held on the Tuesday night at Hotel Figueroa. Pictures of the action are available online:

http://www.igda.org/events/rsvp_e3party_06.php

The IGDA’s executive director, Jason Della Rocca, has provided a brief trip. summary and personal stream of photos at his blog:
http://www.igda.org/blogs/realitypanic/archives/001474.html

Jason has also written up an article for the Escapist Magazine, covering. all of the “other stuff” that goes on during E3:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/46/12

jm3