DiGRA Conference
This past Saturday, I helped my buddy Brian with the drop in video game event of the DiGRA conference. DiGRA stands for Digital Games Research Association, a non-profit, international association dedicated to the study of digital games. The conference was held at Renaissance Hotel in downtown Vancouver. There were gamers, programmers, and researchers from all over the world. Brian conned me into volunteering for the event. I'm kidding, he asked me to help out and me being a video game nut with no girlfriend was totally on board. We had no sponsorship with Electronic Arts so it was quite the task for Brian to coordinate all the gaming units. He had to run around to different Rogers Video stores to rent the XBoxes, Playstation 2, and Gamecube which was quite an ordeal. Apparently, the Rogers staff didn't know what they're doing.
In the morning of the conference, the setup portion was basically organized chaos. We were running around trying to setup a room in one hour with projectors, TV's, booths, and game machines. We had so many wires it was crazy how it all connected. We had set up four projectors and four Xboxes for the Halo 2 tournament. The room looked awesome when it was finally setup. We had a Pacman arcade machine that drew quite a crowd, but it didn't work for some reason. One of the busiest booths was the Playstation 2 video karaoke. Brian and I were so surprised how popular it was. You could hear a lot of women singing all afternoon.
The Halo 2 tournament turned out quite well. At first we were going to have teams, but it was impossible to coordinate as we didn't have enough players. We just had deathmatches which means whoever gets the most kills advances. The top two would advance to the next round. We had four rounds and the finals had eight people participating. I was one of them. I had only played it one other time with Tom, but I enjoy first person shooters so I caught on pretty quick. The top four winners won an iPod shuffle. I almost won an iPod as I hovered around 4th place during the game, but ended up in 6th place. Oh well I enjoyed the competition and was quite pleased with 6th place.
At the end, Brian and I, felt so wiped. It felt like we were there for 24 hours. We went with another volunteer and friend of Brian's, Mark, and Brian's wife, Vanessa, to a Chinese restaurant in Port Coquitlam. Brian was falling asleep as we ate. It was funny.
Peace.
In the morning of the conference, the setup portion was basically organized chaos. We were running around trying to setup a room in one hour with projectors, TV's, booths, and game machines. We had so many wires it was crazy how it all connected. We had set up four projectors and four Xboxes for the Halo 2 tournament. The room looked awesome when it was finally setup. We had a Pacman arcade machine that drew quite a crowd, but it didn't work for some reason. One of the busiest booths was the Playstation 2 video karaoke. Brian and I were so surprised how popular it was. You could hear a lot of women singing all afternoon.
The Halo 2 tournament turned out quite well. At first we were going to have teams, but it was impossible to coordinate as we didn't have enough players. We just had deathmatches which means whoever gets the most kills advances. The top two would advance to the next round. We had four rounds and the finals had eight people participating. I was one of them. I had only played it one other time with Tom, but I enjoy first person shooters so I caught on pretty quick. The top four winners won an iPod shuffle. I almost won an iPod as I hovered around 4th place during the game, but ended up in 6th place. Oh well I enjoyed the competition and was quite pleased with 6th place.
At the end, Brian and I, felt so wiped. It felt like we were there for 24 hours. We went with another volunteer and friend of Brian's, Mark, and Brian's wife, Vanessa, to a Chinese restaurant in Port Coquitlam. Brian was falling asleep as we ate. It was funny.
Peace.
posted by Arnold at 2:38 AM
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