Month: November 2005

I met Joe T. Velikovsky yesterday, a passionate game/story creator. He showed me his mobile comic, a sample is available at Mobster for free, which I really enjoyed. He’s playing with some nice geek/tech/philosophical areas. I took a look at his site, and found him to have a very accomplished career:

* award-winning professional screenwriter and director in the fields of Film, TV, Games and Digital Media;
* published Game Designer and writer, and a published short story author, and professional cartoonist;
* Creative Director and founder of A-Rage Pty Ltd, an augmented reality videogame development company.

He also is fully aware of, and has a stand on, the Narratology/Ludology debate:

`Games’ and `Story’ shouldn’t be mortal enemies. He’s made a career out of bringing them together, to live alongside, in peace and harmony.

And he likes bots! Yay!

Another talented individual that is working with both story and games in innovative ways. Great to see.

The Australian Game Developers Conference is happening on 1-3 December at Federation Square in Melbourne. Keynoters include: Ian Livingstone, Creative Director of Eidos; Dr. Ray Muzyka, Joint CEO and Co-Executive Producer at BioWare Corp; Rob Pardo, Vice President of Game Design, Blizzard Entertainment; Aaron Lieberman, Bungie Studios. There is also a conference and a School & Computer Games Summit. For those who cannot attend (which includes me) there are two cool ways to receive updates (other than blogs) : Control Freaks will give daily video updates during the event, and 3G subscribers (that is me!) can also get updates on their mobile — the first game event updates through a mobile.

I’ve been reading about WiMAX alot and receiving email notifications about the technology for a while. I’ve never really known what it is, just concepts around it: ‘connectivity’, ‘mobile’, ‘wireless’ and so on. C.J. Mathias sets a narrower understanding:

The idea of carrying one’s broadband connection around, perhaps over very large geographic areas, is more than powerful and compelling – we expect it to become the norm over the next decade.

So, WiMAX is a technology that will supply wireless broadband access for laptops and mobile phones etc in urban and rural areas, and then ultimately applications. It is not out yet, it is in-formation. The was recently a conference held on the technology: WiMAX World.
Here is a podcast of an interview with Eliot Weinman (CEO, Trendsmedia, Inc.) explaining ‘the technology, industry, players, research, rollouts and its future’. There is a report on WiMAX Business & Technology Strategies available via email too.