Play Expo 3.0

posted on

4 Apr 2010

Saturday^[1] marked the Play Expo, an event taking place in Whitewater Wisconsin where students and some Midwest Indies had yet another chance to show off all of their hard work from the year.

I had the pleasure of entering in four of my games into their 'Games for Fun' category as well as being able to show them to professional game developers. Some of the representatives were from RavenSoftware, Filament Games. Also appearing was Cory Barlog^[2], who is now co-directing the upcoming Mad Max video game. The Play Expo site probably sums up his previous works much better than I could:

"In his 7 years in the industry he has worked on several titles across multiple platforms eventually landing at Sony Computer Entertainment Santa Monica Studios working as the Animation Director on God of War for PS2. He went on to write and direct God of War II (PS2) and act as Creative Director for God of War Chains of Olympus (PSP)."
-Play Expo Website (retrieved 4-4-2010)

The Play Expo was much better than I had anticipated. My 'collective works' entered into the expo won the 'Game for Fun' category. Winners of the event were invited to Bertozzi's house to enjoy dinner with her and the judges, and it was a great time! There were several discussions on what the future of games held, as well as convincing your audience that the game you've worked so hard on was worth the play. Some guy brought an iPad, sparking discussion on what kind of weird and cool things you could do with iPhones/Pads.

Also, on the Midwest Gaming Classic. I still plan on updating on the event with my experiences and such, but I got busy on starting work on a room exchange system for Visit 3. As the 'awards' season starts coming to a close, you can bet I'll be running out of things to talk about that are non-Visit 3 related. So, expect Midwest Gaming Classic stuff to fill the gaps.

[1]: for more context, "Saturday" was April 3rd, 2010 when this post was written.
[2]: as of 2020, Cory Barlog is actually probably most famous for being the design director of the rebooted title of the God of War series simply called "God of War" — which was acclaimed for recontexualizing its main character as actually having remorse or at least more complex feelings than he ever had in previous games.