Points From The Road

So I'm sitting in the Chicago airport heading home from the Hollywood & Games summit (flight delayed, of course) and I thought I'd throw up a bunch of points floating around in my head over the last couple of days. In no particular order:

Clive Barker's keynote was extremely interesting. Almost surprisingly so, given that I had no clue what to expect. Some of his most important points have already been written up by Next-Gen, Gamasutra and Joystiq but there were three quotes he gave during his talk that I loved and wanted to note here:

"Let's take our imaginations back from the guys who want to sell it to us with a happy meal" -- in discussing how everyone needs a creative outlet and should allow themselves the freedom of creative exploration, even if its messy.

"Make your own laws or be a slave to another man's" -- A central theme to his talk was this idea that we (game developers) don't need to do things the 'old' way.

"We need to be able to dream with our eyes open" -- Explaining one of the reasons he likes and believes in videogames.

Also on the Clive note there was some talk of a series of books he's done that I'd never heard of called Abarat. I couldn't find a copy in my short time in L.A but the few people I talked to who had read books from the series raved about it so I'm adding it to my 'Must Read' list.

Segueing on the Book line I want to thank Kim for turning me on to 'Soon I will be Invincible". If you are any kind of Geek at all, you'll love it. I'm only a few chapters in but the characters are rich, the writing is sharp and the author clearly spent ages researching every single super-hero cliche out there, across all mediums, and finding ways to stitch them all together in a cohesive way that is smart, funny and genuinely cool! If, like me, you're halfway through a bunch of print books already and can't bear the thought of starting another I recommend the audiobook version (I subscribe to Audible).

As a final point I'd like to offer up a little posthumorous credit to Patrick Redding for giving me the excellent point I brought up at the conference re: videogame - vs - film production heirarchies. Thanks again Patrick.