This week, I’m heading way across the Atlantic to Cannes, France, to attend the IDEF 2009 expo. I’ve never been, but I’ve been told it’s a pretty important business-to-business trade fair for the European market. And well, you know, it’s in Cannes — which is not exactly terrible place to have to visit! My travel schedule is fairly grueling — it’s pretty much go, go, go from the moment I step on the plane today, but I have no doubt it’s also going to be awesome experience, work-wise and personally, since I’ve never been to the south of France at all.

With luck, I’ll have the time and energy to be able to post some interesting updates, if not my personal Twitter feed or the Naughty Dog Twitter feed can help you live vicariously, especially the jet lagged parts.

See you on the beach!
(I’m cruel, aren’t I?)

Every following year I have found myself busier and busier at the conference and this year is no exception. Between work, attending sessions, having meetings and attending various get together events of varied sizes, scopes and importance, I’m going to be hard pressed to find a time to relax a little or even sleep. This is making the rest of this week look awesome and terrible simulatneously. But no matter what, it’s going to be a worthwhile experience for me and for everything I do these days, especially since I’ve joined Naughty Dog.

Keep an eye out on my Twitter or the Naughty dog Twitter to see what I’m up to at any given moment. In a slightly longer, and less immediate, format, you can check out this blog and NaughtyDog.com for updates throughout GDC09 as well.

If you’re at GDC, drop my a line through the many ways you can contact me and feel free to add me as a friend on myGDC if you’re on there.

I’ve taken the liberty of copying my schedule for the below… even though I have a couple of conflicts yet to be resolved, looks like it’s going to be quite the full week at the conference!

Hope to see some of you there. Hope I survive the week…

Photo courtesy of the Game Developers Conference

E3 2008 came and went pretty quickly this year for me. I had no activities scheduled for the show, so there wasn’t much of a reason to hang around the improved, “it’s new to you” LACC-centered E3 for me. One of the only work-related commitments was attending the Sony press conference at the Shrine Auditorium (video of the full press conference here). This was my first E3 press conference ever — I was not able to attend the Microsoft ones back when I was working on their products — so it definitely had an air of excitement and anticipation for me. Color me impressed at the degree of production that was involved.

After the press conference I headed back to the LACC to do a spot of work and run into former colleagues, journalists and friends for a couple hours. At the appointed time, I made my way over to King Taco on West Pico Boulevard to the PlayStation.blog reader meet-up. It was nice to see Jeff again — the last time was at the Sierra Spring Event back when I was working at Vivendi Games — and I brought some fancy Naughty Dog items in tow with me: a signed copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a “>signed promotional poster for the game and a few of our new t-shirts. It was awesome to see all the folks that turned out, including regular gamers, some community press (including PS3 Fanboy’s Andrew Yoon and Platform Nation’s Steven Artlip and even a couple people from Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog, among others) and even a few people from other developers and publishers. Alas, I didn’t bring my PSP to participate in the Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 tournament.

I will echo the thanks that Jeff gave on the PlayStation.blog and thank everyone that made it out. It was great the see the turnout and kind words about the studio I now work for and it’s catalog of work.

After that, it was off to dinner and then meeting up with Howard from PopCultureShock and some other buddies for the Activision press conference. Looks like the soon to be Activision Blizzard has a nice line-up as well, based on what they showed. Afterwards, I spent some time socializing with some people I hadn’t run into earlier at the Convention Center and got a good-natured pop quiz from Forbes.com Scott Morris about how it feels like to go from publisher to developer, among a few other items, probably much to the amusement of his co-worker Mary Jane Irwin. I had to quickly make my escape (just kidding) and despite wanting to go to bed, went to the Bethesda party at the Saddle Ranch Chop House on Sunset. I’m kind of glad I did, as it seemed everybody and anybody I would want to see (since I wasn’t at E3 proper this week) was there. Fun times.

Although that was technically my only day at E3, the activities outside of it continue a little bit. I had dinner last night with Flynn and David from GayGamer.net (always a pleasure) and Honey from EA POGO at a nice little Japanese place in Little Tokyo — my first time there since coming to Los Angeles.

Tonight, I’ll be at the Joystiq reader meet-up at Mahalo in Santa Monica (with some more stuff from Naughty Dog). Feel free to drop by if you can!

The Winter Music Conference is in town, as evidenced by many of the clubs mentioning the WMC in their marquee and by the folks I see walking around — I think. However, I’m here for work. The event I’m flew out to staff is one of the few official WMC events on Tuesday to kick off the conference. Ben, one of my colleagues has put together quite the event: Paul Oakenfold is playing with members of the Florida Classical Symphony and a three-piece band, featuring the soundtrack he did for our game, The Bourne Conspiarcy, while Cee Lo makes an appearance as a special guest. The entire thing is being streamed live on Yahoo! and you can get there from the Bourne Sessions web site.

If you happen to live in Florida, or near it, and want a guaranteed entrance to the show, enter Joystiq’s Joyswag giveaway for a chance to get in — note that entries close at 12:00 PM ET.

I’ll go into detail later — this one requires me to noodle it a bit more so I can really explain why it ended up being the most useful of the day for me. At the post-conference cocktail/networking social thing I got interviewed on camera on my thoughts on the first day. There is no doubt that footage is probably the most embarrassing thing ever and if they end up using any of it, my television career is over. Hopefully day two will be as useful and thought provoking.

Hopefully I’ll learn a few new things and the $50 I’m setting aside for gambling lasts the couple days I’m in town.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 – C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.

I didn’t get much time to walk around the Game Developers Conference expo halls on my last day in San Francisco before my flight took off that evening. However I did check out the games exhibited as part of the Independent Games Festival in the North Hall.

There were a few familiar sights, like Band of Bugs and Castle Crashers — both titles that are due out on Xbox Live Arcade in the future — and there were a bunch that I’ve never heard of, mostly because they were small indie studios or student entries. In the very last aisle of the booth space something caught my eye and I just had to try it even though I, quite certifiably, suck at rhythm or music games. Yes, it was Opera Slinger a one level game created by ten students at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. Even though I probably looked like the most shameful nerd sitting in front of the computer trying to sing while stay quiet enough to not draw attention, I got completely wrapped up in the game and I ended up talking about it to anybody who would listen for the full week afterwards. Those folks probably don’t like me anymore.

Still, go check it out. It’s only one level but it’s got a bunch of songs. They’re all classical music with rock opera lyrics all based on the game’s narrative and you’re judged on your ability to hit the right general notes for each song. Kind of like Karaoke Revolution meets rock opera with a plot… or something. Sure the core gameplay isn’t terribly original, but it’s wrapped up pretty nicely, has a good tongue in cheek feel to it and it’s even a free download!

Gamasutra published a string of articles covering the sessions in the PR for Games Conference held in San Francisco nearly two weeks ago. One of those sessions Gamasutra wrote about was a panel on blogging called “New Avenues for Reaching your Audience” and it was one that I would have liked to go see if I had time, since I talk to a lot of bloggers pretty often and obviously, in a way, I am one. This is more about blogging more in the professional sense anyhow.

The article is pretty good, as I think blogging and bloggers are still at a point where people don’t know what to think or do with them in some cases, which is something that the article goes into detail. I think the important point and key differentiator — and one of the reasons I do like them in addition to more traditional media — is that blogs serve both as news aggregators and original content generators all while having unique, opionated perspectives. As Chris Kholer points out near the end of the article, sometimes this, along with wanting to post things with as much celerity as possible, can backfire a little. Be sure to check the article out.