Village Gamer

Vancouver – I will be honest – in the weeks leading up to GDC Canada, I had my reservations about what type of event it would be. I had heard that not many people would be attending and that there would be very little in the way of exhibit booths. I imagine that a large part was played by the current economy in keeping businesses and attendees away, but it didn’t take me very long once I had arrived at GDC Canada to feel that it was going to be a great event. Even though there wasn’t an abundance of exhibit booths, there was a good many people present – early estimates put the number at about double the attendance of 2008’s VIGS – the previous incarnation of GDC Canada.

The conference organizers – Think Services and Reboot Communications, along with their staff, volunteers and the Advisory Board are to be congratulated on a very good inaugural event. I feel that GDC Canada will continue to grow in the future, and I know that more than just a few of us are hoping to see more features added to next year’s conference – especially a Canadian version of the GDC Game Awards.

Overall, I think that Vancouver Digital Week has been thus far a great success. Today we will be dropping in on Digital Kung Fu which is taking place at the Great Northern Way Campus, followed by the Wired Woman seminar about computer forensics. I have loads of notes and photos to post from GDC and all of the accompanying events, but unfortunately it looks like I won’t have the time to do them all justice until tomorrow – but that just means you have more new and informative content from Village Gamer to look forward to.

I do want to send a shout-out to one of our regular readers whom I had the pleasure of meeting at GDC, so “Hi!” to Ryan Arndt from Certain Sound – I hope you had a great time at GDC Canada, and thank you for letting me know that you find our site to be a useful source of information.