GaIn Tampere team travelled last week to Malmö, Sweden to get a glance of game industry approaches to innovation and game development @ Nordic Game Conference 2009. At the conference site we continued our data collection and were able to record quite a few new interviews. We will continue conducting the interviews at GDC Europe in August, as well as contacting the rest of our interview candidates from GDC09 and Nordic Game 09 on the following weeks.

This years Nordic Game Conference was filled with very inspiring and relevant topics (despite the slight down tempo of recession which meant, for example, drink tickets instead of open bar at the Nordic Party). Our team tried to spread out to as many possible interesting presentations. Some of the most relevant ones for GaIn included:

  • “The Global Game Jam: Nordic Beginnings” (Led by Gorm Lai, Game Jam (DK))
  • “Pitching the Game”, in Art of the Deal panel series (Led by Jason Della Rocca)
  • “Innovation – Making the Leap of Faith” (Lars Gustavsson, DICE (SE))
  • “The Birth of No More Heroes” (Suda 51, Grasshopper (JP))
  • “Managing Multiple Development Teams” (Harald Riegler, Sproing (AT))
  • “It’s a Small World” (Ian Bowden, Rockstar Leeds (UK))
  • “Small Game – Big Challenge” (Per Juhlén & Simon Viklund, GRIN (SE))

This year Nordic Game Conference drew over 1100 participants from the nordic region and around the globe. Hopefully we will be able to return in 2010!

We will be covering some of these presentations in more details in the following posts.

At the end of our trip, we spent the whole Thursday at sunny Malmö, including a visit to Toy Exhibition, which is the largest private collection of toys in Sweden. Even though we cannot say that we saw much of innovation there, it was a good place to get nostalgic. Most of the collection pieces were from 80’s and 90’s.

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