@Elyaradine and yet your talks have always been well received and with tonnes of questions, especially from devs who want to branch out into tech art or art proper.
You should definitely give more talks if you're available and demo stuff at the back that people can quiz you about (off-topic but I'm still amazed by that shader that "pixelated" the objects behind it).
Your talks will also encourage other artists to attend and, hopefully, share their artwork and knowledge as well.
Yeah, to be honest, I often really want to show art. I sometimes book a talk in order to do it, but every time I do, I feel as if I'm actually taking time away from a design-talk, and that that's a bad thing, so whenever I do it it's more about the "process" than anything else. Like, hey, if you want to make game art, here's how I do it. It never really crossed my mind that I could showcase game art at the back of the room because of how it technically isn't a game. But at the same time, I'm usually not really showing it in order to get feedback (although I do get it anyway, and profit from it, but it's not my primary goal because I mainly look for art feedback from art communities), so much as to be around and available so that people who want to do game art have a face that they can talk to, and so that I can be on the lookout for anyone that "Arcade" may be keen to hire.
I don't know why I've felt as if, if it's not design, it's not really worth showing, but that's something I'd be happy to see changed.
You give arty talks? Yay! I've been trying to get @pomb to give a talk about the kind of awesome things he does for ages. Because, you know, if there's arty talk, more arty people will come and talk arty things and get involved in our industry. It's all good.
+1 to the art showcase. I'm no artist, but to extend the "art goggles" metaphor that @elyaradine likes to use, I'd really like to develop an "art monocle" for use in my own work.
You know what else counts as informative showcase AND talk-fodder? Postmortems. I adore postmortems. Even the failed projects are full of juicy anecdotes and learnings, and it doubles as showing off cool stuff you've done and getting feedback on what you *could* have done. It can apply to old comp entries, prototypes, and commercial releases alike. Worth considering, I feel.
You give arty talks? Yay! I've been trying to get @pomb to give a talk about the kind of awesome things he does for ages. Because, you know, if there's arty talk, more arty people will come and talk arty things and get involved in our industry. It's all good.
This. This is why I consider it relevant to this conversation to disagree that talks are unimportant and shouldn't be sacrificed for more playtest time. Or that someone's history of showing games is at all important. More playtest time on it's own is great, but more content that will attract wider interests that will hopefully present more wider content and so on is at least as great IMO.
Nonsense. Only my tastes are relevant, which are for post-modern formalist deconstructions of atari games. Don't try and make this about your thing, Matt.
+1000 for postmortems. Love them. I want to do one for System Crash when it's eventually done. *sobs into hands*
Take a well known (or not so well known) game and do a talk breaking down interesting elements of its design from your point of view, what worked and what didn't. Open it up to the floor, discuss alternate solutions to the design problems that might have worked better.
Artists can do the same thing for art, discuss the art design of a game you think did something interesting with its art.
Just an idea, dunno if anyone has already done that. Could be fun.
Along that line of thinking, still on the art deconstruction, a lot of scenes in games are very carefully laid out for performance, perspective etc. Would be interesting for an experienced artist to breakdown constructing a scene in detail, explain the choices made etc.
I would love some knowledgeable person to talk about level design with examples!
What worked well for me back in the day was to actively engage people to talk about something interesting and build a calendar for the year ahead. You can approach people who might not initially volunteer a talk and you can build excitement for future sessions because people knew what was coming.
@Bensonance I'm happy to step up if you need help preparing the sessions and doing MC duties. PM me if you're interested.
Not one of the MGSA talks that I've listened to was useless. Some were more interesting than others but all were awesome. The ones I remember most were when people came up and talked about their personal journeys - breaking into the European game dev scene, or starting with a dream and the steps taken to make that a reality.
There's just something about physically listening to those that doesnt carry across when watching a youtube video. Plus I'm more interested in what my fellow South African's have to say because it's more relevant to my own situation rather than an overseas developer who may have a different set of circumstances.
@Elyaradine I dont know why you think your talks werent good enough, they were awesome. Even when you just showed us that GDC Vault video of Diablo 3's weapon effects, that was extremely interesting - It may even influence me to get Vault access one of these days.
@Nitrogen: Yes, the most important thing about the talks is that they're South African talks, by people you can go talk to afterwards. It's community building. Just like the important thing about showing games and stuff is that it's local people showing things they've made, for the same reasons.
@mattbenic: I didn't say eliminate talks entirely. Just that the important thing about meetups is getting people out of their shells and communicating, talks are okay at pulling people to a location, but showing things in a friendlier setting is much better at fostering communication. My point was don't sacrifice showing things for the sake of having more talks, especially when it seems like the meetups were struggling to FIND talks.
@garethf: Do you bring System Crash to the meetups? It seems like an easy win in the showing things department.
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Can I just ask that this discussion doesn't turn into people saying "It would be nice if someone else did a talk on X or Y"? Yes, it would be nice. But posting stuff to say what you'd like other people to do isn't really providing solutions. Rather post and say "Yeah, I'll bring my in-progress stuff to every meetup" or "I'll share my vault access and let people vote if they want to see a video in the community thread". @Bensonance was asking people to step up, I think that's worth repeating.
The point's well-taken, but I think it's good to know what people want, so we know HOW we can step up and contribute. I, for one, have taken the rebuke over not showing my stuff off to heart, and I will bring my WIP along more often. I'm also actively looking through my old projects for interesting postmortem material, since that seemed to be a popular suggestion.
@garethf: Do you bring System Crash to the meetups? It seems like an easy win in the showing things department.
Yes, I gave about an hour's talk on it when I was up in Joburg, seemed fairly well received. Next time I'm up and it coincides with a meetup, I would love to do a more in depth session. A lot has changed in a year, and I've learned a lot of lessons. And it was fun.
Doing something in Durban would be ideal, but I don't have the time to drive meetups at the moment so someone else will have to organize. I'd be happy to pitch up and talk.
@garethf: Doh, I forgot you're not in JHB. My bad! I guess I just assume that anyone that posts regularly that I don't see in CT is in "the other place".
Yeah I realize that :) Just to cut back on them for more playtest time, and I disagree. I think talks can be at least equally good at getting people talking to each other. If there are no good talks available, fine that's a no-brainer. But to prefer playtesting over talks as a general approach I personally disagree with.
Yeah I realize that :) Just to cut back on them for more playtest time, and I disagree. I think talks can be at least equally good at getting people talking to each other. If there are no good talks available, fine that's a no-brainer. But to prefer playtesting over talks as a general approach I personally disagree with.
Yes. Because people do so much talking to each other during talks, right?
This thread is full of how people leave after the meetup is over. If it's all talks, how is any communication supposed to get done? At least creating space in the schedule for showing stuff off in an informal way allows people to talk to each other on not just a one to many scale.
I honestly don't understand how you can argue that there shouldn't be more emphasis placed on showcasing things at meetups. What's your solution to the problem identified in this thread then? Ignore it?
If it's all talks, how is any communication supposed to get done?
That's twice that you've tried to make this point now, but I don't think there has been single argument for the case of "all talks, no games" in this thread?
The problem here is you're solving the wrong problem. The problem is people get hungry and leave. That's going to happen whether you talk for half an hour, 3 hours or not at all. It's dinner time, after all.
I don't know about the CT meetups, but at the JHB ones each talk is followed by an opportunity to Q&A. Some really great discussion happens then. There's often a break between the main talks block and the gameplay time, and a ton of conversation happens around the topics of the talks then. I've seen how talks give the younger guys something concrete to come and talk to the speakers about, people the wouldn't otherwise interact with.
I'm not saying showcasing things isn't great, I'm saying they're both great and each has their own value. I want to have my cake and eat it. I think the solution is one Ben already suggested-to not have the pizza session at a different venue to lure people away from the play session. It adds far less than either the talks or the showcasing.
I actually think @GarethF's second suggestion about those bringing stuff they want tested to pitch in for pizza is inspired. It's low cost, solves the problem of being downright famished by the end of the meetups, and offers an incentive for more people to try each game (for pizza variety!)
If it's all talks, how is any communication supposed to get done?
That's twice that you've tried to make this point now, but I don't think there has been single argument for the case of "all talks, no games" in this thread?
I actually think the problem with the JHB meetups is their framing/intent. They're essentially framed as being about sharing knowledge in the form of talks and then just socialising with everyone. Sure the focused feedback slots are there, but you really need a game that's reached a certain point to benefit from a slot, as well as not waste everyone's time. Frankly, I feel little pressure to (subconsciously or whatever) to get a game ready to show at the meetup, because the meetups aren't framed to operate that way.
Which is why I'm talking about things to do to change the framing of the meetups to not be overpoweringly about talks. It's actually interesting how much pushback there is against doing that, no wonder the meetups are mostly about talks.
The problem here is you're solving the wrong problem. The problem is people get hungry and leave. That's going to happen whether you talk for half an hour, 3 hours or not at all. It's dinner time, after all.
Bring. Pizza.
I'd agree with you, except that people get hungry in CT too. We have the same constraints around timing and yet the meetups behave quite differently... Unless people simply get massively hungrier up north, I would suggest that the ways that CT addressed this problem might not be so quickly dismissed.
On a side note, I don't think it's fair to people that want to show stuff to pay for pizza. That just puts another barrier in the way of more people bringing things to meetups to show, which is the opposite of encouraging that.
Yes, if I'm running a special focus test of a game and I want people to come to a place to playtest it for me, I'll buy everyone pizza/drinks/whatever. But asking other people to fuel the meetup's food requirements as a bargain for something that should be happening at meetups anyway doesn't sit well with me.
Wow, one plane ride and a day of being super sick in bed and this happens!
So being the JHB meet dinosaur in residence (I've been going to the meets since 2010, and this is the second time I've missed one since I started going.) So I could make a very long post about the cultural evolution of the JHB scene, and how the current meetup situation is a reflection of that. But I think I'd be lucky if 3 people read that.
From what I gathered that isn't off the rails bashing people: there are 3 major things going on.
1. The desire to focus on playtesting, and a lack of content generation or representation. 2. The purpose and usefulness of talks and presentations at the meetup, and their quality. 3. A dichotomy of wanting to socialize and play more games.
Tangentially related is the notion of 'Why are we not seeing games shown multiple times.' And seeing my game is one of the things called out there I think it's a good place to start.
Why we haven't shown zX in the past couple of months? Well in short the open floor of the community is pretty crap feedback. It's normally has one or two good points at the start and then devolves into people just trying to talk over each other so that they can seem clever and score ego points. I normally avoid giving feedback during an open floor and prefer to approach the creator after the meetup and give feedback one on one where it's I feel that they will better understand what I am trying to convey.
I believe I've already entered into the first point with the "we suck at giving good feedback."
As far as talks go: I really used to love talks, but these days I dread them. When people plan to give a talk I feel like they do a bare minimum of research into a topic and them just do a basic presentation and then just say 'but we had a good discussion!' which is a total cop-out. In general the talks are super boring, or at least I find them so, but hey I'm a fucking dinosaur maybe the kids who use SnapChat and watch UTube instead of reading Rock Paper Shotgun find them interesting?
Personally I have some cool stuff that I'd like to do talks on: like hacking GM and writing my own tools for it. But not sure if the community would like an engine specific programmer talk. Maybe the other dinosaurs might. There is definitely a potential of doing interesting talks, but that takes effort. And yeah I'll totally calling myself out here of not putting that effort in.
And on the point of socializing vs playtesting. Sometimes I'm out during the day running around and organizing stuff. So only had breakfast, and yeah MS gives us food, but it used to be just some snacks, so after the meet was done we were REALLY fucking hungry.
Also a large part of the meetup is being able to socialize with other devs and have interesting discussions. And like Ben said. There is no benefit for me going to the meeting for the meeting itself. I'm there because my house is pretty close (by JHB standards) and I like hanging out with a bunch of devs. If you told me that the meet was just a giant social now I'd be pretty happy with that.
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So that leave me with two things:
1: Do we need a playtest day/evening? 2: How should we change the meetups?
1: A monthly playtest day would be good. Wits is kinda far out, especially if you considering that the JHB meets involves people from PTA. And more opportunity for devs to meet gather and do stuff is a good thing.
I'm not sure how I feel about it being on a weekend. I generally try and do stuff on my weekends that isn't game dev since that's what I do most days, and I think it's important to try and get some balance and other kinds of culture and experiences in. Which means that I won't be able to come. Also being at Wits means that it would be a really great event to get students involved in things. And seeing as we seem to have a decreasing number of Wits students coming to the meetups I think it would be good to do something to show them that we are up to cool stuff and they should get involved. And I think ATM students are a much more important attribute of the community than hobbyists.
2: I think pre-vetting the talks, and demos would be a really good thing. Talks should be something that the community should be able to walk away from with the feeling like they gained something cool. So limiting it to one talk if there isn't something cool is probably a good thing.
I'm not really sure how good of an idea requesting people to bring pizza is. I mean getting it past MS security might be quite a pain in the ass. And also it will create a financial burden on people who want to show their games: which is utter shit!
And canning the social isn't really going to stop people from going off and getting food and chatting about stuff, and if there isn't a formal place to meet people might be left out when people just head off to a place they don't know about.
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As far as helping Ben out with the meetings. I'm more than up for it. I've run a couple of meets back in the day. This is kinda chicken and egg thing, but I would have been up for helping out earlier if asked, so @Bensonance PM me or something ;)
I don't know about the CT meetups, but at the JHB ones each talk is followed by an opportunity to Q&A. Some really great discussion happens then. There's often a break between the main talks block and the gameplay time, and a ton of conversation happens around the topics of the talks then. I've seen how talks give the younger guys something concrete to come and talk to the speakers about, people the wouldn't otherwise interact with.
Yes, Q&A can be awesome. It's not the kind of discussion that people have been wanting though:
Similarly - I find I have something that I'd like to add, but I have to play musical-arms-in-the-air / catch-the-presenters-eye for a good 15 minutes before I'm able to speak. Not that thats bad, it just seems an inefficient use of everyone's time, we're essentially single-threading the entire meetup, forcing everyone there to listen to a string of 1 on 1 conversations...
We should multi-thread the whole thing as there are many games and many people to play the games with. Asking everyone to pay attention to single conversations is not fun/productive/engaging.
Multi-threading playtesting is needed.
In CT we go straight from the talks into any focused feedback sessions that might have been booked. There's a little bit of susurrus if PCs need to be swapped, but real discussion (multi-threading) only happens once all the sessions are finished and people are setting up their games/playtesting/hanging out.
I'm not saying showcasing things isn't great, I'm saying they're both great and each has their own value. I want to have my cake and eat it. I think the solution is one Ben already suggested-to not have the pizza session at a different venue to lure people away from the play session. It adds far less than either the talks or the showcasing.
Okay then. Great... I also think that @Bensonance's suggested meetup structure is pretty good too, mostly because nixing the "move to next venue" frees up a lot of things. I'm really glad we didn't actually need to do the whole "You make everything about design" thing, because that wasn't exactly constructive.
I actually think @GarethF's second suggestion about those bringing stuff they want tested to pitch in for pizza is inspired. It's low cost, solves the problem of being downright famished by the end of the meetups, and offers an incentive for more people to try each game (for pizza variety!)
See my previous post as to why that's probably not a great idea.
In CT we go straight from the talks into any focused feedback sessions that might have been booked. There's a little bit of susurrus if PCs need to be swapped, but real discussion (multi-threading) only happens once all the sessions are finished and people are setting up their games/playtesting/hanging out.
I'm not following on the mult-threaded conversation. Do you have one game at a time shown on the big screen followed by feedback from the crowd, or do you have multiple games shown off on a number of machines at once and people have to do the rounds checking them out and feeding back?
Re paying for/contributing to pizzas, I really don't see how that's such a big barrier. If it really is then some other way of ensuring people don't have to choose between playtesting/contributing feedback and tending to empty stomachs is worth looking into.
If food is really such a big concern, why not just put in a communal Mr Delivery order at the start of the meetup and people pay for what they ordered up front?
Just wanna chime in on the food thing... I... personally always try to get to the meet early enough to take advantage of the amazing hospitality by the MS guys - the food that we get before the meetup is pretty damn good, and has always gotten better. Yes it's all finger snacks, but there's nothing stopping me from having enough to be good for dinner.
Now some people may not be able to make the meet earlier, I'll concede that, but I always did when I worked... And still do.
That group Mr Delivery pizza is a great idea, provided we can get the administration right. Mass procurement of food always leave a bunch of billing hassles, and it's never fair to lump the "Guys we're short" responsibility on the people who're more responsible than others.
So, bring cash, for what you want, ahead of time. Ain't no ATM in the MS offices. If we can do that, that'd be GREAT. AMAZING.
I'm not following on the mult-threaded conversation. Do you have one game at a time shown on the big screen followed by feedback from the crowd, or do you have multiple games shown off on a number of machines at once and people have to do the rounds checking them out and feeding back?
Those are two different things.
One game at a time on a big screen is focused feedback. People book a focused feedback slot (on the forum in the meetup thread) and then they get a few minutes to stand up and ask a specific question about their game. Someone else plays the game while they're talking. Then the whole community gives feedback on that question until the time is up, usually players switch a couple times...
Multiple games on multiple machines (or boardgames on multiple tables, or strange custom devices, or tablets, etc) is showcasing. This happens after talks + focused feedback are over. Everyone brings what they want to show, people go around playing things and talking and generally having a rad time. This is what this thread is about ensuring happens more.
In CT people actually set up their games and stuff to show when they arrive early too. When there's not actively a talk going on, people are showing things to each other.
Woah! This whole thread has spawned some wonderful thoughts and suggestions - thanks for contributing everyone. It all makes me very excited for the Joburg community going forward <3.
I think the Mr. Delivery idea is pretty great. We can have people write their orders and then just have them pay up front. We can also rotate who is doing the calling/cash gathering. That way we can have everyone stick around for food/socialising as well as focus on playtesting. (If we have good quality talks lined-up, we won't ever refuse them to ensure maximum playtesting time.)
I agree that we need to widen our focus to not be so intensely design orientated. We certainly shouldn't have talent like @Elyaradine thinking they're "taking time away from design" or whatever. Our first step is of course having more non-design orientated talks, but I think having something orientated around increasing showcasing of art/music would be cool too? Perhaps something like suggesting a Art/Music theme each meetup would work? So it's a prompt to make a piece of work over a month or so and then get feedback on it the following meetup? That way we can have artists/musicians/etc getting feedback on their work? Thoughts? (I'm not sure how effective it would be, but it's a start).
Finally, another thought about playtesting: we'll always have games that pop-up for playtesting, which is awesome, but maybe should we self-challenge ourself to committing (in a casual kind of way) to playtesting a certain game? That way we can challenge ourselves to get something playable and inspire others to get something playable too. Obviously certain things might stop us from actually getting the game ready in time, but having a goal like that might be a cool idea.
Thanks for all the offers to help out with MC'ing etc. I think if we're moving over to a little less content oriented meetup, I'll be okay :).
Personally, I don't see that we've consciously marginalised non-game design material... @Elyaradine's talks (there was the Shader one, another thing about Journey, and the one about his Riot stuff) were great, then Travis had a networking thing, and I'm sure there were a few more I can't remember.
Now, what's the "right proportion"? That I don't know, I don't know if it should come down to "percentage of representation" or "as long as everyone is represented sometimes" or "equal percentages all round"... Don't know. But if anyone has something they want to talk about, bring it up here! That's pretty perfect, right? There was that talk about multiplayer stuff, and that sounds super technical, but I saw some were interested?
Stuff like... Music/sound, production (oh I remember that the GameLogics guys and... was it Matt? did a few things on this, right?), marketing (sorely needed),
Instead of going through the logistical nightmare that organising Mr. Delivery for 40+ people will be, I think it would just make more sense to start the meet at 19h00 instead of 18h30.
That will give people more time to converse and take in foodstuffs prior to the talks and feedback sessions and be of a more sound mind doing so. Whether that is just grabbing a snack on offer at MS, or meeting up at 17h30 at Pizza Perfect or The Baron, that extra 30 minutes would help people to get organised and settled and in a better mindset before they are asked to contribute.
Right, on the same page with you then. Yeah we have both as well. I don't know that the focused feedback is particularly effective our side, perhaps those that actually received the feedback disagree. They seem to be particularly unfocused-basically just a showcase of something followed by a complete scattershot discussion of possible changes. Do you CT guys have any suggestions for making the feedback sessions as effective as possible?
In CT people actually set up their games and stuff to show when they arrive early too. When there's not actively a talk going on, people are showing things to each other.
Yeah I think as much prep as possible to save wasting actual playtime is important-same as vetting of builds beforehand.
I initially thought the Mr.D idea a good one, but I think @AngryMoose is right, that's a logistical nightmare waiting to happen. One shortchanging and it could get nasty. Later start may work, starting half an hour later to prevent people leaving 90 minutes earlier seems like a win :)
Right, on the same page with you then. Yeah we have both as well. I don't know that the focused feedback is particularly effective our side, perhaps those that actually received the feedback disagree. They seem to be particularly unfocused-basically just a showcase of something followed by a complete scattershot discussion of possible changes. Do you CT guys have any suggestions for making the feedback sessions as effective as possible?
Uh...
Yes. Suggestions were posted earlier in the thread as well as a link to @TheFuntastic's post about getting the most out of focused feedback sessions.
Most of the discussion here has been about focused feedback sessions not being as useful in JHB and using open showcasing during that time instead.
Comments
You should definitely give more talks if you're available and demo stuff at the back that people can quiz you about (off-topic but I'm still amazed by that shader that "pixelated" the objects behind it).
Your talks will also encourage other artists to attend and, hopefully, share their artwork and knowledge as well.
You know what else counts as informative showcase AND talk-fodder? Postmortems. I adore postmortems. Even the failed projects are full of juicy anecdotes and learnings, and it doubles as showing off cool stuff you've done and getting feedback on what you *could* have done. It can apply to old comp entries, prototypes, and commercial releases alike. Worth considering, I feel.
+1000 for postmortems. Love them. I want to do one for System Crash when it's eventually done. *sobs into hands*
Take a well known (or not so well known) game and do a talk breaking down interesting elements of its design from your point of view, what worked and what didn't. Open it up to the floor, discuss alternate solutions to the design problems that might have worked better.
Artists can do the same thing for art, discuss the art design of a game you think did something interesting with its art.
Just an idea, dunno if anyone has already done that. Could be fun.
What worked well for me back in the day was to actively engage people to talk about something interesting and build a calendar for the year ahead. You can approach people who might not initially volunteer a talk and you can build excitement for future sessions because people knew what was coming.
@Bensonance I'm happy to step up if you need help preparing the sessions and doing MC duties. PM me if you're interested.
There's just something about physically listening to those that doesnt carry across when watching a youtube video. Plus I'm more interested in what my fellow South African's have to say because it's more relevant to my own situation rather than an overseas developer who may have a different set of circumstances.
@Elyaradine I dont know why you think your talks werent good enough, they were awesome. Even when you just showed us that GDC Vault video of Diablo 3's weapon effects, that was extremely interesting - It may even influence me to get Vault access one of these days.
@mattbenic: I didn't say eliminate talks entirely. Just that the important thing about meetups is getting people out of their shells and communicating, talks are okay at pulling people to a location, but showing things in a friendlier setting is much better at fostering communication. My point was don't sacrifice showing things for the sake of having more talks, especially when it seems like the meetups were struggling to FIND talks.
@garethf: Do you bring System Crash to the meetups? It seems like an easy win in the showing things department.
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Can I just ask that this discussion doesn't turn into people saying "It would be nice if someone else did a talk on X or Y"? Yes, it would be nice. But posting stuff to say what you'd like other people to do isn't really providing solutions. Rather post and say "Yeah, I'll bring my in-progress stuff to every meetup" or "I'll share my vault access and let people vote if they want to see a video in the community thread". @Bensonance was asking people to step up, I think that's worth repeating.
Doing something in Durban would be ideal, but I don't have the time to drive meetups at the moment so someone else will have to organize. I'd be happy to pitch up and talk.
This thread is full of how people leave after the meetup is over. If it's all talks, how is any communication supposed to get done? At least creating space in the schedule for showing stuff off in an informal way allows people to talk to each other on not just a one to many scale.
I honestly don't understand how you can argue that there shouldn't be more emphasis placed on showcasing things at meetups. What's your solution to the problem identified in this thread then? Ignore it?
Bring. Pizza.
I'm not saying showcasing things isn't great, I'm saying they're both great and each has their own value. I want to have my cake and eat it. I think the solution is one Ben already suggested-to not have the pizza session at a different venue to lure people away from the play session. It adds far less than either the talks or the showcasing.
I actually think @GarethF's second suggestion about those bringing stuff they want tested to pitch in for pizza is inspired. It's low cost, solves the problem of being downright famished by the end of the meetups, and offers an incentive for more people to try each game (for pizza variety!)
On a side note, I don't think it's fair to people that want to show stuff to pay for pizza. That just puts another barrier in the way of more people bringing things to meetups to show, which is the opposite of encouraging that.
Yes, if I'm running a special focus test of a game and I want people to come to a place to playtest it for me, I'll buy everyone pizza/drinks/whatever. But asking other people to fuel the meetup's food requirements as a bargain for something that should be happening at meetups anyway doesn't sit well with me.
So being the JHB meet dinosaur in residence (I've been going to the meets since 2010, and this is the second time I've missed one since I started going.) So I could make a very long post about the cultural evolution of the JHB scene, and how the current meetup situation is a reflection of that. But I think I'd be lucky if 3 people read that.
From what I gathered that isn't off the rails bashing people: there are 3 major things going on.
1. The desire to focus on playtesting, and a lack of content generation or representation.
2. The purpose and usefulness of talks and presentations at the meetup, and their quality.
3. A dichotomy of wanting to socialize and play more games.
Tangentially related is the notion of 'Why are we not seeing games shown multiple times.' And seeing my game is one of the things called out there I think it's a good place to start.
Why we haven't shown zX in the past couple of months? Well in short the open floor of the community is pretty crap feedback. It's normally has one or two good points at the start and then devolves into people just trying to talk over each other so that they can seem clever and score ego points. I normally avoid giving feedback during an open floor and prefer to approach the creator after the meetup and give feedback one on one where it's I feel that they will better understand what I am trying to convey.
I believe I've already entered into the first point with the "we suck at giving good feedback."
As far as talks go: I really used to love talks, but these days I dread them. When people plan to give a talk I feel like they do a bare minimum of research into a topic and them just do a basic presentation and then just say 'but we had a good discussion!' which is a total cop-out. In general the talks are super boring, or at least I find them so, but hey I'm a fucking dinosaur maybe the kids who use SnapChat and watch UTube instead of reading Rock Paper Shotgun find them interesting?
Personally I have some cool stuff that I'd like to do talks on: like hacking GM and writing my own tools for it. But not sure if the community would like an engine specific programmer talk. Maybe the other dinosaurs might. There is definitely a potential of doing interesting talks, but that takes effort. And yeah I'll totally calling myself out here of not putting that effort in.
And on the point of socializing vs playtesting. Sometimes I'm out during the day running around and organizing stuff. So only had breakfast, and yeah MS gives us food, but it used to be just some snacks, so after the meet was done we were REALLY fucking hungry.
Also a large part of the meetup is being able to socialize with other devs and have interesting discussions. And like Ben said. There is no benefit for me going to the meeting for the meeting itself. I'm there because my house is pretty close (by JHB standards) and I like hanging out with a bunch of devs. If you told me that the meet was just a giant social now I'd be pretty happy with that.
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So that leave me with two things:
1: Do we need a playtest day/evening?
2: How should we change the meetups?
1: A monthly playtest day would be good. Wits is kinda far out, especially if you considering that the JHB meets involves people from PTA. And more opportunity for devs to meet gather and do stuff is a good thing.
I'm not sure how I feel about it being on a weekend. I generally try and do stuff on my weekends that isn't game dev since that's what I do most days, and I think it's important to try and get some balance and other kinds of culture and experiences in. Which means that I won't be able to come. Also being at Wits means that it would be a really great event to get students involved in things. And seeing as we seem to have a decreasing number of Wits students coming to the meetups I think it would be good to do something to show them that we are up to cool stuff and they should get involved. And I think ATM students are a much more important attribute of the community than hobbyists.
2: I think pre-vetting the talks, and demos would be a really good thing. Talks should be something that the community should be able to walk away from with the feeling like they gained something cool. So limiting it to one talk if there isn't something cool is probably a good thing.
I'm not really sure how good of an idea requesting people to bring pizza is. I mean getting it past MS security might be quite a pain in the ass. And also it will create a financial burden on people who want to show their games: which is utter shit!
And canning the social isn't really going to stop people from going off and getting food and chatting about stuff, and if there isn't a formal place to meet people might be left out when people just head off to a place they don't know about.
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As far as helping Ben out with the meetings. I'm more than up for it. I've run a couple of meets back in the day. This is kinda chicken and egg thing, but I would have been up for helping out earlier if asked, so @Bensonance PM me or something ;)
The problem is people leaving because they're hungry. So offer them an alternative to being hungry. Solve the problem.
If 30 people go and 20 stay, chat, playtest, discuss etc, that's a win.
Re paying for/contributing to pizzas, I really don't see how that's such a big barrier. If it really is then some other way of ensuring people don't have to choose between playtesting/contributing feedback and tending to empty stomachs is worth looking into.
Now some people may not be able to make the meet earlier, I'll concede that, but I always did when I worked... And still do.
That group Mr Delivery pizza is a great idea, provided we can get the administration right. Mass procurement of food always leave a bunch of billing hassles, and it's never fair to lump the "Guys we're short" responsibility on the people who're more responsible than others.
So, bring cash, for what you want, ahead of time. Ain't no ATM in the MS offices. If we can do that, that'd be GREAT. AMAZING.
One game at a time on a big screen is focused feedback. People book a focused feedback slot (on the forum in the meetup thread) and then they get a few minutes to stand up and ask a specific question about their game. Someone else plays the game while they're talking. Then the whole community gives feedback on that question until the time is up, usually players switch a couple times...
Multiple games on multiple machines (or boardgames on multiple tables, or strange custom devices, or tablets, etc) is showcasing. This happens after talks + focused feedback are over. Everyone brings what they want to show, people go around playing things and talking and generally having a rad time. This is what this thread is about ensuring happens more.
In CT people actually set up their games and stuff to show when they arrive early too. When there's not actively a talk going on, people are showing things to each other.
I think the Mr. Delivery idea is pretty great. We can have people write their orders and then just have them pay up front. We can also rotate who is doing the calling/cash gathering. That way we can have everyone stick around for food/socialising as well as focus on playtesting. (If we have good quality talks lined-up, we won't ever refuse them to ensure maximum playtesting time.)
I agree that we need to widen our focus to not be so intensely design orientated. We certainly shouldn't have talent like @Elyaradine thinking they're "taking time away from design" or whatever. Our first step is of course having more non-design orientated talks, but I think having something orientated around increasing showcasing of art/music would be cool too? Perhaps something like suggesting a Art/Music theme each meetup would work? So it's a prompt to make a piece of work over a month or so and then get feedback on it the following meetup? That way we can have artists/musicians/etc getting feedback on their work? Thoughts? (I'm not sure how effective it would be, but it's a start).
Finally, another thought about playtesting: we'll always have games that pop-up for playtesting, which is awesome, but maybe should we self-challenge ourself to committing (in a casual kind of way) to playtesting a certain game? That way we can challenge ourselves to get something playable and inspire others to get something playable too. Obviously certain things might stop us from actually getting the game ready in time, but having a goal like that might be a cool idea.
Thanks for all the offers to help out with MC'ing etc. I think if we're moving over to a little less content oriented meetup, I'll be okay :).
Now, what's the "right proportion"? That I don't know, I don't know if it should come down to "percentage of representation" or "as long as everyone is represented sometimes" or "equal percentages all round"... Don't know. But if anyone has something they want to talk about, bring it up here! That's pretty perfect, right? There was that talk about multiplayer stuff, and that sounds super technical, but I saw some were interested?
Stuff like...
Music/sound,
production (oh I remember that the GameLogics guys and... was it Matt? did a few things on this, right?),
marketing (sorely needed),
What else?
That will give people more time to converse and take in foodstuffs prior to the talks and feedback sessions and be of a more sound mind doing so. Whether that is just grabbing a snack on offer at MS, or meeting up at 17h30 at Pizza Perfect or The Baron, that extra 30 minutes would help people to get organised and settled and in a better mindset before they are asked to contribute.
I initially thought the Mr.D idea a good one, but I think @AngryMoose is right, that's a logistical nightmare waiting to happen. One shortchanging and it could get nasty. Later start may work, starting half an hour later to prevent people leaving 90 minutes earlier seems like a win :)
Yes. Suggestions were posted earlier in the thread as well as a link to @TheFuntastic's post about getting the most out of focused feedback sessions.
Most of the discussion here has been about focused feedback sessions not being as useful in JHB and using open showcasing during that time instead.