The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

If you’re in the Toronto area and have been thinking about getting into game development, whether for “stationary” devices like desktops, laptops and consoles or “mobile” devices such as tablets, slates and phones, you might want to go attend this weekend’s Board Game Jam, which takes place in Toronto this weekend.

Once the sole province of enthusiasts, game are very popular these days. Console sales are doing very well, the Kinect is selling extremely well, gamer culture has found its way into popular culture as evidenced by chiptunes and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and events like GamerCamp (which took place in Toronto in November) are attracting more than just the hardcore nerd crowd.

When people talk about games, the first thing that comes to mind is videogames. After all, they’re big business, and people are playing them everywhere – at home, at work (who hasn’t snuck in a quick round at the office?) and now, with mobile devices, whenever they’ve got some downtime. Videogames are great, but there’s more to gaming.

Board games are currently enjoying a renaissance. According to The Economist, board games sales in 2008 exceeded USD$800 million and have been growing 20% each year. Settlers of Catan, which was once for the Dungeons and Dragons crowd only, is now a hipster hobby, there’s a very healthy selection of board games at Toys ‘R’ Us and there are crowds at Toronto’s board game café, Snakes and Lattes. Just as videogames have their own special charms, so do board games – they may be made of plastic and cardboard instead of pixels and data, but in both, it’s the gameplay that makes or breaks them.

Gameplay is what Board Game Jam is all about, and since it’s about making board games rather than videogames, this gathering will make game design accessible to just about everyone. As the organizers say, “On a mechanical level, it’s simple arts and crafts.” The bigger point of Board Game Jam is to explore the gameplay aspects of game development. What makes a game fun? How do you balance challenge, playability, simplicity, complexity and sociability? Can you build a game by taking a classic and applying a little twist to it, or would you rather build something completely different?

If you’re thinking of building games for the PC, phone or Xbox, you could learn a lot at Board Game Jam. As the organizers put it:

Most of the time, we’re talking about videogames. Because videogames are awesome. But it’s easy to forget that the principles that underlie good game-making don’t necessarily involve realistic physics engines, or even good control schemes. Much of game design has to do with abstract rules and mechanics that don’t have anything to do with technology.

Here’s what’s happening at Board Game Jam:

• Saturday
  • Morning: A crash course in board game design
  • Afternoon and evening: Make a board game
• Sunday
  • Morning and afternoon: Finish those board games
  • Evening: Board game party – the public plays the games built at Board Game Jam!

(The full schedule for Board Game Jam is here.)

Board Game Jam takes place this Saturday and Sunday, January 29th and 30th at the George Brown School of Design, 230 Richmond Street East, Toronto. The early bird price is no longer available, but the “late bird” price is still a mere CAD$20. If you’d like to attend (I’ll be there, at least for the crash course in board game design, where I plan to take copious notes and blog them), you should register for the event at their EventBrite page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

“Violence escalates in Egypt, the Egyptian government cuts off the internet, and up next, a man shot in a Cairo  protest. But first, chocolate mousse!”

Photo by Kevin Steele. Click to see it on its Flickr page.

When Coffee and Code at Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar wound down late Wednesday afternoon, I took a perch at the bar by the big window facing Queen Street West. Kevin Steele, my friend and former coworker at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, my first job after graduating from Crazy Go Nuts University, was walking by and snapped the photo above. He then walked in and joined me for a coffee.

Photo by Kevin Steele. Click to see it on its Flickr page.

We struck up a conversation, during which time he took a number of photos of me, including the one above. Looking at me, it’s kind of hard to believe that two weeks prior, I was in the intensive care unit.

We hung out at the café until just before closing and then moseyed westward to Addis Ababa restaurant for some injera. We talked about a great number of things, from Jacques Tati films to Isaac Asimov to my adopted role model for my “Bachelor 2.0 lifestyle” (Tony Stark!) to the people I know who are planning on being frozen when they die.

One of the staff overhead our conversation about cryogenics. “Hey guys,” he said, “I don’t mean to butt in, but I couldn’t help hearing you talk about cryogenics. I want to be frozen and revived in the future!”

“Many are called, but few are frozen,” I quipped. I wish I could claim that line as my own, but that’s actually a slogan used by a number of cryogenics enthusiasts.

We talked with him for a couple of minutes about whether he’d actually like the future – after all, would a 14th century peasant dropped in the middle of downtown Toronto be able to cope? There was also the issue of how long a business would keep a freezer running, as well as whether future people would think we were worth defrosting (or worse still, if they’d keep us as pets).

At about ten o’clock, we decided that as interesting and wacky and all-over-the-map our conversation was, it was time to head home.

I’m looking forward to more evenings like that one.

Feel free to add a caption in the comments.

I held the first Coffee and Code of 2011 at a venue new to me: Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar, located in Toronto’s West Queen West neighbourhood (968 Queen Street West, to be precise). It’s a work-friendly café that also acts as the home base for its parent business, Cloud AdAgents, an advertising/marketing/communications/social media agency. Rochelle Latinsky, who works at Cloud, along with Managing Director Tamera Kremer, invited me to host a Coffee and Code at their café, and went so far as to lend me their downstairs meeting room. I’d like to thank them for the invitation and the opportunity.

The café, located on the ground floor, serves a variety of espresso machine drinks, from “plain old coffee: (a.k.a. Americano) to the cappucinos, mochas, lattes and the like, as well as teas and hot chocolate. Unlike many cafes, whose food offerings are limited to sweet snacks, they serve about a half dozen different types of sandwiches (including some veggie options) and soup and chili. As for their sweet snacks, they had a variety of muffins, scones and three or four different types of cookies. I ordered a tasty turkey and provolone sandwich made with ciabatta bread along with some roasted red pepper soup, and later on in the afternoon, I had one of their nutella-and-chocolate chip cookies – all were delicious.

It’s a bright, airy space, with glass walls facing south and west, which means lots of light in the afternoon. Most of the seating is at the three bars that ring the café, with the longest one facing the south glass wall, giving you a great view of the passers-by on Queen Street West. Conversely, they get a good view of you, and when I sat at that bar in the later part of the afternoon, there were two instances where a friend saw me at the bar and dropped in for a conversation.

You might think that a bar might be too narrow a surface to do work, but it was more than enough space to accommodate my 17” “Dellasaurus”, which is a bigger laptop than most. I walk around with an accordion on my back, so I have a warped idea of what constitutes a “portable” computer.

For the curious: the Dellasaurus – that’s the nickname we’ve given it at Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – is a Dell Precision M6500. It’s essentially a kick-ass server machine packed into a 17” laptop body. It has a quad-core Intel i7 chip, 16GB RAM, 1GB video RAM, mechanical and solid state hard drive, and it runs Visual Studio and rips DVDs simultaneously without skipping a beat. To borrow a line from my hero Ferris Bueller: “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

The bars are great for hanging out or working solo or in pairs. If you’re getting together with a couple more friends, there is a table in the corner:

This is a work-friendly café. While a handful of cafes have made it clear that they’d rather not have people using their establishments as workspaces (some in a friendly manner, others in more passive-aggressive ways), this place makes it clear in the “Free Agent” part of their name: they invite you to come in and get some work done. Most of the seats are within a power adapter cord’s reach of an outlet, and they offer free wifi. As they say in their page about the café, it’s “designed with the untethered class in mind”.

Whether you’re an indie coder going a little stir crazy in your home office or if you just need to get out of cubicle-land for a bit, you might want to give Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar a try. I’ve had many a good experience “café coding”, and Cloud has all the necessary ingredients to be a great place for that sort of thing. I expect that it’s going to be one of my regular go-to places when I’m not on the road and I need to get out of the home office.

In addition to the café, there’s also a meeting space downstairs that they rent out. The Cloud folks were kind enough to loan it to me for Coffee and Code to try out. It’s a nice space, with seating for about a dozen people, a good number of outlets and large wall-mounted screen with webcam. It’s perfect for offsite meetings or small seminars.

They even gave me a free pot of coffee and pitcher of icewater with cucumber slices in it:

Rent on this space works out to about $40 an hour, and they’ll throw in a $20 catering credit if you book it for 2 or more hours. I’m going to keep this place in mind; the rate’s pretty good, and I’ve got a number of ideas – such as a Windows Phone 7 development jam session –- where a space like this could come in handy. Perhaps it could be useful for your needs as well.

As for the Coffee and Code? This one got only a handful of visitors, but that’s okay – everyone who came had never been to a Coffee and Code before, and most were people whom I’d met for the first time, and as a result, I’ve got a couple of extra items on my “to do” list. I consider that a success.

Once again I’d like to thank Rochelle and Tamera for inviting me to Cloud and letting me have free roam of their space. I enjoyed my visit, and I will be back!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Don’t forget, there’s a Toronto Coffee and Code today at Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar (968 Queen Street West, at Givins Street, a block west of Shaw, a couple of blocks west of Trinity Bellwoods Park) from noon until 6 p.m.. Join me for lunch – they’ve got a great lunch selection – or a coffee break, or the afternoon!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Weird Al is living proof that it’s going to be up to the accordionists to save the world:

He’s right: the adjective form of the word is slow, but the word’s being used to modify a verb, so we want the adverb form: slowly.