As I was saying, if you came to Gamercamp, you would hear inspirational TED-like talks from thought leaders in the gamespace who are from around the world. We have hands-on workshops, because some people, depending on their level of expertise in games, have only played games and have wondered, “How do I make these things? I'd love to.” We give them workshops for that. We have people who are in mid-career and are wanting to upgrade their skills or just be with new people and share ideas, so we have workshops in addition to talks.
Finally, we have a game showcase. This year we showed 25 games from around the world, but we essentially focused on Canada and Toronto, because we really wanted people to get a chance to play these games. Hundreds and hundreds of games come out every year, and sometimes we don't know where those games come from, so we really wanted to give people a chance to see things that were created in their own backyard.
Gamercamp started as a grassroots thing. It did not start because we were trying to make money. Certainly we haven't lost money over the last four years, but we did it because it was a passion project. We knew that it was the right idea. It was the right place to be, Toronto, at the right time, in 2009, and it was the right sector for video games, because that was a time when video games were becoming more distributed, when anyone who could put up a game on the Apple iTunes store or the App Store could get it distributed to millions of people, to potential audiences around the world.
We were just very lucky to start during that time. Also, Toronto had never had a big triple-A studio to come to the support of the game developers who were there, so it was very exciting for the Toronto developers, who were in small teams, to be able to release small games that could have a much wider audience than they were used to, and you didn't need physical media anymore—you didn't need to put a disc into an Xbox or whatnot—to get your game played.
What we've tried to do with Gamercamp, then, considering, just as Brenda said, that the audience is getting broader, is try to be something like TIFF for games. As you know, if you want to see TIFF, you don't have to be part of the industry. You don't have to be a film buff. You don't need to have watched x number of hours of film a week. As long as you find anything interesting, you can go to TIFF. It's the same with Luminato and Nuit Blanche: you don't have to be someone who's an artist or have a very deep interest in art. As long as you're interested, you can go.
But for a lot of game events right now, you either have to be part of the industry or you have to be labelled a gamer. You have to self-identify as someone who plays a lot of games, and then you feel comfortable going. We want to change that, because games are broadening. As long as you have an interest in games, we want you to come to Gamercamp just the way that people do with TIFF or Nuit Blanche.
We are unlike anything that's out there right now because we do try to reach such a broad audience. That's mainly because nothing existed in Toronto, so we got to start from a blank slate, which is kind of a neat thing about Toronto. Because we had nothing in Toronto, we actually built everything from the ground up, and it meant that new ideas were happening there.
I want to talk a little bit about the ecosystem of what we have in Toronto, because I think it can be amplified on a national level. We have something called the Toronto Video Game Jam. The seventh one just happened. This year, 400 aspiring game developers, professional game developers, and hobbyists—people who just love games—crammed themselves into George Brown campus and, for 72 hours, they worked to make games. I usually go for a little bit, because by day three, people haven't showered, they're kind of tired, and they're all on caffeine, and I try not to be there at that point, but to see the games that come out is pretty amazing, because in 72 hours you can really get a sense of what people can do. Even though those games aren't sellable themselves, what happens is that those ideas can be the germ for sellable products in the future.
I'll give you an example from a studio in Toronto called CAPY. Actually, their game is in the magazine: it's called Super TIME Force. What they want to do is play with the idea of time: can you reverse time in a game? In video games, we're very used to the idea of having many lives. When you play Mario, you have 15 lives to get through it. They wanted to play with the idea of what would happen if you had to live all those lives at once, so while you're playing the game, every time you die, you rewind to the beginning of the level, and you play beside a version of yourself playing that level. Each time you die, the game actually becomes a bit easier, because you have many ghost versions of yourself fighting with you. It's kind of like an army of yourselves fighting this level....
I thought it was a really cool idea. The germ of it started at the Toronto Video Game Jam, and recently the game got picked up by Microsoft for the XBLA award at GDC, which is the largest event and one of the pivotal game events in the game world.
That's something that started out of Toronto just because 400 people decided to get into a room and work for 72 hours. It's really demonstrative of Toronto pulling itself up by its bootstraps and creating something that will have international impact. When you look at the global video game press, you see that with Super TIME Force they're, like, waiting with bated breath. They're drooling at every little thing that comes out of it. Who would have thought that this would have come out of this small thing, that this chain of impact could happen?
To echo the point that Brenda was making, it's small and medium enterprises that are driving Canadian-owned IP. Every dollar from Super TIME Force goes back into Canada. The previous game, Sword & Sworcery, which has been downloaded a million times, is Canadian IP, and that goes right back into Canada.
Even though a rich ecosystem, on a national level, requires both triple-A studios and smaller studios, we see that the money, if you invest in these small studios, goes right back to hiring more Canadians and having everything just.... I'm sorry, I don't even know the right words for it. You know, it's just Canada all the way through.
We're also getting this Canadian-built innovation, which is creating value for Canada. I think that's a really good thing.
The market right now is ready for Canadian games. Games are really being successful. I'll name some of them off for you. Although they might not mean anything to you, if you ever get a chance, if you have 15 minutes, download them. Give them a shot.
There's Sword & Sworcery, which is a very cool pixel-art game. It's very arty. That's been downloaded a million-plus times.
You can hear about the story of N+ in the magazine. They created it, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies on the Xbox platform. It was started by two people. Really, people say that this was the game that proved that downloadable small games could be profitable. That came out of Toronto. Most people don't even know that.
A game called Sound Shapes recently came out. It's one of the top sellers for the PlayStation Vita. Sony is very happy with that.
There is a game called Dyad, which started from Toronto. One person made it over four years' time. It's done extremely well.
I really wish I could just give you all the games to play. Sometimes you need to play them to really know what's so awesome about them. It's been nice doing this festival in Toronto for four years and to have this list of games to talk about. It does make me proud that this industry that I want to be in has all of this Canadian product coming from it.
In terms of support, it's good that games are out there, but we don't know that this trend will last forever. There can be a time when something is new and the city can hit, but if there isn't that sustained support, it won't grow and we might get out-competed by other cities. We are doing a great job in Toronto right now, but I would like to make sure that we don't get out-competed.
What does that mean? That means we need funding. We need funding for these studios so that they can hire more people and continue to grow at a pace that might be comparable to the States. They need leverage so that they can continue to build products. I know each studio has three or four games they're working on; the faster we can get those games out, the more competitive ground they can take up.
I think funding will also provide an infrastructure. As these companies grow, we need to find spaces for them to attach to so that they have somewhere to fit in.
The thing I see right now is that there are lots of small companies, but there's no cohesive vision among all of them. That's a little bit problematic, because that means if anything bad happens in the industry, they could fall apart from one another, and that would be very bad for the Canadian video game industry.
In terms of making this a national frame, we need to have a conversation about how to do this nationally. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Winnipeg, Halifax—how do they all come together to talk about where games need to go?
On a personal level, in terms of Gamercamp, it would be great to have funding so that we could compete against similar festivals in the U.S., such as IndieCade and PAX, and British festivals like GameCity, known as thought leaders. These are thought spaces where people are excited to see what happens next. We're building very hard at Gamercamp to be that, but you know, I've done that just by knocking on doors, asking for sponsors, and trying to get as many attendees to come as possible. Having that extra funding would make it better so that we could grow faster.
This year we cut into our profits so that we could fly in speakers from Austin, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal, and Prague because we knew those were the steps we had to take. Having some funding would allow us to grow faster and do even more of that so that if people knew the great stuff that was happening in Canada and got to meet all the Canadian developers, we were really hoping that having come to Toronto, they would go back to their own cities and talk about how exciting it is in Canada to be able to make games and have the ideas that are happening there.
Lastly, I just hope we get a chance to talk more about the cultural role of video games. We have the National Film Board and we talk a lot about the national conversation on where we want music or literature to go. I'm so glad this is happening, because it's forward thinking in terms of where we're going to have this national discussion for video games.
In 10 to 15 years, people will treat video games as a given, the way they treat music or film. No one says, “Oh, are you a televisioner? Oh, you really like those television shows. Oh, you're a booker?” No one says, “I'm a reader. I read 15 hours a day.” People aren't going to do that anymore with games. The hope is that gaming becomes an intrinsic part of our lives so that we don't have to do that, but you need a national framework so that people can talk about it that way without feeling that it goes into that stereotype of the teenage boy being the only one who's playing games.
I'm going to end with my favourite anecdote. My mom had never played video games before. She always told me that I was wasting my time. For Christmas, I bought her the Kinect system, and we had Dance Central, which is a game that has a motion sensor. There's an avatar in front of you, a computer character, and you dance along with it.
You could see her slowly move from the kitchen to our foyer to the couch, watching us, and soon she and my aunt had pushed us out of the way so that she could dance to Lady Gaga's “Poker Face”. Then after we said we wanted to play again, she went to the mirror to just practise the moves by herself, and I thought, “Holy crap, this is amazing.” We're branching out beyond what anyone would have thought. She'll never call herself a gamer, but that's where this is going, so I'm very happy.
I hope talking about my experiences was helpful. I'm so glad to be here.
Thanks.