Virtually and physically, the second generation of MDM’ers mixed, mingled, and got to work during our first full week of academic classes. After a week of orientation and team building, which included a stimulating workshop about collaboration, creativity, and teamwork from Glenn Entis, former Chief Visual and Technical Officer of Electronic Arts and Tom Wujec of Autodesk, our instructors did not waste any time in assigning projects and introducing the class to the course work.

We are already busy working on projects for our Visual Story and Building Virtual Worlds classes.  In Visual Story we have been tasked with creating an interactive series of stories with multiple intersecting narrative lines.  And all this using still photographs as the primary narrative device. The class has quickly jumped on this first project. Teams were heard buzzing with ideas and concepts over the past few days.

In Building Virtual Worlds we got more acquainted with our virtual selves.  Using Second Life as our primary point of virtual interaction we flew and fumbled our way on to the GNWC virtual campus.  Our project in this case is to create a 3 minute machinima movie filmed in SecondLife.

The academic week culminated in a massive game of multi-player ping-pong. The challenge was to adapt traditional ping-pong to incorporate as many people as possible. We were divided into two groups and implemented some fast prototyping techniques we had learned in the workshop with Tom and Glenn. The groups quickly cycled through what seemed like good ideas on paper but didn’t work out so well in reality.  After 30 minutes we had to finalize our design and teach it to the other group and watch them play it. We played then analyzed our game designs; we then tried a time-tested version, which our instructor, Ian Verchere, had invented years back. As we played Ian’s version we developed our own adaptations and tweaks and experienced the natural evolution of the game’s design.  It was a fascinating ‘real world’ application of game design techniques and development strategies.

After our massive multi player ping-poing game, the day culminated with a social mixer co-sponsered by Women In Games International and Big Fish Games, a game development company that recently opened a studio in Vancouver. Students and professionals mixed and mingled with professionals from all corners of Vancouver digital media industry.

Friday not only brought respite from the first full week, but also the official speeches from the nominees to be the first student representative; the elected individual will represent the student body on the board level and provide two-way communication between the administration and students.  The election will take place next week, so stay tuned.