The 2003 conference was held at the Lotte Hotel in the Jamsil area of Seoul. The hotel is interesting in its own right. |
The hotel takes up a very large city block and includes a department store and an amusement park called Lotte World. This is the park's mascot. |
Part of the park is outdoors, jutting into a manmade lake. This is the view from an external hotel elevator near my room on the 23rd floor. |
Another part of the park is indoors, including rides and an ice skating rink, beneath the huge domed roof visible below my window. |
And down in the basement, above the subway station, is a fancy Grecian (or is it Roman) fountain. |
Here's a shot of the KGDC sign hanging in the hotel lobby. The conference took place up there on the 3rd floor.
My apologies for the picture quality. I stupidly forgot to take my "dica" (current Korean slang for "digital camera") on the trip, and had to make do with those cheap disposable cameras, which don't handle available-light situations as well as my dica does. |
Group shot of several of the conference speakers. Left to right: Steve Gray (EA), Erik Bethke (Taldren Korea), Thomas Lee (Megsquared), me, Skip McIlvaine (Microsoft), Young Hui (Gameup), Gi Uk Lee (Game Academy), and Andrew Jung (KGDA). |
Left - John Song works for the Korea Game Development & Promotion Institute (part of the Ministry of Culture & Tourism). He's the one who got me onto the speaker list and flew me over to Korea. Right - Andrew Jung is president of the KGDA. |
Left - Young Hui is CTO for Gameup China. Right - Yuko Okabe of Metrowerks, and Kiyoshi Shin of IGDA Tokyo chapter. Shin-san gave me a copy of his book, a postmortem of a samurai game project. |
Cool ice sculpture, huh?
Oh, I suppose I ought to say what my speech topic was. My talk was entitled "Striking the Balance," and examined the pros and cons of the two major game design philosophies (A - designing a game fully before starting to work on it, and B - designing as we go). You can download the Powerpoint file here. |
The last night of my stay in Seoul, I had a pleasant dinner outing with a group of game designers. Left to right: Taesun Yeom (Game Designer/Planner, Daum Communications), Earny Park (Game Designer, Gravity Software), me, Heung-Ki Kim (Game Designer, Daum Communications), Jee Eung Jung (Designer/Developer, Com2us). Several of the members of this group are into table games as well as electronic games - something that can be said of relatively few aspiring game designers in America (who seem to be interested exclusively in electronic games, sadly). The location: "Raw," a restaurant specializing in American style sushi. |
After hitting another place for a drink, the group said our goodbyes in the subway station, each to go in different directions. Heung-Ki Kim rode with me most of the way to my stop, and we had a nice chat on the train. |
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Special thanks to Taesun Yeom and John Song, without whom the Korea trip never would have happened!
Copyright 2003 Tom Sloper. All rights reserved.