Games Accelerators for the Arts, Not for Monetization

hello everybody my name is Tommy pom and that title of my talk is game accelerators for the arts not for monetization I had a person I didn't know come up to me yesterday and asked me if it was an ironic title which I assure you it's not he had a different picture of who I was publicly and what I would talk about I heard you could get into this session with an expo pass so I considered to have like a freemium model too for this talk to help out the poor organizers with their cash but I decided against it so I'm gonna read this slide it's a wall of text between 1962 and 1984 any world had a studio in New York called the factory there even vited

other artists musicians writers filmmakers to spend time working on their project side by side people like Bob Dylan Truman Capote Mick Jagger this was the same idea Oscar Berman had one in mind when he sat with Tommy Palmer one day in his office in stock on bringing 20 game developers together to spend a summer in the cabinet woods of Sweden it was written by Lewis Wang in an article in killscreen magazine and this presentation is about a nonprofit accelerator that I've been involved in in my spare time and it's been one of the most rewarding experience of my career I've divided this up in three parts now I'll tell you about the the startup of this process first the pictures are from the students themselves for most parts a few of them here happy cedar but two years when this came about I had already had quite a long career in game development and I've been

lucky enough to go to several fantastic event these pictures from Oulu in northern Finland where I spent four days work shopping with very talented game person a formal mental institution and I met some some of my now best friends there and I had some thoughts that this would be something really cool to do more often with with getting talented people together and I met Oscar and he showed me a PowerPoint on his idea of a summer camp for game developers and I I jumped on that and I said that's way too fun to not to do so we started working on it on weekends and evenings and we got young on board who worked full-time on the project as well we commissioned a graphic designer to make this picture very early on this was kind of the thing we had in mind as cabin out in the the

Swedish nature where you would work together with your with your friends and this was very helpful for us throughout the project one of the other things that came up very early I always felt that it's very important to have a good name for your for the things that you're working on even if its game engine or it's a company or or an idea that you're working on and we came together and discuss and we felt that one thing that we wanted to have is this Swedish sounding name that would sound very exotic to other make it easier for its uniqueness some icecream manufacturers have adopted the same thing without it actually being a Swedish word and I thought about that I was studying at the Royal Institute of Technology once upon a time and my teacher there made the first commercial video game in Sweden in 1978 and I went there back to him and I

explained about the project and asked if we could borrow that name and he asked his friends that was also helping him out doing this fantastic text-based adventure game and they loved the idea and we could use that names to gun as a throwback to that all game so the financial aspects of this is a core part of the presentation and we felt that traditional accelerators normally work a little bit like investors that they take a part of the company that people apply and come together as a team but there was several different problems with that one of the things was that many of the most of the game developers said we knew that was really talented in these didn't have a company and we wanted them to be able to come from the whole world not only Sweden obviously and we know nothing about corporate was outside Sweden and not very much about

Swedish corporate policies and so we wanted to get rid of that shackle and another thing was was the commitment this was a new project and we knew that the indie game developers didn't necessarily know very much about us and would be hesitant to give away something they might have been working on for a long time so it would be much easier if we didn't have that thing where we needed to have this long-term commitment also if you're an incubator and accelerator you need to focus a lot on the economy and even though we believe that that's an important part of making games it's not that much fun I rather not focus on that part with a lot of other interesting it talks about Malaysian and stuff but we didn't it's not what we wanted we felt that it will be really fantastic to really focus on the things that we truly enjoyed the joy of of game development and inspiration

of creating great ideas we also felt that it's it's very hard to predict what is a hit and what is not a hit and to have this much looser form where we just select some really cool people and projects would make it easier for us not to be reliant on that financial aspect so we had to come up with another way of financing this and Sweden has been fortunate of having some successes and and some people made money out of that so we gathered some of our successful friends in a fundraiser in Stockholm in in November 2014 and fundraiser is something that is unheard of in Sweden we only seen it in American movies so we did kind of did our best version of it and we told him about this project that was still very loose and people were really psyched

about it and just helping out so we got a my aura T of the money from just private sponsors from very successful and games companies another part of it is that we didn't have really a budget for any marketing so instead we we tried to utilize our personal brand and the the company brands and game brands to create buzz about this project so we would reach out and developers with here so they could apply and we had we spent a little bit of money on on PR efforts and we have very talented PR guru that I've been working with Poole and he helped us to create a fantastic amount of interest for for the project which was vital for people finding out and being able to apply in time one of the bigger challenges that we didn't really

realise we felt that it would be great if people could follow the concept from all around the world and in our naive thoughts we thought let's get the youtuber and be embedded there and they would love that and they get a lot of attention and have material to write about but turned out there wasn't at all that easy our networks is very strong in the game development community and we we asked the youtubers that we knew about the ones that were already successful felt that they didn't want to live in a forest and that would be hampering their work and we didn't get a lot of interest for this so this started to become a problem and one month before we still had a solution really until fortunately I was interviewed by this British video game reporter named Alicia Hodge and she had read about still gun she asked a lot about really interesting questions and she seemed generally psyched about the project so we asked her if he wanted to join Stu gun and

being embedded reporter therefore the entire stay and she said yes so that was fantastic and she helped out with filming and doing the scripts and even some of the editing so it was possible to follow still graham from the sidelines we had tried to have a rather a simple application process where people would just record a 90-second video of themselves and their their game concept and send it to us this is me Oscar Jana working through those videos and a short description of their game and trying to select which team we wanted we wanted a very diverse group of people from different backgrounds in different parts of the world and we felt that would be a very good source of inspiration and interest from from media and stuff this brings me to the second

part which is year 1 the night before the it started I think nobody could really sleep bringing 23 strangers into a cabin isolated cabin in the woods is you know you can imagine anything could happen but it turned out to be absolutely fine of course that 21st of July all the people mapped there and from different parts of the world and they stayed for for eight weeks living together and eating their food they're working so here it's an overview video of the location that we got in the end it's we much bigger than we had originally imagined that we would need but it turned out that this was perfect

size for for the 23 people so they had a separate room to sleep in and a separate house to work in and another place to eat sort of was really great and it's by a lake and rather isolated three hours outside Stockholm when it comes to the actual budget we spent about hundred and fifty K dollars on on the project we got my or two of the money from from individual sponsors we got some money from the region itself that wanted to have this project there and some money from the Swedish Swedish Innovation Fund sponsored by the government that's the nuova with a third of the cash we also very importantly got to borrow that entire location from the

Swedish traffic organization which was a huge help for the budget that's not actually in the budget so we spent more money on food instead than we would normally because they had just one caterer that we could use for food we discussed a lot on how the teams would keep their motivation going out into sunny place for the entire summer but it turned out that the team were able to themselves get very inspired by this pure chance of getting to work on their project undisturbed there was no regular office hours but every time I was there that people were working late into the night sand and were very focused on their tasks melters came up three times a week to meet with the teams one on one and there was a really great interest for we had more

mentors actually wanting to come up than we could accommodate in the end we had a presentation of all the concepts and games at technical museum in Stockholm where there was a lot of interest from the press we had articles from Wall Street Journal and a lot of big publications even Playboy wrote a piece on this yeah we had participant at different level which was a great thing so some of the teams were really experienced and had done it many times before other teams this was the first game that were work on here's some of the mentors that came up we had the inspiron stem from Mojang is one of the lead developers and designers on minecraft we have people from from international that flew over Paul Bragg L is a angel investor Paul Brady our PR guru in help the team with with strategies on getting

press and getting their stories about the game out there something that we felt is a core part of discovery for for your indie games to work professionally with that Steve and Jared from King was one of the more popular mentors who spoke to their teams about their creative process we also got we goo that the professor who who made the original student game when he was 12 he came up and talked about math and all algorithms great so the third part of this is that the second part of studium that we are doing this year so we've raised another round of financing to clear the second year and we have opened the application process and the first game that came out of still young released earlier and I want to show you the application that

Clint sent in to us when he applied and this is twins first first game he made a few tutorial games in unity before this he used to work as a visual artist in Hollywood before hi Steven my name is Clint sue and this is prism prism is a puzzle game for iPad about atomic matter by solving patterns and symbols on each prism the structure starts to unfold and you begin to discover the secrets that connect the entire universe short and sweet this is one of the typical project that I find extremely inspiring we have a single individual doing all the the

programming the game sign just scoping the project and he's also done the sound effects and music behind it so it's really like a one-man game Factory and released it for for iOS and it became one of the top 20 most downloaded paid apps pretty quickly you can see it in the expo floor is a huge made by unity promotion for for the game as well and the client is working and working on on taking it to other platforms as well as I said we opened a new application process it goes throughout the day M today under this month just to summarize some of the big challenges that we that we faced was finding the location we thought that we'd be very easy like Sweden s is a specially populated

country and it has a lot of great old houses in middle of nowhere and a lot of these are connected with with really strong fiber interrupt but we we were spending a lot of time searching for something that would fit us there was always something that didn't really fit the puzzle we're very happy we found it eventually the youtuber that I mentioned turned out to be much more difficult than we could possibly imagine and getting people to apply was something that was sincerely nerve-racking we had a application process last year and when there was still two weeks left there was very very few applicants and we had already made a big busts about this all in press and we were getting very nervous that we wouldn't be able to fill the 20 spaces as we saw a lot of them came in in the very end of the application process but we actually we got an advice to prolong it a little bit

and say that we would help with feedback if people applied early so made our self-confidence a little better it turned out to be a little bit tricky to get the mentors and journalists out there in the middle of nowhere the Swedish people who live nearby that was easier but but flying people in to stockholm which is rather far in itself and then taking a train out three hours is challenging but can't can be done and for the mentors that came there was they were extremely inspired by the teams and and super excited about coming out again next year so my final notes here I just wanted to say something I saw this great article and VentureBeat about the hotel startup ecosystem Silicon Valley was listed as the number one and Stockholm was listed as number two actually and they

explained how they put this together and said that the biggest contributing thing was that pay-it-forward culture mentality and they used a young Steve Jobs as was mentored by Intel CEO as a great example and I really like this with with game development in general there's a big community of helping each other out and not seeing each other as competitors very much and I definitely think that it's good for both consumers and developers in the end that we get we get better games so that's all for this presentation if you're interested in the project you can see links here there's also er now as the project manager for the first two gun is here today as well so you can talk to her if you I'll happily ask answer questions thank you very much [Applause]

hi hi my main question is how do you evaluate artistic success if it's an incubator for artistic creation that's a good question we do not really evaluate it I would say we are very much focused on those eight weeks where we're super happy to see when the game if the game comes out and then that's definitely an aspiration that we have that we want to select projects that we think can can are scoped so they can come out but other than that this the first very much from other incubators in that way that we we don't necessarily need to see your commercial success in order to be deeply to be happy we have been when we have a selected project we've been trying to be a little bit edgy and looked at taking

things that feels very innovative and different from maybe what traditional incubators or publishers would accept thank you thank you hi hi I have a question I was part of a program like this very similar last year and I you were saying that it was was like all the fundraiser culture fundraisers don't really happen over there and it seemed I mean obviously it was very successful I'm wondering about that like how did how did he get that to work and also just kind of how does this pay it forward culture work like all these people are probably not known for giving tons of money away without anything coming back is there convincing that has to be done I mean I don't want to say what's in it for them yeah but yeah what's in it for them is it like press or just because they've well I think it

was different from different people I definitely think that some are motivated by the chance of getting seen as a sponsor but many of them felt that they've been successful in games and that has been very inspiring for them so it's one of those things we had a lengthy discussion on the last fundraiser like what are the goals why why should we do this and why are we doing em I think it varies very much from from person to person i from me personally I'm I'm very I just liked the idea very much and I think it's a lot of fun to do something that is very different and doesn't necessarily need to be focused on financing and packaging and all these other things that comes into commercial game projects thank you

all right thank you very much I'll be around if you want to ask us more [Applause]