Feature
24 Comments"[At E3 2012], people I’ve long admired asked, ‘How is the indie game development scene in Japan?’ I didn’t know what to tell them." -Yohei Kataoka, director of Tokyo Jungle
BitSummit Rising: Japan's Indie Ambassador
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"I really like people who are individuals, like mavericks," says James Mielke, a six-foot and change, bleached-blond ex-pat. "Japan does not reward that kind of behavior normally. It has a village mentality. Like when shit happens, people keep their shit together. They don't raid or loot Best Buy and they don't set cars on fire. All of these young people who are full of hope and promise, they just go into a salary man job. They end up being the guy who chain-smokes and drinks himself to death. Jumps on the subway because he can’t handle the pressure or jumps on the train tracks. It is really tough here for the average Japanese person."
Mielke is the organizer of BitSummit, a conference designed to galvanize Japan’s fragmented indie game community and introduce it to Western...
Human Angle
102 CommentsA day in the life of a working-class game hero.
Ciji is a Robot Jockey with Something to Prove
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Once upon a time, Ciji Thornton was a rock star.
Kind of. During the height of the Guitar Hero boom, Thornton made a name for herself as one of the hardest rockers of the plastic guitar.
"I was up on stage with thousands of people watching me," Thornton muses about her performance at the 2009 Gamescom Instant Jam in Germany. "How many people spend thousands of hours, days, years learning to play real guitar? And I come out with my plastic guitar and play on stage in front of thousands of people in another country."
Though Thornton has been competing in one form or another since 1998, she didn't go pro until 2006 at the Midnight Gaming Championship in Texas. Her first sponsor was a gaming apparel company, she recalls, who offered to customize her personal Guitar Hero instrument in...
Human Angle
59 CommentsMeet the people, problems, motivations and games behind this year's PAX East Indie Megabooth.
We Built a Booth
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Kelly Wallick can't stand still. She's hurtling left and right, forward and backwards. She's racing down aisles. She's putting up signs. She's building stuff in one place, and telling others to build stuff in another. She's saying hello to old friends and to people she's never met before. She's making small talk and big talk. She's on the move, scooting around forklifts and cardboard and monitors and people. She's nervous but excited; she has a tentative confidence. But this is what she anticipated, and now she's putting everything in its right place. She's home.
It's the afternoon before PAX East 2013 in Boston, Mass., and Wallick is standing at the heart of her baby. She has been at the head of a six-month-long project, one with the potential to better the lives of hundreds of...
