Next Wednesday I’ll get to Jönköping, Sweden, for DreamHack.

That is, if I don’t miss my plane. I’ve gotten pretty skilled at missing planes lately.

So assuming everything goes well, I’ll be at DreamHack. DreamHack is a four-days long festival, a little city set up in a huge convention center. It’s made for gamers and the likes. They say it’s the biggest LAN party in the world.

DreamHack Winter usually hosts 10,000+ PC’s on one giant Local Area Network. They’re all connected at very high speed to the Internet through the biggest modem ever built by machines built by human kind. Or something like that.

There are gaming tournaments with some of the best players in the world in StarCraft 2, Counter-Strike (‘mixed’ and ‘females only’), Tekken and  Super Street Fighter 4. Outside of Sweden, at least twelve countries will be represented, including Iran.

Wait. Iran? I need to say: I am impressed. Whenever I hear about this country in the news it sounds like it’s one huge prison. These guys must have escaped or something… And are they better with the AK?! I need to find out.

There are restaurants and places to buy snacks. A gaming show with publishers booths, a temporary cash mashine just for the weekend and a decent amount of female individuals attending or admining (we know one at least at Gamocracy, and a male one too). You can even talk to them if you’re courageous enough.

Games and women: what more could the people be asking for?

Well, there’s no hotel inside DreamHack but attendees are provided with a table to put their computer screens on and sleep under. The PC’s do for the heating. It’s very clever. A bunch of hotels are standing next to the venue too in case, madness, anyone’s really into sleeping.

http://www.dreamhack.se

I’ll be headed back there at the end of November. You’ll see plenty of it here!

www.dreamhack.se

These past few weekends have been so full of video games for me. I had almost forgotten about those.

This time, after my two days at the FJV, I attended a game developers meetings today at some café near the Panthéon.

It was set up by Bertrand Poulain, a 2D/3D artist working for Sony Computer Entertainment Japan from Paris (yes, that can happen apparently). Here’s Bertrand’s blog. His demoreel below:

It’s the second time I’m attending that monthly meeting, it’s nice to be able to talk to people who make video games like that. Today there were two 3D artists, two musicians, one creative & production director and myself sitting at the table. It’s funny and enriching to get to hear everyone’s side of the same terrible story that is the making of video games.

Sometimes, my mouth open and my eyes rolled out, I wonder how I ended up falling into such a well of game dev experience… That’s when I remember I need to thank my friend Yu for pointing Bertrand my way.

Thank you, Yu!

I spent the day at a gaming show, the Festival du Jeu Vidéo. In my hometown, Paris, France.

It was an occasion to catch up with a lot of people, tell even more people about Gamocracy and… come across a guy wearing the t-shirt I missed at Gamescom.

Damn.

Alas, there was no way I would get one for myself at the Festival du Jeu Vidéo… Not because the Valve guys didn’t see a point in moving their big asses all the way to the City of Bling. It’s more like no one was there. I mean, no big name. No EA, no Activision, no Blizzard, no Ubisoft, no THQ, no Nintendo, no Sony. No Valve of course. Want me to go on?

So if you followed me on Twitter today and you wondered why the hell I wasn’t showing the Black Ops and Portal 2 booth… You may stop now, they just weren’t here.

There’ll be another show with the big names in late October, here in Paris. If they’re there, they’re not here. Maybe Valve attends then. Maybe I can get that t-shirt. Life is hard in the realm of video games…

In the meantime, I’ll be back to the Festival du Jeu Vidéo tomorrow, it’s a good place.