Just how much is mountaineering like game development?
This morning began day one of Casual Connect 2010, the game conference for the casual game industry. The conference is located in Seattle, a hotbed of not just game development but casual game development, including PopCap Games, Big Fish Games, and GameHouse. First up, a keynote by noted mountaineer Ed Viesturs. Wait, what?
After a delay due to registration problems, the Casual Connect keynote started with a welcome by Jeremy Lewis, CEO of Big Fish Games. Lewis briefed everyone in the room about the most recent accomplishments of the casual games industry, including a report that USA Today had published that morning that had estimated the casual game industry at $3 billion dollars.
Lewis believed that this is a conservative figure, and went on to expound on the industry’s 30% year on year growth. He stated that the Casual Connect conference was playing host to 632 companies from over 35 countries this year that develop and publish games on multiple operating systems, platforms, languages, and geographies.
“Games are a universal pleasure,” Lewis said. He continued that those who play games have shown increasing benefits to mental health and well-being.
Lewis then turned over the microphone to famed mountaineer, Ed Viesturs. Among other accomplishments, Viesturs has climbed the world’s fourteen tallest mountains–peaks higher than 8,000 meters–without supplemental oxygen. Viesturs also participated in the 1996 IMAX Everest Expedition documentary, the highest grossing IMAX film ever.
In a wryly humorous manner, Viesturs detailed his rise to becoming America’s leading high-altitude mountaineer, successfully connecting it to the path of game development.
He compared the intense planning the goes into preparing for a climb to the work that goes into the development of a game. The teams that travel to summits, he said, need to work together, and they need to like each other, because they have to rely on each other. And most importantly, he believed that one had to know when not to continue forward, as he gave multiple examples of knowing when to stop before reaching the top was a good thing.
He also pointed out that reaching the goal on a timetable is not always the best plan, and that one had to know when to delay. He pointed to several times when weather led him to conclude that continuing forward to a summit by a particular date would result in serious repercussions, such as dead teammates.
His keynote was accompanied by gorgeous images taken of his many climbs, and one could not help but hear the intake of breath by many of the listeners in the room.
If Casual Connect was looking for an inspiring keynote speaker this year, I think that they were successful, as Ed Viesturs performed his job admirably. One could not help but feel inspired to move forward in their creative endeavor after listening to the man who has conquered the highest peaks in the world.
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