I went last wednesday to GameCamp — mostly because it was the first edition.
This post is not much a report about the presentations, I’ll leave this to the more informed Michel, but more a comparison of the “Web/Entrepreneur” vs “video games” community.
What I’ve seen is the Web people we see in Barcamps and Blitzweekend are much more diverse. You can see for instance in a Barcamp solo entrepreneurs, hardcore programmers, investors, creative people with dreams and big projects, guys who are designer/programmer/marketers at the same time, some who might be in the industry for as long as 1995 or those who just came with a new web idea the day before the meetup.
This is a striking difference compared to video games, which is now an industry in Montréal, with all its consequences. Jason Della Rocca, who was the host for the evening, asked casually what job positions people in the room had, and apparently everyone in the room knew exactly what their speciality were. It occured to me that these kind of questions couldn’t be asked in a BarCamp, as most of us are working on bleeding edge “stuff” that has yet to find a name. Also one revealing difference was that there were many video games sudents in the room, coming from various video games school. Yes, it’s now an industry, and it’s socially acceptable to have a “video games” career, while it’s harder to present yourself as a “web entrepreneur”.
Apart from this, I would say though that both communities are more similar than they are different. Both are obsessed on innovation, both are obsessed on the quality of the people they get to work with, and ultimately both know that it’s ultimately the market that decides wether if you are doing a great product/service or not… and of course, they also know they have to work their *ss off in order to ship a great product.
All in all, this was very insightful. If you are working in video games, I am also inviting you to BarCamps and other related events. I think it will much more fun and insightful — so that both communities benefit from each other’s errors and successes.
