The Edinburgh Interactive Festival showcases the continued popularity, growth and influence of video games and brings together the games industry’s key decision makers.

Games publishing, hardware and development alongside Government, TV, film, press and other entertainment industries as well as students seeking to work within the creative industries are all represented.

David Yarnton, Managing Director/General Manager of Nintendo UK, said: “We’re very proud to continue our support of EIF for the third year running. Edinburgh Interactive Festival raises our industry’s profile into the wider cultural arena and celebrates the input, talent and creativity from all with a common interest in video games.”

The Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2008 will take place from Sunday 10th to Tuesday 12th August in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Registrations are open at the EIF2008 Website.

Register before Tuesday 1st July 2008 - £120 (ex VAT)
Register on or after Tuesday 1st July 2008 - £149 (ex VAT)
Scottish based developers and companies - £99 (ex VAT)
Students - £75 (ex VAT)

Shocking news everybody! According to some guy called John Mayer who, according to Wikipedia, is some sort of American rock musician (yep, we’re in touch and up-to-date here at CGEmpire), pushing plastic buttons and waggling your arms around in Guitar Hero is not really very similar to playing an actual guitar.

Lies. Real guitars don’t have coloured buttons, apparently

Amazing. Congratulations John Mayer for that astounding insight.

Source: Rolling Stone

On tuesday 17th June 2008, NMK are running a Writing for Games event in central London (exact venue to be confirmed).

As NMK say on their site, “Writing for games is an often-overlooked career path, but it’s a great opportunity for writers who want to flex their creative muscles. It can involve plot development, script-writing, copywriting, dialogue creation, project documentation, humour writing, characterisation and character development and a load of other elements that exercise a writer’s abilities.”

Featuring a line up of impressive speakers including Steve Ince of Broken Sword fame, the event should be fascinating for anyone interested in pursuing a career in games writing.

Tickets are currently priced at £25, although a discounted price of £15 is available to freelancers, students, unemployed, companies with fewer than 10 employees and not-for-profit organisations.

More information can be found at NMK’s website.

Uh oh.

The BBC is reporting that there’s talks of making downloadable video and videogames need a full-on BBFC rating too.

While that’s probably actually fair enough, it raises some concerns for those of us who make downloadable content for the web.

From The BBC Website:

Age ratings for downloaded video content and video games are to be introduced in the UK.

Overseen by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the scheme will see certificates appear on websites, via set-top boxes and portable players.

Mr Johnson said the scheme, called BBFC.online, was not an attempt to censor the internet, nor to regulated online video gaming.

Mr Cooke said the BBFC continued to work with the games industry’s self-regulatory body Pegi to find solutions to classifying the burgeoning range of online gaming.

“We don’t need to set up in rivalry with Pegi online. We can work cooperatively,” he said.

Without providing specifics, Mr Johnson said the BBFC expected all the leading content providers and aggregators to sign up to the scheme in the coming weeks and months.

Quite how it’s all going to work is anyone’s guess, but paying to have your game rated seems a tad too likely, even if it is currently ‘voluntary’. It’s possibly a problem on the horizon for Indie Developers who typically can’t even afford new shoelaces.

Uh oh. Watch this space.

Here is Adam Adamowicz.

He’s a concept artist for Bethesda, the chaps behind the brilliant Morrowind, slightly less brilliant but still cool Oblivion, and most recently the not-out-yet Fallout game that’s probably going to be ace:

Hello Adam! Doesn’t he look lovely?

Adam draws lots of pictures of monsters and things, apparently. But that’s not news. No, what is news is that by the looks of things, me and Adam Adamowicz have the same monitor! Look! I have proof:

See where it says ‘1′? That’s the Dell logo, that is. I know that because I’ve got one on the monitor that I’m literally looking at right now! See ‘2′? That’s a little light that tells you which screen is active or something. ‘3′ is the ‘on’ button. It lights up green when the monitor is on, and I think it might go orange when it’s on standby (but that’s hard to test without turning my computer off which would rather muck up writing this post). Finally, ‘4′ is the lovely solid swively stand that comes with it.

You can read lots and lots about lovely Adam and his amazing taste in monitors over at Bethesda’s blog.*

*Interview may not actually contain any information about monitors.

Good God, I should write headlines for a living. I’ve literally just amazed myself with that one.

Where was I?

Oh, yes - R. Scott Campbell (the game designer chappie of Fallout which was apparently ‘a bit good’) has started his very own new Games Studio called WhiteMoon Dreams. Woooo! Very hippy!

Anyhow, he’s set up ship in Pasadena, California, found a bunch of guys to work with him (11 so far), and got an unnamed Japanese publisher to give him a bundle of cash. Presumably to make a game with.

One to keep an eye on, basically. Expect some kind of game from them on PS3, X360, and/or Wii at some point in the future.

Full story.

It seems recent news that Capcom are potentially getting sued for making a game about zombies in a shopping mall wasn’t all just Internet Nonsense and hot air after all.

In typical “just get your damned hands off my stuff, yeah?” style, Dawn of the Dead’s evil owners MKR owners have gone all out and engaged Litigation Mode in that curious way Americans find oh-so very very agreeable:

“Both works are dark comedies. In both, the recreational activities of the zombies and absurdly grotesque ‘kill scenes’ provide unexpected comedic relief.

Both works provided thoughtful social commentary on the ‘mall culture’ zeitgeist, in addition to serving up a sizable portion of sensationalistic violence.”

Watch this, very carefully. Not only for more ‘unnecessary quotation marks’, but also because if it goes anywhere, you’re going to have to tread very carefully where parody, pastiche and homages are concerned in future…

In short, :(

Here’s the link.

Microsoft have announced that they’re opening up Xbox360 to User Generated Content, which presumably means more dross than you can shake a stick at.

Expect to sift through no end of rubbishy Breakout clones and an over-abundance of cornflower blue, all in an attempt to find the occasional gem.

Like bobbing for apples in a bucket of raw sewage. Can’t wait.

Press Release!

Gosh it’s a veritable marketing blitz from Peter Molyneux today, isn’t it?

First we had news on Fable2, now it’s an interview where he speaks his mind on consoles and the state of PC gaming.

And by crickey, it’s rather no-holds-barred…

The fascinating thing is when [PopCap, Big Fish and Reflective] first started, all these games came out like Peggle and Mystery Files and Alice Greensleeves and Diner Dash, and it felt quite exciting. There was a lot of innovation going on. Okay, there weren’t great graphics, but there was innovation.

In my view, that has completely stopped. They’re doing the same game over and over again with a different wrapper. It’s like a mini-universe in itself which is emulating what’s happening in our industry.

Wowzers! A pretty contentious argument there, Pete. Quite possibly alarmingly accurate however. He also goes on to pretty much blame The Sims and World of Warcraft for “sucking all the air out of the PC market”.

Read the full interview here!

Yep, seriously folks. Students across the world will soon be able to get their grubby little mits on XNA 2.0, Visual Studio 2008 (professional), Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft Expression Studio all completely free! They call it DreamSpark!

Currently rolling out across the US, UK, Canada, China and most of Europe, all you need to do is sign in, get yourself verified as a student (the system is linked to organisations that can confirm status), and then download away!

Almost too good to be true really. More information here (including an interview with Mr. Gates).