Tag: con

TwitchCon 2018!

A very sharp young lawyer (well, she’s waiting for her bar results but I have confidence) who goes by LadyLawTM on the Internet invited me to speak on a panel she wanted to do on lootboxes, games, and gambling at TwitchCon this year. I like talking, I like cons, and I Have Opinions, so of course I said yes. It was this past weekend and I thought I’d just share a few of the highlights with you. 🙂

Note: There is a list of all the streamers I met (and whose gamertags I got) at the bottom of this entry. Please check them out! If I missed you, so sorry, please comment and I’ll add you.

First, I am happy to report that our panel was a smashing success. The description is here, and here’s a VOD of our panel!

Continue reading TwitchCon 2018!

Anime Central 2018!

I moderated my first Anime Central panel yesterday. It was a variant on a panel I’ve done before, which I call “GeekLaw: Law, Pop Culture and Creativity.” I managed to spend most of the day at the con, so I thought a little recap might be fun. Please note that if you were at the panel and you’re looking for the presentation materials, here they are:

GeekLaw-AnimeCentral2018

I arrived about 11AM and it was touch and go whether I’d even get a parking space. The convention center’s lot was so full it was blocked off already. Fortunately the Hyatt still had a few spaces (the convention is held at the Rosemont Convention Center, which is physically attached to the Hyatt hotel.) Unfortunately, that lot costs a lot more, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

But at least I found a space and was able to make the first panel that had caught my eye, “Scum & Villainy: Why It’s Good to be Bad.” I was under the impression this would be a how-to panel, but it turned out to be how to write about villains. Which was obviously disappointing but it was still a fun panel.

After that I went through Artist’s Alley, which was much better laid out this year than last year – one aisle was still a little tight, but you could get by. I picked up a cute little sketch zine from Lisa Imas (http://hashtag-art.tumblr.com/) called “things i drew when i should have been paying attention, or how i almost failed all my classes.) I got this because it reminded me of the time I almost got thrown out of a class in law school for laughing at the book I was reading when I was supposed to be paying attention. 🙂 I also encountered this retro cosplay:

The next panel I went to was a fan fiction panel. As I sometimes do when fan fiction is discussed, I went to the moderator before the panel and mentioned that I was an intellectual property attorney and that if any questions about legal issues came up, they were welcome to call on me if they didn’t have their own legal expertise.

I’m sure you can tell what happened next.

The question did come up, and the moderator very graciously invited me to stand up and borrow a microphone and talk for a few minutes about the legal issues related to fan fiction. It seemed to be very well received and people commented that it was helpful. I also plugged my own panel, which wasn’t for hours yet but it seemed only fair. So thank you to moderator Pearson Mui (http://www.jurai.net/~pmui/adintro.html) for asking me to speak.

With some time to kill, I headed back to the show floor and scoped out some cheap manga books, as well as running into these two:

In one of the cleverest (and most adorable) mashup cosplays I have seen in a long time, that’s Sailor Ladybug and Tuxedo Noir. (That’s what I call them, anyway.) I had to leave before seeing quite all of the floor because I wanted to attend a panel called “Copyright 101,” put on by Kumate Works. I admit that I went to this to see if the information being presented was reasonable, because while I try not to be obnoxious about it, if I see a presenter giving information that will get somebody sued, I will say something. However, my concerns were completely unnecessary. The presenter knew her stuff and had consulted with an intellectual property attorney to develop her presentation. It was excellent. Once again, I got outed, but once she knew I was an IP attorney I kept my yap shut unless she asked me for confirmation of something. I was very impressed.

Then I had to bolt around the panel room area to get to a paneled identified as “Game Development – The Crash Course.” It was put on by Mark Kakareka of Guilty10Games. Promising to be a “crash course” in the basics of game development, the panel delivered quite well in my opinion. Acknowledging that he couldn’t teach anything of practical substance in 45 minutes, the presenter instead hit the big picture elements – have a plan, write it down, do a design doc, use tools appropriate to your technical skill level – and provided some examples of each. I thought it was about as much as you could ask from a one-hour panel on a topic that you can literally get college degrees in. I got made again when somebody asked a legal question and I volunteered to answer it, but once more I apparently wasn’t too obnoxious and nobody seemed to mind my assistance.

I thought about going to another panel but the show floor had just closed and there were huge lines to pretty much everything, so I took a little break. When it got close to time, I went to the panel room I was in only to find that the panel going on in it was being run by a person I follow on Twitter, @Homura_Bakura. Her enthusiasm and happiness to be talking about something very dear to her was really amazing and while I did come in toward the end, everybody was obviously super happy to be there, so well done. After saying hi while she was on the way out I got set up for the panel.

I was stunned to see that even though we were doing a law education panel at 10:30 on a Saturday night, there were about thirty people waiting to come in. Thank you so much to everyone who chose to use part of their Con Saturday night to be with us! Thanks also to my fantastic co-panelists Sam Castree (http://www.twitter.com/indiegamelawyer) and Diana Qiao (http://www.twitter.com/dianaqiao.) The panel went great, we had wonderful questions, and everybody put up with my rambling far better than I could have expected. (It was a long day.)

Then I went home and passed out.

So thank you again, everybody, and hopefully I’ll see you again soon!

M

Wow, MAGFEST!

I attended MAGFEST 2016 in National Harbor, MD (just outside Washington, DC) this weekend. MAGFEST is a major computer game conference with an emphasis on music and creativity. And wow was there a lot of creativity on display!

I was there as an invited panelist. My presentation, entitled “Third Party Trademarks vs. Your Game, Your Dreams, and Your Money,” was part of the MAGES Legal sequence, and given in collaboration with three great attorneys from well-known law firm Banner & Witcoff. It was an honor to be up there with them. If you’d like to see the materials from my presentation, I’ll have a link here in a day or so, or follow me on Twitter and wait for me to post the link. 🙂

First, heartfelt and grateful thanks to:

Sam Castree of Crawford Intellectual Property Law, for the invite, the Legal panels, logistics, and candy from Russia. Sam, you are aces.

Tasker, Jax and their merry band of LARPers, whose games were fantastic and a great way to enjoy the festival if your ears aren’t quite up to some of the… louder stuff. Brilliant, creative, and engaging people. This is the kind of thing I hope to encourage by assisting creators in dealing with business and legal matters.

The doctor of psychology at the Gaming and Immersion panel whose name, shamefully, I forgot to note, for being open minded to my alternate theories on the psychology of game immersion and loss of self.

My fellow presenters Steve Chang, Ross Dannenberg, and Scott Kelly. I really enjoyed collaborating with lawyers of their caliber, and dinner was great fun.

And the MAGFEST staff for their hard work, friendliness, and overall ability to make 20K gamers behave themselves!

Here are my thoughts on the panels I attended:

The other MAGES Legal Panels – They were all great. You should be very confident in hiring any attorney who presented. Special shout-out to Suzanne Jackiw (@zedthegamer) and Ross Hersemann (@loadinglaw) for being young lawyers with mature advice!

What Games Get Right and Wrong About Reality: Expert’s Perspectives – This was really interesting. The experts knew their stuff and were very personable. Lot of good observations and thoughts on how to do better.

Bootlegs, Counterfeits, and Lies: Fakes In the Video Game Market – Went to this on a whim. Though it was a bit chaotic, the panelists knew their stuff and I learned interesting things. They also responded with good humor when they learned that they had two IP lawyers in the audience. 🙂

The Worst Panel You Will Ever See at MAGFEST – Exactly what it said on the tin. At least for me: it was apparently aimed at long-time MAGFEST insiders/volunteers. Even for them it seemed rather random, chaotic, and obnoxious. I left early.

Video Game Industry Real Talk – I was blown away by how good this panel was. Though young, the panelists were the real deal, knowledgeable and honest about both their successes and their failures. They were having fun, but they were laying it down. If the hopeful indies in the audience were paying attention, they got their money’s worth.

Therapy and Tabletop Role Playing Games – This had a lot of potential, but to be brutally honest the panelists lost control. At one point, an audience member went up on stage and started plugging her book. Now, I’m pretty sure she (and many of the other people who co-opted the talk) had legitimate issues of their own, but it was hard to stay engaged when half the panel was audience members meandering through their ill-defined rambles. The panelists did have some interesting points when they managed to get in a few words.

Therapy and Gaming -Same people put this on as did the prior one. Same objections, plus it seemed a bit redundant. Left a few minutes in.

Brains & Games: Designing Videogames that Incorporate Mental Health and Human Experience – Enjoyed this. This panel had a similar demographic to the prior two, but the panelists maintained control. Good information on using games to implement self-improvement and mental health assistance programs, including a CBT reinforcement game and games to help with grief management.

LARPs by (among others?) Damocles Thread Development – The ones I did were the Fallout “Vault 71” game,  the “Not Shady, Just Fierce” werewolf social game, the Witcher “From Novigrad with Love” game, and the “Gaudete Sunday” Victorian Tea Party game. (Best quote: “I did not anticipate that this game would need combat mechanics.”) They. Were. Amazing. I had so much fun. And extra kudos to the storytellers for dealing with huge turnouts as well as anyone could be asked. Even with the crowds things happened, people participated, and a good time was had by all. If you see DTD putting on LARPs at an event, GO.

The Mind’s Eye: Gaming and the Role of Immersion – The moderator lost control of this one, and didn’t seem willing to stop the endless tide of look-how-smart-I-am questions or just outright I’m-just-going-to-pontificate-for-a-whiles. That being said, it was a fascinating subject and the panelists were extremely knowledgable and insightful. Very glad I attended despite the runaway parts.

That’s it! Thanks for reading, and see you next year!