I took three videos while I attended the IGDA Annual General Meeting at the Game Developers Conference on March 26, 2009.

The first you see here is a video of outgoing Board Chair Jen Maclean preemptively addressing the issue of the QoL controversy surrounding then-board-member Mike Capps’ statements (more here, too) at the IGDA Leadership Forum. I am missing the first ~30 seconds of her statement, sorry about that.

The second video is of Scott Macmillan, one of my fellow volunteers with the Boston IGDA chapter. During the Q&A session, he read a statement denouncing the IGDA board’s official response to the QoL controversy. Maclean’s response to Scott is also in the video.

The third video is of John Feil, who was an IGDA board member for five years and is critical to the organization’s crediting efforts. During Q&A, he makes three points. (1) Commending the IGDA’s response to the EA Mythic crediting controversy. (2) Denouncing the IGDA board’s handling of the QoL controversy. (3) Questioning the new website technology for igda.org and the organization’s history of adopting and ditching web technologies at great cost to the organization. Jen Maclean responds to points (1) and (2), Jason Della Rocca responds to point (3).

I will let these videos speak for themselves right now, but I will be posting my response later this week. I have spoken about this publicly; you can see some of what I have to say on the original IGDA forum posts here and here. I also made a statement at the annual general meeting, which I did not take video of. To the best of my recollection, here it is:

To me, it doesn’t really matter whether Mike Capps was allowed to say what he did or not at the Leadership Forum. We as a membership elected him. This points to problems with the IGDA’s electoral procedures: in the six-sentence summary we see on the web form for each board election, it’s impossible to understand people’s positions. You can look at the archive.org records of Mike Capps’ personal statement when he was  running for the board. He claims to be in favor of quality of life, but does not define what quality of life is. There’s no room for nuance or for dialogue. I think that those running for election owe it to the members to give them more information. This is why I launched dariusforigda.org in support of my bid for the 2010 IGDA Board elections. Members will be able to go there and see my policy positions and make an informed decision whether or not to vote for me. I encourage others to do the same. Thank you.

I went to my first Game Developers Conference when I was 19 years old. I was just a year into my university career, and at the time I had no idea whether I wanted to be a game developer. I liked game development, but I liked electrical engineering just as much, and one of those careers pays a lot better than the other, you know? 

But by the end of that week in San Jose I knew that I wanted to make video games for the rest of my life.

Not because I love games — which I do.

And not because I love game development — which I do.

I wanted to spend my life making video games because I love game developers. You are the most fascinating, creative, hilarious, hard-working, passionate, and brilliant group of people I have ever known.

I have been an active volunteer with the IGDA for about six years now.  It has been a pleasure to serve as the technology co-officer for the Education SIG and as a chapter coordinator for the Boston Post Mortem.

Now I feel like it’s time for me to take the next step.

Please keep watching this blog. I will be outlining my platform on game industry and IGDA issues here. I will also answer questions from IGDA members. I want this website to be a place where people can interact with me as a potential candidate for the board. If I am elected, I fully intend to maintain that level of interaction.