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Vancouver Fan Expo

Melissa’s Scorpion cosplay

Ghostbusters of British Columbia

Variety Village - The charity Ghostbusters of B.C. were collecting for.

Reboots Hexadecimal is voice by Shirley Millner. I blame con hangover for messing her name up twice. Sorry Shirley!

Melissa and Shirley Millner

Canadian Videogame Awards

FLuffee!

Standard Action

Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo

In this weeks podcast we learn what kind of porn Melissa likes, what kind of T.V. show’s Luke likes and our minds are blow by the response to the Steamfunk kickstarter.

Melissa’s bunny rabbit Awwwwwww

Mass Effect 3 demo to be unveiled February 14th

Steamfunk Kickstarter

Geekin-out.com - Side Note: This is the episode Kevin was a guest on!

Reboot

Sherlock

Maddy’s message on SOPA blackout day

Scooby Doo porn parody – No I’m not going to link it, I’ve polluted my search history enough searching for topics discussed on The Button Mash. The Google ads are getting… weird.

Balls 2 That is back! Wednesday and Friday, here is the first one of the new year.

Lukeipedia

Simple English Wikipedia

Balls 2 That

Skyrim

Christopher Plummer

Morgan Freeman

Epic Pie Time

Melissa in her Scorpion cosplay

Mass Effect 3

Diablo 3

Boobs, Bad Games and Misogyny

Amanda’s article: Top 10 Video Game Characters I Would Love to Take Home

Skyrim: 2012

I couldn’t find the article about a guy who punched a bear in the nose but I did find this article about a woman who punched a bear in the nose to save her dog…

Tribes Ascend Beta

Ninja Fishing

Knuckles Dawson on podcast #2

Balls 2 That – Ask Mustard

Let me Google that for you

Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook consider ‘nuclear’ the option

Be a HERO and Help STOP SOPA Now!! (Video Kyle was talking about)

No SOPA Google Chrome Plugin

MLG drops all domains from GoDaddy for their support for SOPA

 Arby ‘n’ The Chief

Soul Calibur Lego

Evo Championship Series

Ezio auditore di firenze in Soul Calibur 5

Top 10 Video Game Characters I Would Love To Take Home by Amanda Murphy

Geekin-out.com Episode: 3 Sammich or GTFO!

Game Transfer Phenomenon

Rehabtronics: A video game joystick that can help stroke patients recover motor skills

Fan Expo Vancouver

SWTOR: Dancing makes you invincible so /getdown!

Brewsters

Kevin and Maddy talk about things such as the Masturbate-a-thon and Kyle tells an embarrassing story about his experiences with a Tranny… Don’t worry there is also lots of talk about video games.

Cintiq tablets

The 3D game Maddy was talking about. Shattered Horizon

Gabes article on the Ocean Marketting debacle

Masturbate-a-thon (don’t worry this is just the Wikipedia article.)

Mayan calender doomsday predictions explained

Balls 2 That

Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo

Black Friday migrating to Canada

Woman pepper sprays 20 people to get an Xbox

Blackberry get $ 1.7 million in playbooks stolen

Starfront Collision

Bastion Narrator invades other video games

Geek Chic

Razer’s Xbox 360 arcade stick

Xplornet This was Maddy’s microwave ISP. Much like Ocean Marektting they couldn’t spell their company name right either.

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre

Slippery slope game mechanic

The Girl Geek: Myths and Stereotypes Roundhouse Kicked in the Bawls

Pierce Brosnan Bond tank chase in Golden Eye

Japanese Capsule Hotel

The boat Maddy rode on in the Amazon. It’s name is ‘Siempre Adelante’ (Always Forward)

The Hungry Cyclist

The Hobbit trailer

Fan Expo Vancouver

Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo

Bawls energy drink

Why Protect IP / SOPA will break the internet [video info graphic]

Some info on the risks EA is taking with SWTOR

The Nuzlocke Challenge

Gotham City Impostors

The Dark Knight Rises trailer

Prometheus trailer

Quick! Steal this podcast before SOPA becomes law!

Skyrim’s sales in the first 48 hours vs MW3

Why Skyrim Is Horrible for the Economy

2011 VGA’s

Last of Us World Premiere

That Thing is Operational! Kevin’s PSN Network article.

The Black Baron’s Rant Against Spike TV

The Legend of Zelda – The Legend of Zelda’s 25th anniversary artwork time-lapse

MW3 Dev gets teabagged at VGA’s

George Takei is the Broker of Star Peace

G.I. Joe Retaliation trailer

Assassin’s Creed: Beautiful Lies

SOPA Stop Online Piracy Act

Master Grief

Corridor Digital

Brush With Death

Drawn By Pain

Status Kill

Metro Xbox 360 Dashboard

Rabbids

8-bit Memories

Portal gun sounds

OnLive

Gundam

Halo

Waygoz

Nvidia offers Batman: Arkham City

Kevin’s crazy videocard

Limited edition GTX 560 Ti 448 Core

Backwards flying dragon

Starship Troopers Remake

Lego Death Star

Sakura-Con

 Luke takes a pic right after he learns this girl is 15 years old

Game developers have recognize this and have begun embracing and supporting this user generated content. Almost every major game title now employs a community manager or community developer to help the best and most positive content or communities rise to the top and help reinforce their brand. I caught up with Gabe Graziani, Ubisoft’s community developer for Assassin’s Creed to talk to him about community and what a community developer does.

Jose Rojas: So Community manager at Ubisoft for Assassin’s Creed. What’s that all about, what does that involve?

Gabe Graziani: Well technically the term we use at Ubisoft is community developer, the job is mostly community management. What it entails basically is we’re responsible for all the messaging on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and also Youtube to some degree, we share those responsibilities with our digital marketing teams. But certainly for Facebook and Twitter those are our domain mostly and our objective is to manage the community, make sure they have things to do and things to talk about keep their conversations going and support any projects they might have when they engage in user generated content and things like that we definitely want to do our best to promote the top tier user generated content.

JR: Because we are talking about community, how has community really changed or grown in the gaming industry to become such a big part of it that we have community developers and community managers?

Gabe: I think it’s actually not just the gaming industry honesty it’s marketing in general, certainly brand strategy. It’s becoming really apparent to everyone that with the advent of social networking and things like that, for all the force you exert as a brand manager to market your brand, you don’t own your brand anymore. You don’t control the public perception as much as you used to say like in the 50′s when the only contact someone would have with a brand is an ad in a newspaper or magazine or something like that, maybe a television commercial. Because we have things like Facebook or Twitter you have people who generate their own content and can instantly reach a huge audience with whatever their message is that you don’t have any control over, but it’s about your brand, it’s about your product. I think that shift is fundamental, it’s a huge deal and it’s taken some people to really long time to really grasp what that means. That’s why the focus is on management and the mechanism is transparency. I think overall across the board a lot of people in the marketing world are having to come to grips with that.

JR: You were talking about, in the panel a little earlier today, about having contact with your top tier community who produce that type of content. How important is it, and maybe you could talk a little bit about the experiences that you’ve had, for them to have that contact with you directly?

Gabe: I don’t know if I can really speak to that necessarily because I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. Certainly to me they say really nice things and that makes me feel good but as far as the overall impact on their lives I don’t necessarily know. You know you get people sometimes who say things like, “I started playing assassin’s creed, it really got me interested in history and now that’s why I’m back in school.” When you hear something like that, your done, you’ve done your job. Because of the impact on that one person that’s more than enough that’s more than enough of a reason to continue doing what you’re doing. So I think it varies probably a lot, certainly some people probably played Assassin’s Creed and don’t even like it or visit the Facebook page and were like, I don’t need this I’m not that into it, and that’s fine. But for the people it really matters to, those are the people you’re really trying to reach and really trying to contact and really trying to support. Certainly it’s a mutually beneficial relationship when you have users creating content, that’s content you don’t have to create. Especially if it’s of a level of quality where you do want to share it with everyone it’s kind of you’re responsibility to make sure that happens. You defiantly want to look with a critical eye on all of the things that are being discussed and be like, hey have you seen this or have you guys seen this. Most of the time [chuckles] the hardcore community members, yeah they’ve seen it, weeks behind, where have you been.

JR: haha, late pass right?

Gabe: [laughing] Exactly exactly, but certainly not everyone of the single one of the approximately 2.3 million fans we have on Facebook have seen everything so we do our part, we try and share as much as we can.

JR: Speaking of that type of stuff is there anything in particular for Assassin’s Creed you’ve seen that’s really interesting?

Gabe: Oh man, so many things! We are really blessed with a community that is just so super positive, I’ve worked on other games in the past and certainly on other projects but the Assassin’s community is amazing. We have hamps19 who produced a video called Beautiful Lies that is set to music a montage of Ezio, Altair and Desmond fighting and it shifts seamlessly between them performing the same fighting maneuvers and it’s just really really a beautiful video. Then we also have Tom Quigly who is a director, he’s done a series of short films called Assassin’s Creed: Generations and those are fantastic. You know there’s a certain like… you look a video that’s produced by the fan community and well you know production values being what they are its… to us it’s more the heart and the conversations that are started by these things more than it is like “oh well you know the hidden blade is not exactly how it appears in the game.” For us it’s just so flattering to begin with. We have a lot of people producing multilayer tutorials, certainly EscoBlades on YouTube and Machinima, he does some amazing tutorials. We’ve had Rainie make some really entertaining videos, Squiidish, Shenmue. We have so many community members that are supportive of a variety of different aspects of the game. There’s so many people, on my computer at work I have spreadsheets that are just full of people from different schools. We also really like the work Crabcat has done with cosplay and there has been so many cosplayers here at PAX I try to give them all my business cards make sure they email me and stuff like that. At Comic Con we had a bunch of cosplayers show up to our panel and were going to give them all signed copies of Revelations when it comes out because that kind of commitment, we want to reward it, we want to support it.

JR: Thank you very much for you time Gabe and I’m really looking forward to the game, I know I’ll be playing it and I’ll be sure to check out a lot of that community stuff, thank you.

Gabe: Thank you.

Beautiful Lies

Assassin’s Creed: Generations

EscoBlades

Shenmue36

Rainie

Kiri Callaghan
Geek Girl Con
Settle Center
PAX 2010
Whedonesque Burlesque (SOLD OUT)
Concert Friday Night
Labyrinth Movie
Marvel
DC
Firefly
Bioware
Star Wars The Old Republic
PAX’11
Mass Effect
Portal
VALVE
Dead Island (made to movie)
Lionsgate Studios
Brick Con
LEGO
Seattle
Vancouver
Chase Masterson
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Lani Blazier
Designing Women of BioWare
Designing Women
Delta Burke
Golden Girls
Blanche Elizabeth Devereaux B.E.D.
Tattoo Art (Golden Girls)
Betty White
Felicia Day
The Guild
Dr. Horrible Sing Along Blog
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Web Comics
Gail Simone
San Diego Comic Con
Nancy and Belle Holder Wicked Saga Book
Carrie and Katie Goldman
Masquerade

Geek Girl Con
Twitter: @GeekGirlCon
info@GeekGirlCon.com

Knuckles Dawson
CGR Podcast
Gears of War 3 Launch
Tokyo Game Show 2011
Please Stay Calm
“Phantom Sensation” Gaming Technology
Fold It
TED Talks
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
World of Warcraft Free to Play
Gears of War Limited and Epic Editions
Batman Arkham City
Batman Arkham City PC Pushed Back
Zero Hour
Halo Anniversary
Thor 2
Catwoman Short – Batman: Year One
New York Comic Con
Archer
Battle Field 3 Beta
Battle Field 3 Jets are back!
Star Wars Gaming Peripherals
Gears of War Vault
G-155 by GAEMS
Custom Gears of War G-155