Yesterday was another good one for discussions with interesting people, featuring fewer derailments but an equally lax attitude to timetables on the part of the attendees as the day before. After the event, we went to Gíjon to visit the technical university there. It has some very impressive architecture, including a 130m-hgh tower:
We got to go up it, too. The views were great!
Yes, they did have a lift; if not, I would be writing this from a hospital ward.
There was a tour of the university, which has a relatively recent past. It was build during the Franco era, and when that ended was allowed to fall into disrepair. It's reopened after a few years and is thriving once more, but some of the old facilities were preserved s a kind of museum. This is how we ended up wandering around a 1950s kitchen and looking at telephone exchanges that needed an operator. Naturally, this made us late for the art centre part of the tour, so we didn't get a full look around that. To be honest, I'd have preferred to have overrun at the art centre and cut back on the kitchen.
Afterwards, we went to eat in a restaurant on the harbour front. It was a seafood restaaurant, because this is Asturias so what else could it be? Happily, they had alternatives for people such as me who go to seafood restaurants without liking seafood.
I'm sure someone will have picked up the hotel umbrella I inadvertantly left there.
This morning, I was given a packed breakfast, which was a nice touch. It really hit the spot, and I scoffed it before going through security. The roads to the airport were almost completely empty, which I attribute to the fact that 7am in Spain is like 5am or 6am anywhere else. This being a Saturday also perhaps contributed.
Perhaps surprisingly for people who haven't been to a Games Executives Summit Europe before, but not for those of us who have, from the chaos of the two days emerged some actual conclusions:
- Gaames studios will become smaller as more work is done either by AI or by specialist teams brought in on a project-by-project basis.
- Finance will remain a problem, because what's saved in development will need to be spent on marketing.
- More people will return to working in the office, but not programmers because they're not people.
Either the students of Gíjon throw themselves into the spirit of Hallowe'en, or they're crazies who must be avoided at all costs, I took no photos, sorry, in cse they were the latter.