A Few Thoughts From Visby

So.

Visby.

I fly in on a Fokker 500, a 50-seat twin engine prop job from Stockholm. There are thirteen rows of seats on the plane, numbered 1-14. On my flight back, the back couple of rows are filled with a large traveling party who are clearly and hugely enjoying each others’ company. They laugh the whole flight, and when turbulence bumps the plane up or down (or both, or left and right), they laugh uproariously.

There’s a recreated Viking croft across the street from Visby airport. It’s about all the Viking I see all week, apart from being conversationally pillaged by a guy named Ragnar at the conference after-party. Very enthusiastic, very nice guy, Ragnar, and very concerned for his friends on one of the project teams. I think I just need to learn a few additional phrases of Swedish, like “I’m sorry, but I’m freezing my ass off out here and need t go inside because like an idiot, I forgot how far north Sweden was and packed mainly t-shirts like the one I’m wearing now and did I mention I’m freezing my sweet bippie off?”

I’m fairly sure that one doesn’t translate.

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When I get in to my hotel – complete with long corridors, occasional stone walls, a model of the Vasa, a sauna, and what appears to be a second floor garden – there’s a message waiting: dinner for the guests who are in town at the restaurant that serves the best bouliiabaise in Visby. The restaurant is on Stora Torget, which is a couple of blocks from the hotel, but it takes me roughly fifteen minutes to dope this out by way of some printed maps and confusion over whether they’re actually saying “Here’s where the Target store is.”

There’s no Target there; “Torg” means “Square” (as I should have remembered from Malmo), and on the square is a titanic ruined church. It’s just walls and the ribs of the ceiling now, and it’s titanic and magnificent and looming up over the parking lot like an unearthed dinosaur skeleton picked clean by ravens. As the days progress, I discover that Visby – old Visby, anyway – is positively chockablock with ancient, crumbling churches. Develop a good eye for 13th century church architecture and you can orient yourself instantly, depending on which lapsed apse or arrant nave is peeking over the local red-tile rooftops.

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Visby is a World Heritage Site, which I did not know until I got there, and which is posted on all of the signs at all of the gates into and out of the old walled city. And it is walled, make no mistake about that – five meters high all the way around, with 23 towers and various gates and what appears to be a retired but still functional trebuchet plopped out in front of one stretch of wall facing the sea. Some of the towers are crumbling, some have stairs so you can ascend and gaze out, watching for longboats or cruise ships (take your pick), and some are right up on top of houses. My friend Mirjam’s place has a tower – supposedly a haunted one – right in her backyard. She’s let the bushes grow up to obscure the window facing it; no sense letting the tourists peek in, after all. And the spirits under the tree in her back yard keep the ghosts – the tower was apparently the local gaol once, and lots of folks died there, badly – at bay.

At least, so the story goes. And who am I to argue?

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My last day in Visby, Mirjam and I take a walk. She’s a professor at Gotland University, the school putting on the conference, and one of the most astonishingly nice people I’ve ever met. Her nickname in the cutthroat games of Family Business that pop up at game conferences is “Mittens”; a stark contrast to names like “Mickey da Fitch” and “The Frenchman” and “Purple Face Bang” that are more common.

As we’re strolling through the Arboretum, Mirjam borrowing my camera every so often to take pictures of flowers (hers is in possession of a seriously dead battery), she mentions something about the trilobites in her garden.

“Trilobites?” I say. I love trilobites. Love love love them. First fossil I ever got, in the days when all I read was dinosaur books and I was convinced I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up, was a trilobite roughly an inch and a half long, pressed into a gray slate matrix. Intellectually, I understand that when alive they almost certainly looked like giant pillbugs and probably would have been unpleasantly horrific critters to have around, but that doesn’t matter. Trilobites!

“Yes, trilobites,” Mirjam says. “You just go down to the beach and pick them up.”

Several noises exit my mouth at this point. I’m fairly certain they all came together to mean “It would be absolutely smashing, if you’re feeling amenable, if we were to go down to the strand and perhaps take a speculative gander at some of the local sedimentary material in case there’s a hint of evidence of Paleozoic invertebrates, which is to say, fossils.” Mijram later tells me I just said, “Trilobites? Whee!” a lot. But she likes picking through rocks for fossils, too, and so we stump down to the rocky beach and start rummaging through pebbles.

She’s got the better eye, and finds more, especially of the smaller stuff, at first. I’ve got a little more background knowledge and can identify worm tracks and crinoids and coral and so forth. Gradually a small pyramid of fossiliferous stuff piles up, as we bash rocks apart looking for particularly juicy fossils or just the fun of bashing rocks.

No trilobites emerge. But that’s OK. And when we determine we have enough – me to bring back spoils for my nephew and my goddaughter, both of whom have been bitten by the science bug , her to fix some gaps in her garden – we wander off to the Yellow House café for what I am told is a very Visby dessert of saffron pancakes with elderberries.

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This is the first time I’ve been asked to judge a student competition. I’ve done student critique before, but  nothing like this – a convention center filled up with booths a la E3, arcade cabinets for the first year students’ projects and larger showcases for the second and third years’ work. There’s two sessions of project presentations to watch, followed by Q&A sessions – I find myself being particularly energetic in grilling the students – and then time for us to walk around and play the games and do our best Jury-esque duty in rating the games and providing useful feedback.

There are eight or so folks on the jury panel I’m part of, chaired by Mirjam. Bonnie Ruberg, a PhD student in new media who gives the opening talk of the conference, is on there. So’s Eric Jacopin, from the Academy of St. Cyr, and Swedish game journalist Oskar Skog, and a few other cool folks from various nooks and corners of the industry. Later, Bonnie and I will figure out that not only are we both from Philly, but we’re actually both from the same suburb, and that we grew up roughly four blocks (and more than a decade) apart.  Also, she’d written the “Top 20 Game Writers” article I was mentioned in a few years back, and our paths had crossed unknowingly once or twice on top of that.

Small world indeed.

The projects we saw ranged from the polished and playable to the “great idea, now consider making an actual game” to “the members of this team should not be allowed to work together again or there may be bloodshed”. And there was good stuff, there and on the show floor, inventive games that didn’t necessarily restrict themselves to typical genres or control schemes or conceptions. The students, to their credit, weren’t there to be told they were pretty snowflakes of game development. Again and again, after playing something, I’d hear, “So what did you think? What can we do better?” and then would follow discussion, and suggestion, and other various good stuff.

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The illustrious Ernest Adams was there. He’s got a partial professorship at Gotland, and he’d been tapped as the Master of Ceremonies at the awards presentation, and he’d  managed to completely forget where we’d met before (various GDC type things and a dinner for the RIT Advisory Board, among others). After a while the conference scene tends to blur; there’s so many and such cross-pollination between them, and the social set you develop at conferences takes on a life of its own. I’m fairly certain there’s a conference somewhere every week of the year; it would be entirely possible to go from show to show (if you could get someone to pay for it; then again, go to enough shows and you may become enough of a presence that you get invited to speak, which means you get invited to more shows, which means…the mind, it boggles) and never stop to actually make a game.

Lots of kids at the show are wearing top hats, and not just the ones working on the Burton-esque evil circus game. Ernest and I run into each other on the stairs at one point, and I tell him that the kids are stealing his shtick.

He laughs.

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The third night I’m there, I walk around at midnight and take pictures. It doesn’t get quite dark, at least not while I’m still wandering the streets. Stars are out and the sky has deepened, but down to the south and west there’s a lighter band on the horizon. And I have a new camera that does all sorts of marvelously spooky things with low light, and the city is awash in the skeletons of old churches, and off I go.

I end up lurking mainly around St. Maria’s, the one big, spiffy church in town. When the Hanseatic League pulled out of Gotland, the resultant population drop and economic crash meant there was only enough resource-wise to support one big church on the island. The beached whale in Stora Torget was one of the losers of that fight; St. Maria’s was the winner. The wife of Steven BAtchelor, one of the professors at Gotland, preaches there; there are ancient stone slabs propped up outside against the churchyard wall with weathered inscriptions in Latin. But the church is beautiful, and its bells ring out at all the proper times, and the bits of the interior I see – there was a funeral in progress when I wandered in, so I stayed clear of the sanctuary – are impressive.

But I like it better at midnight.

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There’s a reception for the conference at the Governor’s Mansion. The invitation says “elegantly casual”, and absolutely nobody knows what that means. I suffer a panic attack before leaving town over this, and run home to adjust the contents of my suitcase to add slacks, braces, shoes, a nice shirt, and a tie. Ernest dolls himself up into a suit; others range the gamut from cleaning up real nice to wearing t-shirts and jeans, and our host and hostess clearly aren’t used to having mobs like this in the place.

Ulf, one of the conference organizers, and I wander around the place at the insistence of said host, who is clearly quite proud of the residence. Ulf’s what you’d call a natural kind of guy, enthusiastic and unrestrained and not necessarily always tuned in to social airs and graces because, well, they’re really not important to what he’s doing. We wander around for a bit, discussing furniture and paintings and the fact that the place was built in 1647 and thus is older than the US – when he spots a bowl of walnuts.

“Watch this,” he says, and crushes a couple of them in his hands. Ulf, in case you were wondering, works out. He wears shorts every day of the show, and later he’ll be described as “the man with no pants but a plan.”

“You think these are good?”

I shake my head, “No telling how old they are.”

“Still.” He pops one in his mouth and chews speculatively for a minute, then starts to look unpleasantly surprised. “I think you’re right,” he says, and tries to hide the broken shells in another dish of ancient, but not fossilized, walnuts.


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The flag of Gotland shows a long-legged sheep holding a flag. Sheep are big here. So’s lamb. The local crafts gift shop is full of sheepy things – sheepskin vests, slippers, pouches, yarn, unspun wool, you name it. There’s glass there, too. But mostly sheep in its various crafty permutations.

 I never do figure out how it manages to hold the flag.

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The Yellow House, according to Mirjam, is the best café in Visby. It is, indeed, a house, and it is yellow. The hours are erratic, as the owner runs it as a hobby, because he likes making pastry. The kitchen is literally a kitchen, and you can accidentally wander into it while perusing the randomly assorted cakes.

Mirjam insists, when we arrive, that I get the most Gotlandy thing on the menu, which is a saffron pancake with elderberries. 

It is delicious. And there are no hamsters to be seen anywhere.

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Bonnie’s husband, Scott, is not part of the Cheltenham Mafia, but he’s from Yardley, which is close enough for jazz. He’s also a very sharp game designer and a great guy in general, and he and I coined the term “Frite Bro” to describe what happened to us over a shared bowl of French fries at a restaurant Wednesday night. (Don’t ask)

Sunday night, over dinner, he asks if anyone at the table – a motley mix of guests and Gotland folk – if they’ve ever played Ninja. None of us have. He asks if we want to, and since it’s, well, a game, we all do, and then the next thing you know we’re in the library of the university doing our best to make “single fluid motions”  and keep a feather aloft and make paper airplanes and… (Note: feathers and paper airplanes are not, strictly, part of the rules of Ninja) while onlookers gaze in though the big glass windows and wonder what the bloody hell is going on.

And I realize, right around the time my second paper airplane nearly does a Capt. Sully in the sedate fountain along the outside windows, that we have in fact fallen into a montage from The Breakfast Club, and that there are maybe two of us in the room, myself included, old enough to remember what that means.

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Thursday, I mostly just walked. Stuck a book in my jacket pocket – yes, I needed a jacket, it’s still the Baltic, people – and wandered through the town and along the coast. Outside of Visby to the north, past the trebuchet and the last of the walls and the medical helicopter landing pad with a name that just didn’t translate to English (Note: the ice cream was worse for that sort of thing. One was called “Plopp”. Another was “Bris”. I realize it is not the responsibility of anyone to make sure anything sounds correct in every language out there, but I don’t think I’m a bad person for being amused by the incongruity there), I found a bench. It faced the water. So I sat on it, and pulled out my book, and read “In the Halls of the Martian Kings”, by John Varley. I did this because I could, and because I could not conceive of anything possibly better I could have done at that moment.

Later, I climbed one of the tourist-accessible sections of the wall and perched precariously and read another story from the same collection. Bliss.

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Bonnie and Scott and Anneke and Mirjam and I trooped back to Mirjam’s place while we were waiting for our dinner reservation to open up one night. It’s lovely, tucked up against the wall as noted above, and we all tumbled into her living room to talk about ideas for games with a romance-based mechanic. (sorry, folks, no spoilers). Eventually, we looked at the time and tumbled back out again, and along the way we told ghost stories because, well, that’s my thing. Mirjam mentioned a place in town that has three floors, but can only use one for events because the other two are…supposedly supernaturally problematic.

And that was that. We got back to the restaurant, rejoined the rest of the merry band, and had dinner. Once again, there was Frite Bro-ing.

Sunday. Mirjam and I had brunch at a restaurant called The Russian Garden. The proprietor was very solicitous, making sure I had a proper Visby meal (potato “body cakes” stuffed with bacon and onion and served with ligonberry jam, and a local beverage that tasted faintly of apples), the interior was done entirely in large pieces of wood, and it was a grand meal.

After we paid up and left, Mirjam said, “And that’s the floor they can use.”

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Wandering abandoned 13th century churches is fun. Wandering abandoned 13th century churches that are theoretically tourist attractions and thus are occasionally open to the public is lots of fun. Wandering abandoned 13th century churches that have discreetly tucked away stairwells that let you climb up a level and make your way around the periphery at a dizzying height of twenty or so feet with the sunlight streaming in through the gap in the roof and the occasional one in the wall and the windows that are actually supposed to be there, along with the narrow, dark bits of passage that’s more appropriately medieval, and of course ravens everywhere the eye can see, and…

Well.

You had to be there.
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When I first got my schedule, I checked it twice. After all, I had presentations to observe on one day of the conference, and that was it. I’m used to being overscheduled, running ragged, yea verily running amuck, with meetings and informal get-togethers and round tables and Stuff That Has To Get Done crammed into every single moment. One day of watching pitches? Piece of cake, right?

Then again, maybe not. A day of pitches, two sessions’ worth. And a couple of talks I wanted to see. And all of those games to play. And notes to compare with the other jurors. And the games to play again. And time to sit down and talk with the teams about what I think they might want to try. And then playing them again, and writing up the feedback, and agonizing over it, and rewriting it, and generally being juror-ish.

I played all the games in my category. I played most of the games in the others. I didn’t get to see any of the animation entrants – no time. Thank God they weren’t on my docket.

And I will never pre-judge a schedule again.