Given our own incubation and indie culture interests in TAG and GRAND this is certainly important news. Click on over to Jason della Rocca’s Reality Panic blog to see the latest news on the impending establishment of a professional level game incubator in Montreal based on ideas Jason has been kicking around for some time.
As I understand it the idea here is not to try and produce a “fresh out of college” incubation experience but rather to provide a platform for mid-career moves into indie development. Until now this was something individuals designers had to handle themselves and mid-career bootstrapping in any field is bad enough… in the game dev world it can be very daunting.
But game dev cultures have been changing quickly and as Jen Whitson argues so cogently (in her soon to be completed PhD thesis) there are palpable cultural and economic pressures at work that make ‘beyond-entry-level’ indie development a viable pathway (that’s a teaser since Jen will soon start a postdoc at TAG).
Call it a radical Canadian experiment if you like but for game studies researchers as well as student, indie and mainstream designers worldwide, this new effort will be an important one to follow.
Congrats to Jason and his collaborators and to all the folks who manage to find a spot in the first cohort through the door!