Think you have to go to GDC to meet cool & influential game folks? Think again! This month alone, the Hand Eye Society is hosting three (3) free indie industry events. This one features Kelly Wallick, the current chairperson for the Independent Games Festival held every year in San Francisco, and is the Overlord of the Indie MEGABOOTH. She’ll chat on stage with past Hand Eye Society Board President Cindy Poremba from the kokoromi collective (responsible for the groundbreaking GAMMA exhibitions) and a past IndieCade co-chair.

Do you have questions about game festivals or exhibitions? Selection processes or curation? These two are the ones to ask! Given that we’re going with an “In Discussion With” format (which went well for our Kentucky Route Zero event) we are polling the community for questions in advance.

GO HERE TO ASK KELLY OR CINDY A QUESTION
We are also taking the opportunity to launch our own discoverability tool…

The Beta Launch of the Toronto Videogame Database

After a year of several pizza nights and the nearly endless digging through the deep interwebs for games unknown, we are super pleased to announce the official beta launch of the Toronto Videogame Database.

The Toronto Videogame Database, or roughly referred to as the TOVGDB (toe-vig-duh-buh), is an online, tag-centric collection of games aimed at listing as many games created in the Greater Toronto Area and by Greater Toronto-based artists as possible.

At the event, please join us in taking a public look at the database, learning more about how you can get your game recorded for eternity, and considering the importance of game history and how it’s up to the community to preserve, remember, and celebrate our own work. We are also looking for ways that we can improve the database in order to make it more accessible and user-friendly. 

EDIT: Access to the database will be shared online after the event as we are cleaning it up in anticipation for our first public launch.

A super special thanks goes out to all those who helped make the database a reality: to Sean Lerner who developed the database, to Chris White who designed all the delightful visuals, to Chris J. Young who created a thorough data entry guide, to all the volunteers both online and offline who found and entered the games into the database, to the OMDC for funding this amazing project, and thank you to everyone else who had a part in helping us out, we couldn’t have done any of this without you!

As this project is a continuing work-in-progress, we are looking for ways to sustain its maintenance as well as to sustain the people who maintain it. If you are interested in helping to support the TOVGDB, please contact us at info@handeyesociety.com or chat with us at the event!

Thanks to EGLX for sponsoring the event!