I thought I might start posting a brief overview of the Auckland Game Developer meetups we have every month.

Mike Porter, formerly of Terminal Reality, Sierra, FASA, Microsoft Aces et al, now an art tutor at the Media Design School, gave a facinating talk on his long career in the industry. Highlight for me was his talk about his experiences with working on Microsoft Train Simulator 2 and Microsoft ESP (Hybrid Train/Plane/Vehicle simulator for professional training), unfortunately both of those were cancelled and the studio shut down.

Stephen Knightly of game design consultancy ingame gave a lecture his findings about Gamification, applying game like mechanics (Such as giving points, achievements, tradable items etc) to websites. He intends to post some of the lecture on Playmaker so I'll link through to it when he does.

Edit - Stephen has now posted Gamification links on Playmaker - http://playmaker.org.nz/forum/community/game-development/gamification-links

Also, as a humorous coda I did a brief show and tell about the TV3/Kevin Butler saga. Basically, New Zealand's TV3 ran an ad that was a blatant ripoff of a Kevin Butler Playstation 3 ad. Fortunately Sony took it in good humour, and Kevin let them off the hook in exchange for some Kiwi goods.