By John Powell Below is an interview I had with one of the organizers of the Video Game Tournament at Texas A&M University mentioned in the article that inspired me to hold an IEEE VideoGame Tournament in the triangle area. (see Video Games Unite Students, An article by Anna Bogdanowicz on Video Game Tournaments at MIT and Texas A&M University) I hope this will help kick off a discussion on how we can start organizing & planning our own Video Game Tournament. E.g, What should we do the same? What should we do differently? What goals (in addition to having lots of fun) would you like to try to meet? Interview between John Powell and Austin McClintock: Austin McClintock Intern Hewlett Packard @ Research Park Chair IEEE Texas A&M [John] Hi Austin, First I’d like to congratulate you on coming up with a great idea and carrying it through successfully. As we’re just starting out, I have some real basic questions so far: 1. How big was your planning committee? [Austin] We do all of our planning within our officer corps. We had about 8 officers at the time. Most of the details were worked out between two officers dedicated to the task. [John] 2. How many student members and how many IEEE professionals? [Austin] We had over a hundred student members (only a couple dozen of which participated). I don’t think any IEEE professions partook in this event. Our event was open to all students. [John] 3. How long did it take to plan the event? [Austin] Planning for the event started about 2 months prior to execution. [John] 4. What did the high-level planning schedule look like? [Austin] Basically we needed to start early and acquire an adequate number of tables and chairs. We then positioned these tables in a way which was convenient in terms of power access, power distribution, network access and ease of movement. Our Chair at the time had access to a large number of Cisco routing equipment and was very handy with networking. Before the event started, we had every sign in, write down the computer equipment that they brought with them, and give us the MAC address of their local machines. This was all part of our security procedure to eliminate theft and network piracy. During the activities, we placed IEEE officers at all of the exits to monitor all foot traffic and make sure there wasn’t somebody walking out with someone else’s stuff. We had an officer monitoring the network administrators computer which also hosted dedicated servers. Another couple of officers were proctoring the HALO tournaments that we had going on in server lecture rooms on the projector systems. Only thing left was clean up after everything was over. [John] 5. Did you look for sponsors first, secure a location first? [Austin] The only sponsor we had was the on campus computer center which lent us several Cisco switches and routers for the event. [John] 6. Once your initial planning was complete, what major tasks were there? E.g. advertizing, setup crew, prize coordinator, etc? [Austin] Our advertising was limited mostly to email listserv messages, and fliers. [John] 7. What were the most difficult tasks? [Austin] The most difficult task was maintaining surveillance. In retrospect, we should have found more people to help run the event. Many of our officers began getting tired and need relief. If I were to do it again, I would have shorter shifts where people could go home and sleep if they wanted. [John] 8. Any lessons learned? [Austin] We didn’t have a problem with power, but you need to make sure that if you plan on having a bunch of computers draw from a single circuit, you are [John] That’s all for now. Thanks for your help. |
IEEE VideoGame Tournement |