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What's it really like to work in the gaming industry?

Canadian-made Indie Game: The Movie will be making its world premiere as an official selection in World Documentary Competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Indie Game: The Movie was created by Winnipeg's James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot. They've been working on the project for over a year, gathering stories from game developers all over North America. The film has been solely funded by their personal savings and the support of the gaming community through two successful crowdsourcing campaigns, raising $100,000 for the production.

Becoming an official selection of Sundance is a pretty big deal. Last year, 3,812 feature films were submitted (796 in the world documentary category) and of those films only 14 were selected for competition in the World Documentary Category.

Check out the trailer below and if you're in the gaming industry, let us know in the comments if this looks like it is representative of working in the Canadian gaming industry.

Toronto-based Waygoz allows Canadians to swap video games for free

Waygoz is an online platform that allows you to trade video games for free based on a points system which represents the trade value of each game. Then you meet up with your fellow trader at a designated location such as Starbucks or Tim Hortons when you've made a successful trade. 

Waygoz Product Manager Josh Kerbel said that a lot of people have been ripped off as there is low trade-in valuation at stores like Best Buy, Gamestop and EB Games and he wanted to change that in a $2.5 billion dollar used video game industry.

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Are Video Games Rewiring Our Brains?

Youth who play video games at above average levels have different structures and activity levels in their brain, particularly in areas of the brain linked to reward, new research suggests.

A study published today in science journal Translational Psychiatry revealed that frequent gamers have a higher volume of grey matter in a key part of the brain—the ventral striatum, or the human reward centre.

“These findings demonstrate that the ventral striatum plays a significant role in excessive video game playing and contributes to our understanding of behavioural addiction,” Simone Kuehn and Juergen Gallinat wrote in their study.

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Give Our Stock Back or Be Fired: Inside Zynga's Highly Controversial Gambit

Mark Pincus is already reputably infamous for doing anything possible to achieve "success." And yet, somehow, this latest-to-surface gambit of his still surprises me.

A new report released by the Wall Street Journal reveals that the Zynga CEO and his clan of top executives determined many months ago that they messed up. How? According to industry sources, they felt that they had issued too much stock to early employees. They made a mistake in their eyes… and instead of learning from it for the future, they decided to reverse their errors in a rather forceful manner.

The execs made a list of employees whose contributions failed to justify their potential cash windfall when Zynga went public using what could only be a highly subjective method. And then these employees became unexpectedly faced with a ludicrous ultimatum: give their unvested stock back to the company…

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Women in digital media profile series: Jade Raymond on gaming and work-life balance

Jade Raymond photoAt the age of 14, Jade Raymond, Managing Director and Studio Head at Ubisoft Toronto had an epiphany. She knew that she wanted to work in the gaming industry. Her favourite subjects in school were Math and Art, and gaming seemed to lend itself well to both disciplines.

She held on to that dream and has built a career around producing highly successful video games.

A year and a half ago, Raymond moved her family (with a five month old daughter in tow) from Montreal to Toronto to start-up the Ubisoft Toronto office. In a very short time period, she grew the team from zero to over one-hundred and ninety employees and counting.

She believes that a good leader must have a strong vision and an inspiring direction for their team to follow. They must also be direct and never take no for an answer.

I caught up with the very accomplished Raymond at the International Women in Digital Media Summit last week to find out more about how she got her start in gaming and how she manages work-life balance.

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Björk joins Montreal's Arcade Fire in making interactive music with world's first app album

Scott Snibbe, the founder of Scott Snibbe Studio and Snibbe Interactive said last week at the opening keynote of Interactive Ontario’s cross-media X-Summit conference that the immersive and intimate music experience had been lost in the age of the digital download.

The American interactive artist, who dabbled in various forms of interactive art for the better part of a decade and a half, helped the famous Icelandic electronic music composer Björk create the world’s first app album Biophilia which was released last month. This comes after his screen-based artwork rose to fame in the iTunes store entertainment section last year. They have been downloaded over 400,000 times.

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Canada's Video Game Industry in 2011 [Infographic]

It's well known now that Canada has a top-notch video game industry. But did you know it's the third biggest in the world with 16,000 employees, 348 companies, and a direct annual economic impact of nearly $2 billion?

With the industry poised to grow 17% over the next 2 years, it's never been a better time to be involved—especially considering those in the video game industry earn an average salary of $62,000, more than double the overall Canadian average income of just $29,000.

Infographic after the jump.

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The Rise of Mobile Social Targeting

Toronto-based Addictive Mobility has released a white paper.

Titled The Rise of Mobile Social Targeting, Addictive's research highlights the opportunities presented to advertisers by the rapid growth of social media connectivity for mobile apps.

As audiences continue to make the jump to smartphones and tablets, the number of users accessing social media on a mobile application or browser continues to rise. There has never been a better opportunity for brands and advertisers to immediately understand consumer intent and deliver the appropriate message to the correct audience. Having the technology to effectively reach this audience is crucial for mobile advertising.

Download the white paper for free here.

Ontario college launches new programs focused on filling the skill gaps of today's game devs

Sheridan College is launching two new postgraduate programs in January 2012.

Game Level Design and Game Development – Advanced Programming are two gaming programs that will offer students the opportunity to experience a realistic industry environment with designers and programmers working together to create a video game.

The Game Level Design program is the first of its kind in Ontario, and prepares students with the skills "to bring together all the different aspects of the game—narrative, characters, rules and mechanics—to create the virtual environment in which all of these elements play out," says coordinator Avrim Katzman. The program will prepare students who already hold a degree or advanced diploma in the arts with "the specialized skill set required to succeed in the industry."

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Wesley Clover backs mobile gaming studio Glitchsoft #BVF

The Banff Venture Forum's last session in the Information Technology stream is happening this afternoon at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Wesley Clover pitchman Ben Morris is on the stage again today promising to blow our minds with GlitchSoft - he pitched on behalf of WC-financed Teldio yesterday.

Founded in late 2009 Ottawa-based GlitchSoft is an independent game studio that produces and publishes games for the iOS platform using its own proprietary game development engine and tool set, called the Helios Game Engine.

To date, GlitchSoft has published 4 titles on the iOS platform (including Bar Star and Destructopus) accounting for one million downloads. Of these 200,000 were paid downloads and 800,000 were free games focused on in-game monetization.

GlitchSoft is backed by investment from the Wesley Clover Group of Companies and has received funding as a part of Wesley Clover’s Digital Media Portfolio. Through the portfolio, GlitchSoft has access to in-house digital entertainment, live action, and animation studios. All of which allow GlitchSoft to maximize flexibility for production while maintaining efficiency.