Denis Dyack's Dream Of A Canadian Gamedev Kibbutz

Despite the pictured fawning nymphs, Denis Dyack makes himself a tough guy to love. After a bit of a nutty rant on the 1UP podcast last year regarding Too Human and how those who didn't care for the plodding looter didn't "get" the game because it was "so innovative and different," gamers may not put much stock the Silicon Knights president's recent outline of his plans for a videogame co-operative community in Ontario, Canada:

Well, we want to create an institute here that's a combination of companies like Silicon Knights , Niagara College, Brock University all in a co-op program where we're all in the same complex or campus so that people live and breathe making videogames and other forms of non-linear creations. So imagine a place where not only will you be instructed about how to make videogames, but you would have people in the industry teaching you.

A creative collective that breaks traditional group structure and hierarchy does indeed sound pretty awesome, although I'm not sure Dyack is the nutter I'd tap for the job. But although endeavors such as the EA-sponsored Game Innovation Lab at USC are already accomplishing some of Dyack's aspirations, one of the few thinks for which you can fault Dyack is daring to dream big:

It's at the proposal stage. We're speaking to various members of the government now, we just put some meetings together over the past three or four weeks and hopefully it will happen over the next few years. Everyone seems very excited about it. If you look at all the recent ideas and subsidies in Ontario it's all built around the three pillars of government, industry and academia. This builds upon that whole plan. I would love to see it become a world centre of excellence for videogames.

Silicon Knights employees already help foster the kind of environment Dyack longs for, contributing their time to local universities and raising the next generation of game devs. Lets hope they learn the lesson about extremely slow unskippable resurrection cutaways. That's all I ask.

Ok, that and a request that the commune keep male strippers available for press shots as well as bikini babes wielding microphones.

Denis Dyack Part One [GamesIndustry.biz]
[via GamePolitics]