NEWS ///
NOAH DECTER-JACKSON, PRESIDENT, COMPLEX GAMES
"The support of the government is unprecedented, and the local development environment is both supportive and competitive."
News

Plugged in

January 05, 2010

Earlier this year, a retiree walked into New Media Manitoba's Waverley office and gave NMM director Kevin Hnatiuk a piece of his mind.

"He laid into me right there," Hnatiuk says with a grin, sipping a coffee at Bar Italia on Corydon. "He said, 'When I was hiring people, if they told me they had a Facebook, I'd walk their ass out the door.' I said, 'Isn't that funny? Because if someone told me they weren't on Facebook, I'd walk their ass out the door.'"

The pair went at it for a while -- "in an entertaining way," Hnatiuk says. But the spat touched on something deeper: this isn't just a generation gap. It's a sea change.

Because new media is not your grandpa's industry.

For starters, it's younger. New media professionals are overwhelmingly drawn from the first generation who can't remember life before computers: average age, about 30. Their craft is diverse: websites, video games, iPhone applications, animation. Their businesses are small, mobile and increasingly run from home.

And they are quietly assembling one of the province's most explosive industries.

In a 45-minute showcase video commissioned by NMM and debuted at a sold-out IMAX party earlier this month, MLA Jim Rondeau handed out some hard data.

"We've gone from a handful of companies to 437," he said, looking pleased. "That's about a 650 per cent increase per year for the last few years... which isn't bad."

Those numbers mean investment for NMM, which grew from a 15-person coffee klatch in 2000 to a industry-building group funded by the province in 2009. But the data is hard to pin down.

"What makes a new media company?" Hnatiuk asks. "If we define it as individuals, which many of them are, it's a lot easier to track. But what about places like Palliser? They have a new media department. What about the hobbyists? Do we count them?"

Better question: in a world where 20-year-old hobbyist Mark Zuckerberg wrote a little website called Facebook during downtime at his Harvard dorm, and parlayed it into a $32-billion business three years later, can anyone afford to discount them?

Alec Holowka was a hobbyist once, when he was an eight-year-old East Kildonan kid and his father handed him a children's computer-programming book, BASIC Fun. "So that I would do something productive with my time, instead of playing games," Holowka says.

Eighteen years later, he still looks like a kid dabbling in games: rumpled T-shirt, eyes hidden under shaggy bangs. At least, that's how some of the attendees at a New Media Manitoba job fair saw it.

"Parents would come up and I'd say, 'Hi, I'm a video-game developer.' They'd look at me like I was the spawn of Satan," Holowka recalls with a sigh. "There's this weird derisive attitude towards games. But to me, it's obvious... it's just another artistic medium."

And Holowka's one-man company, Infinite Ammo, is in the business of making art. In 2007, Holowka and online collaborator Derek Yu released a lovingly drawn game called Aquaria for a $30 download. It took the top award at San Francisco's prestigious Independent Games Festival and quickly went viral.

Now, Holowka has thousands of fans across the world. They draw Aquaria fan-art.

One arranged the game's entire score for piano; others donate up to $200 apiece to fund Infinite Ammo's next big project, Marian, which Holowka programs from his Exchange District apartment with collaborators from across the world.

"The fans will go evangelize stuff they like," Holowka says. "It's honest."

It's also portable. New media is bursting with new and repatriated Manitobans: Holowka moved back to Winnipeg in 2007, after a couple of years in Vancouver. Winnipegger Sean Lindskog quit working for gaming giants in Vancouver and Boston to come home and start his own imprint, Firedance Games.

In 2005, New Yorker Andrew Boardman moved his family and his Manoverboard web-design company, which built sites for Barneys New York and Al Gore's investment firm, to start fresh in Winnipeg.

Why Winnipeg? Easy: in an industry freed from geographical constraints by digital communication, it helps the bottom line.

In St. James, Dennis Tam spends his days, and many late nights, labouring in his home studio. He speaks softly, and plays down his own achievements: you wouldn't guess he's sort of famous everywhere but here.

Tam's company, Systematic Design, makes animated graphics for television. Big television: Fox Sports, Hockey Night in Canada, ABC News. In 2006, Tam won an Emmy for the titles he designed for Superbowl XXVIII. (He's been nominated three times.)

In Winnipeg, outside of occasional media spotlights, few took note. "It's kind of an industry-kept secret," laughs Tam, 39, of his "low-key" local profile. "On the national and international stage, people definitely know us. But I never really have representation here."

But broadcast media is changing, and Systematic is changing with it. Earlier this year, Tam hired friend Fung Wee Lim to start making inroads in the local new media market. Maybe someday, he muses, he might even open a public office.

But moving closer to his international clients? Not in the cards. "We don't have to be anywhere else," Tam says with a shrug. "Our calibre of design is just as good as a big firm from New York or London. But because we have a very low overhead being in Winnipeg, we can work behind a very competitive budget. That's why we're not afraid to compete with bigger players. We have everything to gain, and nothing to lose."

Tam recently gave a sold-out seminar on digital animation for 60 New Media Manitoba members. "We want to empower the community here," Lim says. "To have more people be aware that Winnipeg is not just a city that people hide in. There's so much you can do by not isolating yourself."

There's a lesson in that. With the global market at Winnipeg fingertips and local demand for new media services reportedly at a peak, people in new media aren't getting proprietary. Instead, they're becoming pals.

"No one's being selfish right now, because (demand) is not maxing out," says video producer Doug Darling, 30, who launched Tripwire Media Group with buddy David Lewis in August. By December, they'd added a third staffer, a web development arm, and 25 clients.

"A good example is with Blinkworks (the company that made the NMM showcase video). They did exactly what we want to be doing, and I wanted to know how they did it... so we're going out for breakfast on Wednesday. There are a lot of tricks of the trade to learn, and people are willing to share it. It's amazing to be included in something so big."

How big will it get? Hard to say: the industry is dogged by a lack of programmers and IT specialists, Hnatiuk says. NMM is focusing on building its members' sometimes shaky entrepreneurial skills; in the software and gaming sector, training options are still lean.

That's starting to change. Complex Games recently launched a video game training program; the University of Winnipeg ran a 10-week gaming course last summer, and the province launched an interactive-digital-media tax credit in 2008 to encourage new projects.

Of course, there's something to be said for not being the biggest Next Big Thing. "What I'm afraid of is if the Winnipeg scene grows too much, too quickly," Holowka says.

"It would suck up a lot of talent that could be used for unique things. Five years ago, I never would have imagined what's happening, and the key to that is diversity. Right now is the best it's ever been in Winnipeg. What I'm worried about is that that stays preserved."

New media by the numbers

IN the last two years, provincial money has flowed into the new media sector, hoping to position Manitoba to snap up a larger piece of a seemingly unstoppable boom industry. The figures from the province's ministry of Innovation, Energy and Mines, at a glance:

$150,000: Provincial support for New Media Manitoba to create a trade-mission showcase video, the province's first-ever online directory, and other initiatives, in 2009.

$300,000: Size of the province's Manitoba Interactive Digital Media Fund, which has supported new media projects like an online television series and a classroom space-shuttle simulator.

$500,000: The maximum refundable corporate income credit for 40 per cent of labour costs under the Manitoba Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit, a program unveiled in 2008 to spur new development in the sector.

$500 million: The estimated gross revenue of the estimated 5,000 people employed in interactive digital media industry in the three Prairie provinces in 2008. (Source: 2008 Canadian Interactive Industry Profile.)

$66 billion: The estimated size of the digital new media market in Canada, by 2011.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 26, 2009


Back to Archive


/// TOP 		LINKS