The Gathering 2007 Still Puzzled?

Behind the Scenes

Have you ever wondered who and what makes the world's greatest computer party so great? Or that behind the internet connection, the game tournaments and scene shows just to name a few, there are dedicated teams of highly skilled people that work hard to make everything run smoothly? This year, info:content is proud to present to you, a behind the scenes tour and talk with some of the people who work behind the scenes to give you an awesome experience.

Event:Demo The first stop on the tour is the demo room where the demo crew lives. I caught up with some nice guys there who told me more about what they were doing. First they look through all the demos that are being submitted and makes sure there isn't anything previously released, offensive or otherwise bad material in them. They also provide the machines that will run the demos in the various compos later, and otherwise makes sure things work as smooth as possible.

The demo crew are also responsible for sending out information regarding rules, various compos, their schedule and similar.

When I visited them Thursday, they were a bit busy looking through the contributions to the two compos that was being held, but they still had the time to give us some info about their work. Yay for demo crew!

Event:Game Of course, one can not talk to the demo crew without talking to their counterparts in event:game. Therefore I made my way over to the game crew where the always charming MeJ was delighted to give us a brief talk about what they do. -Some of the guys come up here on Monday to set up the room and prepare for the others to come on Tuesday, when it all breaks loose for us. We then get all the crew members together and really work hard to get it ready. This is the day that everything has to be ready and set up for when the participants come. Of course, we will plan stuff and solve lots of problems during the party as well.

Other tasks the game crew does is to make and set the rules and pick out prices for the game compos and send it over to info for them to publish.

Event:Vision It's not that we endorse the event crews in particular, it's just that they are doing lots of interesting stuff and work a lot behind the scenes which this article is about. Anyways, the vision crew was the next stop on the route.

I first encountered with the scene:tech team whose job is make sure that the material the rest of the crew makes finds it way to the scene and looks good. They also rig stuff up and are the ones who decide what kind of music to play on the speakers and how high. -We play whatever we feel like playing at any given point, said Henrik one of the people I had a chat with about their work.

I also had some chats with the rest of the vision crew who in general explained that the vision crew makes the visual reports from the gathering and plan and make videos like the ones that was showed on the screens during the opening ceremony.

Tech:Server Tech:Server is one of the most important crews at the party. Before the party starts, they put up the DHCP servers, DNS servers and SMTP servers for outbound e-mail. They have also put up the web camera and ubuntu booting over the network, which I must add, is a really cool feature.

Server work together with tech:net to provide the internet connection to the outside world, and they also monitor the internet traffic and makes sure that everything is running smoothly.

Server work together with tech:net to provide the internet connection to the outside world, and they also monitor the internet traffic and makes sure that everything is running smoothly.

Another interesting thing they do is being in charge of the video streaming and MBD which makes it possible for the participants to play network games with everybody in the arena, not just those who shares your switch.

In the end we want to thank every crew member for making this an awesome party and with a special thanks to those who told us about their routines and let us onto their turf for a while.

vilde - 06 April, 2007 00:25