WIGI at E3 2011

Congratulations to Women in Games International and Blacks in Gaming for a fabulous showing at E3 this year!

WIGI kicked off the week on Monday with a special E3 edition WAM—Women and Men networking mixer at Busby’s in Santa Monica. Our Los Angeles WAM sponsor, TriplePoint, teamed up with Nyco and others to provide ten raffle goodie bags with special Nyco Wii controllers.

The event had a great mix of regulars, locals and folks in town just for E3 meeting, greeting and playing Skee Ball and Galaga in the arcade room.

WIGI’s Los Angeles WAM meets the first Monday of every month from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. In July, we’ll postpone the event to the second Monday, July 11th, in observance of the 4th of July holiday. See you then!

On Wednesday night, WIGI partnered with Blacks in Gaming for the Third Annual WIGI/BIG E3 party. My biggest thanks go to Amy Allison and mOcean for their great work and invaluable support of the event!

Amy is a member of the WIGI Executive Team and suggested the fabulous idea of adding women’s Roller Derby to the E3 party at a planning meeting for the event. I kinda blinked, thought about saying, “No way, we can’t make it happen,” and then realized it was WIGI, BIG, Amy and the team and said, “Let’s go for it!”

Amy’s crew, the Angel City Roller Girls, teamed up with us to create a one-of-a-kind E3 party that will not be forgotten! http://www.angelcityderbygirls.com/

A giant posse of women on skates took over the dance floor at high end downtown nightclub Exchange LA for some fabulous video game-themed tricks, stunts and skits. Check out the photos and see if you can find Ms. PacMan and other famous characters. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.223403917683792.64461.149024965121688

Women in Games International and Blacks in Gaming are non-profit orgs that depend on sponsor contributions for all events and programs. The E3 party was sponsored by mOcean, the Art Institutes of California, the Los Angeles Film School, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Frozen Codebase, GameSalad, Konami and Ubisoft. Each one of these supporters provided cash to pay for the venue, food, drinks and incidentals to make the party happen. If you get a chance, thank them for supporting diversity in the video game industry. They’re awesome!

We had fabulous event staff including DJ Voomz on the turntables (so to speak…;-), Emcee Dumptruck announcing the Roller Derby antics and Christopher Seguin on still camera. Check them out at these links:
http://voomz.net/
http://about.me/Dumptruck
http://christopherseguinphotography.com/

I’d also like to thank event volunteers Dominique Grinnell for organizing the door staff and Heather Decker, Louise Nemschoff, Jenni Petot, Beverly Reyes, Anne Toole and Paul Trowe for working the door.

Thanks to everyone who attended the party and special thanks to our sponsors and the Angel City Roller Girls. Stay tuned for more fabulous stuff from Women in Games International!