I'm going to turn this over to Converge, who's the DCG main point of contact for all of us. He's going to go through a little bit of a history. I'm going to try to keep up with him on the slides, so we'll see. I'm not really a good public speaker, so if you could be a little bit less public, I think it'll work out better. DEF CON groups is kind of an interesting thing. It was an idea that started back on the forums back in, I think around late 2002, and it was formalized as an idea that was presented at DEF CON 11 back in 2003.  I was one of the POCs that started a group back in DC 207, back in Maine, and I found, are you Mainers? Right on, right on. And proceeded to find absolutely no one in Maine that was a hacker. Yeah, so the goal was personally to find a group of people that I could meld with, sit down, work on projects with, and just have a really good time, and that didn't happen. So, I set off personally on my own venture across the country and found myself in Portland, Oregon, where I did find a bunch of hackers, and we, do we have 503 in the house? How many 503 years we have in here? There's one, I know there's at least two of us.  But it kind of ebbed and flowed. People got busy, people worked, people had personal lives, and I worked, I had personal life-ish. So, I moved up to Seattle, and I've been a part of the Seattle crew for, I don't know, a few years now. And the groups, the groups have existed for that time and have really been doing things autonomously. But the question has always been, what are the other groups actually doing?  So, around the time I was starting to ask that question, I was starting to realize, and many other folks were starting to realize that the DEF CON groups coordinator was MIA, which is kind of a problem if you're trying to coordinate something and the person who's doing it isn't there. Things go quiet. So groups aren't able to make updates, groups aren't able to say, hey, we're out here, groups that disappear just disappear. And the list of groups that we had went completely out of sorts. When I took it on, there were over 170 groups. Afterwards, I think we're down to about 90. Out of the 170, over 100 of them just didn't respond. They were just inactive. So the 90 groups that we have now are strong.  But the question still remains, now that we know who's out there, what do we do? And I think that's where the panel steps in today. Okay, so we've got a group of point of contacts up here that are pretty diverse. I'm Anch. I'm the point of contact for DC 503 to Portland, Oregon. Right now, our membership is three. But we died back in 2007 when we were starting to grow again. So we're starting to kind of ramp things back up again. We meet at a hacker space. It's pretty cool.  Black, he's DC 225. Word. Anarchy Angel and Inji Haro. They're DC 414. Represent. We've got Isaac and Ian for DC 9723. Represent. Yeah. We've got generic superhero and Lando from the Black Lodge. Oh yeah. We've got Romer from the analogated space. Drink motherfucker. And we've got Converge who's the DEF CON group key master. With that, kind of how we're going to run this panel is going to be an open kind of discussion. We're going to talk a little bit about how groups operate, what we're doing to kind of get them to grow, how hacker spaces work. We want you guys to participate too. And so I'm going to start off the discussion by asking these guys a couple questions and they'll go ahead and talk about what they want to talk about and answer and banter back and forth. And if you guys have questions, please come up, use the microphone, ask a question, and we'll just kind of keep this as a rolling discussion. All right. Here we go. Oh yeah. And these will play pictures of the various groups that we have up here as it goes. So I think I'm going to start with Isaac. So you guys recently did an event called a hackathon. You guys tell us a little bit about what you did and how it's helped your group and a little bit about your group as well. Yeah, sure. So DC, our DC is actually DC Israel. And we just started... DC tell me. Yeah. And we just started like seven months ago and we had a lot of people coming and showing interest. But we couldn't figure how committed they are to the process. Basically what we're doing, our monthly meetings mostly come, have some lectures, volunteers, people talking, mingle and go home. But we wanted more. We wanted to actually to form a real community with real people that willing to do more than just come sit and learn or say a question here and there. So the hackathon ideas basically have people together, hanged out in a place to do a project. So there isn't like a predefined project. Everybody can suggest any idea. And the thing is to find another person who has the same interest, whether it's hardware hacking, software hacking, or out-of-the-box hacking, and just sit together and do something and try to push forward, try to find the time to do it. And then perhaps having a follow-up in our deaf committees, talk about it, raise more people to the project, et cetera. So the first event that we had was two months ago. It was five hours. It was a great success. We had seven projects, different projects having from mobile botnet up to hardware hacking, et cetera. And now we're going to do another hackathon. It's going to be a 24-hour event. And we're really excited about it. We have a lot of people coming up. And we're trying to do more projects. And hopefully this time we will have some open source project announced and have something with a repository. So that will actually be a real step forward. Thank you. All right. Romer, it's your turn. I know you like to hear yourself talk. Can you tell us how unallocated space, the hacker space that you attend, how their model is a little bit different than some others? Yeah. One of the things that we've done unallocated is we actually don't have anything that's a member. There's no such thing as being a member of unallocated. There's no such thing as a required dues at unallocated. Our thought process is if we have content that people are actually going to want to come and see, and we pack our schedule. There's something on the schedule at least three to four days a week and usually more than that. And we want to see if we've got all this stuff going on, people are actually going to come there and participate and then want to actually donate money to the space to keep it going. We're a relatively young hacker space. We've only been around for less than a year at this point. Nine months exactly, yeah. And so from that standpoint, even though we've not required anyone to pay us, we've never had any problem meeting rent. We've never had any problem paying the bills. People are actually coming in and saying, this is so cool. I actually want to give you money to help keep this thing running. So it's a little bit different model from what some of the other spaces are doing and something we're trying to see if it's actually going to end up being a viable way to do these things. So to play devil's advocate on that, how do you pay the bills? Well, I mean, we don't have members, but we do have key holders. There are six key holders now or five. Five key holders right now that basically they've pledged that if something goes wrong and we can't get enough donations to keep the space going, they're going to pay for it. Hasn't come to that yet, but hopefully it never will. But yeah, that's how we keep it going at this point is if we like this week, obviously every person from an allocated is here. So we're not going to be getting any outside donations. So it's one of those things where we may run into a problem. We'll see. Two kind of roamers point to when we started our space, we kind of did the same thing. We had a dedicated set of a few members that if things went sideways, we would just pick up and make sure it still happened. So we would be there the next month and kind of make it work. And then we grew out of that model eventually, but it was what kept us going and moved us to the next step. And I mean, you guys probably saw the same thing. Then if you're sitting there and you're putting as much content as you can out there, we get people that we have no idea how he even heard about these things that show up. I mean, you want me to keep going with that or you want to go somewhere else? You keep going. I'll stop you when I want to stop you. Sounds good. I mean, like one of the things we were actually just talking about outside when we were smoking is we do a lot of stuff through Twitter.  Let's go to an allocated and do it. And people that live in our area will show up. An example being I got a free AT&T microcell a while back. And I have excellent AT&T service in my house, so I had no reason to use it. So I just threw on Twitter, anybody want to hack this thing and see what we can do with it? Like 25 people showed up to play with it that night. One of the really cool things was as I'm coming over to an allocated that night, I was just doing a little bit of quick research and I realized that it has a hardware kill switch in it. So if we opened the case, it was basically going to wipe the firmware. But one of the guys that had saw my Twitter post said, I'm one of the participants in the tamper evident contest at DEF CON. I can get it open for you. And he did.  And we had no idea what we were doing. I didn't have any clue how we were going to start. So when we all showed up, it was just, hey, who wants, who thinks we should start with looking at the network traffic. We looked it in and activated in everything and just went from there.  We didn't get as far as we want to do yet. But I think those kind of activities that are a little bit different from the, hey, it's lock picking night are kind of cool for the spaces to have. Yeah. Our scheduled events for ours eventually kind of picked up over time. It wasn't really the, it was something we initially kind of drew for, but it was kind of the weird stuff that happened at Hockley where we're all sitting on IRC like, let's go build something real quick. And we end up building something just really random where we end up sitting at the space and going, hey, we're here. We've got some new gear coming in. You guys want to come over and mess with it. Also to an effect with our hacker space, it's kind of uniquely tied to the DC group, whereas we kind of host it and keep it at our space once a month, once twice a month, we do some events there. And we've had random projects kind of just spur out of that. We participated in the Red Bull Challenge. And that kind of happened just out of one of those meetings. Just all of us kind of made a team real quick and then all of a sudden that became something that we worked on and that space was the place that we hosted it. So just something kind of added with that. We wanted to do the Red Bull Challenge and you would think since, you know, Ryan Clark, the guy that designed your badges and, you know, is pretty decent with electronics as one of the people that comes to an allocated quite often, you would think we would have been able to get something together to get in. We failed hard. Yeah. All right. Hey, Black. Yeah. Can you tell us a little about your thoughts on group cohesion? I know you guys have been really successful with that. Can you give us some pointers? Yeah. So like going forward, trying to keep together, there's been a lot of issues with groups that fall apart. I mean, if you only meet once a month and an individual misses, let's say, that one Tuesday, then they're really going to have less of an incentive to show up again the following month.  It's real easy to fall off the map. So what we've done is we've included social events outside of the ramifications of your typical infosex sort of style, you know, entries. Like for instance, we do trivia as DCT25 on Tuesday nights at the local bar and we'll have turnouts as high as up to 30 people that may not be directly connected with the Haku space or the group, but playing as a team, being up front, putting out that sort of advertisement helps gain members, people who know nothing about DEF CON. I know Ridler came up to us one night as we were playing trivia and said, hey, do you guys actually go to DEF CON? And we're like, yeah, you know, have a seat. You know, and we have that Tuesday night. Well, we get together on Saturdays and then we do the infosex stuff. Then we have the regular meets. We meet roughly about, I'd say, three to five times a month, just keeping it going. No specific projects like we get together, kind of figure out what the hell we're going to do. Are we going to smash a stack? Are we going to build something, play with an Arduino?  But ultimately, I think the infosex box that Haku spaces put themselves in limits their ability to bring about the true meaning of hacking to the community. Like, we're not just here to make a good root kit. Although we do, we make fine root kits. We're here to make our community a better place. If we want to get together and, you know, feed the hungry on a Saturday to do some community outreach, that not only establishes us in the community, drives participation, but it also promotes group cohesion. So there are things that are side channels to your main purpose that help support you, perpetuate you, and gain momentum in your cause. You know, it's one of those things that you really have to look for. Not everybody's going to have the same interests. And, you know, that ad hoc style that Black Lodge does is great. And that fits into the mold of kind of what we do. That, you know, everybody gets together and says, hey, you know, what inefficiencies can we remove today from our lives, from our communities, from this box? How can we open it without it wiping the firmware? It's a challenge, you know? Across all facets of life. So we kind of extend the meaning of hacking to outside of the traditional ramifications and keeping with that MIT train club style definition of hacking and applying that to your life and community really enhances the impact that we have as hackers. It gives us not only a positive image in the media, which we're finding negative images every day, but we actually make real differences. And with that, you know, I think other groups have somewhat Black Lodge. I know for a fact has a good amount of ad hoc style get-togethers. And they support 206, but they're not necessarily 206. The core members of 225. We have 10 members here, the stuff gone. But we have 59 members total. You know, you have to have those perpetual members. Those people who are key holders. Those people who are drivers. Those people who continually impact the group and their environment every day that they exist. You have to be gung-ho for it. And you can't sit and be introverted and, you know, break a de-ice distro every Saturday. You know, it's one of those things that you really have to look forward to. If you're trying to get a group started or you're dealing with those first lols of participation or group management, if you can have an outside event, something that is completely non-infasec-related to co-heize the group in between those times you meet, you'll really move forward. That's really how you get it. I think that's an awesome point. I mean, we do a ton of non-security-related, non-hacking-related stuff. Crypto, stand up for a second. Crypto is one of the key holders in an allocated. If you look at the back of his shirt, there's a party right on there. A keyhole for you, yeah. But it's one of the things. We do a lot of parties. Crypto organizes a LAN party once monthly or twice monthly now. Once a month. And basically, he throws out to the mailing list, hey, what games do you want to play? He sets the whole thing up. We're not doing anything except for playing games and drinking beer those nights, okay? I mean, it's one of those things that it brings a lot of people in that would, okay, I don't understand about hacking, I mean, they'll sit down and they'll come and actually start to talk. The conversations continue and they're like, oh, that's something I'd be interested in and it does bring new people. That's a great point. So, Black, when you were talking trivia, are you just talking like Trivial Pursuit? Next. Rather than most implementations of trivia, and this is an aside, we don't do the digital sort of Hooters version play with the little device, that would kind of be fun to target. Random Ash trivia is what it's called, rat trivia, where a human sits up front and we play against all the groups in the spar. And what it does is it really gives a personal, localized level to a gainful knowledge perspective. Who can think on their feet? You know, hacking's not about a razor-like knowledge about something. It's a general understanding of how the system works, knowing how to manipulate it is the next step.  What is this assembly? And he had a point and he had a target. And I think we sat at my house and he sat and annotated the assembly. We were just drinking beer bullshitting. I think we just got together to drink beer. And it ended up with him having a fairly good understanding of assembly, how the stack works. And he went into it not knowing really anything about it. A very intimidating subject to somebody. And he came out of it as an individual. I think he's reading an IDA pro book right now as I talk. Way to go. No, but it, yeah. It amidst the point. No, no, no. And those community events are kind of what's necessary too, that are outside the standard, like okay, we do do pen test days where we invite people over to build a box and smash the crap out of it. One of our members here, Don, he actually built one of nice BM servers for us to get back. But one of our other events that's really fun is we have someone over here named Lee who organizes a gaming night where it's all retro arcade. So one floor of our hacker space is a retro arcade and Downstairs is a different set of games. And it's just kind of cool to get everyone together and do that. But I think when you were talking, a couple of points came to mind in terms of hacker space formation. Now for a couple of years now we've had talks where we had hacker spaces and kind of what people have done with their hacker spaces and the basic cookie cutter template. And then have you guys felt the need to have to start that way or have you, for the hacker spaces and groups that are new, have you felt the need to kind of fit that mold or did you just kind of do it randomly when you approached it? Yeah, so like for instance, Wait a second. I want to interrupt you because I wouldn't get a chance for Anarchy Angel and Gihara to speak because that's a great question for them to answer. Then you can answer. Well actually to expand a little bit on what he said, we also try, we have to expand a little bit on what he said. We also have planned events but through research and just getting online I was able to find there were lots of other social and community groups that are I guess you could call tech related. We have a Linux user group in Milwaukee. There's regular Reddit meetings and there's MillSec meetings, all different kinds of other meetings and I kind of encourage our members to hijack those meetings if they can, you know, just go there and represent DC414 and that keeps us together. That way we get outside of our, you know, outside of our usual mold and kind of go out there and party it up a little bit with the other groups but we kind of went for a randomized Well we're pretty small, we got maybe 8 to 10 regular members right now and we're only about 6 months old after it kind of died out but to get it going, it's not difficult. I mean as Black said, you need to be there. Persistence is the key. Our first like three meetings were the only guys there. Yeah, so I mean you just show up at the place, you get the word out you get your communication channels open, you know, IRC, HTTP, mailing lists social networking and all that and people will find you and I know Vlad was just searching he's in the security biz and one of our members he's attending DEF CON this year so he Googles DEF CON Milwaukee and he finds our site and he shows up and he's a great asset and you just got to know you find these really smart guys and you find those core members and you recognize their skills and you just kind of start brainstorming from there and everything starts to grow. I also found it's good to try to cater to their skills like we've had a guy who was strictly a Java programmer so I personally went out and tried to educate myself as much on Java as I could so that he would feel more at home when he came to meetings. We have a guy who's a locksmith genius, I mean the guy is just unbelievable and I went beyond that and tried to learn as much about it as I could so that I would be able to converse with him and keep him interested in the group. It's more than just doing what you want to do you have to realize that the group is carried on the backs of your members so you definitely have to try to keep them as happy as possible at least I've found that. You got to come up to the mic. I just wanted to say something about the community outreach thing because we're a fairly new DC07 we just kind of restarted out back in October we're a long way from a hacker space but one of the things we're looking at is that Poland is a really strong art community there's a lot of industrial artists that don't have spaces so we're actually looking at getting space from a studio that already has this type of setup where it's just a big open space or something like that where we can actually bring some of the industrial artists into it who need access to machines and other things that they may not have access to people like doing metal smithing in their bedrooms or something like that so I don't know if you guys want to get into it or try to get into it it's something completely not related to technology Oh, completely to add to that we have one of our members who actually studies lapidary which is watchmaking has a whole bench that's just completely made just for that and it has nothing to do with it he kind of makes some cool steampunk watches and jewelry and stuff like that it's kind of neat. I just want to throw it there too back to what you had asked earlier about the templated sort of hackspace a lot of people have this idea that they have to go get these laser etching, laser cutters just like this shopping list when in reality they only need whatever they need to achieve their purpose. If you really want to make three or three badges sure, you need a CNC machine you need some laser etchers you need to go through the steps but you procure those as you need them going with your artist question real quick I really don't have much to say about the artistry thing but I can give you an analog for instance we like to break into things and so our idea is we have about one and a half million dollars with the hardware that was donated to us through a corporation and we're going to create an elastic computing environment where members of our DEF CON group and others connected to our darknet can make a request saying look I need an XPSP3 machine with these patches in order to break maybe these groups don't have those resources but maybe we can offer those resources to give the sort of elasticity to the groups to be able to provide those machines if you have a CNC machine and there's another group that says man I need to cut this or do this maybe you can lease space to them make these resources known to other groups we are much greater than just the sum of our parts when we communicate we achieve way more and remember that you know that's the point here hackers aren't the people you read about they're the people you drink with that is the pure point of all of this and with that I'll go ahead and defer to the guy with the mic one real quick question would any of your groups be interested in resources like that anyone I was going to ask how many group point of context do we have to remember right now I think is a take away item to add to that kind of sentiment is as hackerspace and group owners I know a lot of us are and members we need to do a better job of kind of maybe reaching out to those other hackerspaces and groups and creating those connections whatever they may be maybe it's a cool dark net between hackerspaces where you're sharing data or creating these cool little local networks for yourself or maybe it's that you're in city and one shop has a laser cutter and can work out a situation where you're working with that group to share those resources we should be pulling those resources where and how we can and to add that I would say don't be afraid to go outside the technical realm try to find other groups that just have the same sort of mentality or main goals outside of computer security like we've sought out the candlelight collective in our area which is I guess I would say a space for punk rockers to hang out at but they basically have the same of the man feel that our group has to it so we communicate with them even though they're not they're completely outside of the security realm there's a lot of talk about shared resources liking this smash thing which is cool I love doing it too but there's a fine line when you have resources about being a legitimate organization in the lives of the public and still doing cool security resources by security research whatever you want to do how do you walk that line how do you manage it how do you manage your risk for that yes so like let's say we had a dark net between every single deaf con group here and the auspice that someone could expiltrate data through that dark net on a viable production target that would violate law definitely is consideration and a concern so while we may espouse the ideas that yes we do need to connect we definitely have the finer details of the allocation of resources and what type of rules that we can apply for that I will defer to the EFF for the comment but if you have anything regarding like you know consider this a call for papers if you have an idea if you have a mitigation of that risk in mind please respond to it I know there's a question and answer after this I'm sorry I won't be able to be part of but do not you know stop from emailing the list with a hey here's how we do it ideally we trust one another I mean you know we can have two networks one for the communication of viable resources attack resources and others and we can have a hygiene network that has no public access available and yeah I mean at the risk of worrying about sound with exclusivity or anything I mean it would be very easy for like us and you know Black Lodge to work together because the members of your place and our folks we've known each other for years so we can start to build those personal relationships in the network that way too you know I mean it's not as quick but it's definitely something that can be done where you okay I absolutely know Lando is not going to do anything to screw me over so we can work with them on this right but it's not that we can trust every single member that we have because that trust is built up over time so I mean it's just something you have to I think deferring to the EFF on that one and deferring to common sense is another thing I mean tour has a great implementation for exit mode protection I don't know if you've ever run an exit made from tour but you get this nifty little email from EFF saying while people may be doing illegal things through your client and that machine needs to be sandboxed outside of an accessible area of your network no one has ever been prosecuted for running a tour exit mode and keep that in mind at all times but that is the number one reason why you should all go get a mobile walk and donate to the EFF I mean to be realistic with it this is why we donate to the EFF because we have real risks that directly affect the implementation of a cohesive DEF CON group organization as well as a community as a whole we do have ways to mitigate that so mind you money is one way you can share support of it and building on trusted relationships is definitely another I think it's important to note that while we want to mitigate the risk you shouldn't be doing it through a whole bunch of legalese in your membership documents and some hacker spaces like to put in clauses in your membership so that they own everything you do in there or you're not allowed to do illegal hacking so don't don't put a leash on the people in your organization just because you want to mitigate a little bit of your risk and you have resources like the EFF I just felt like it was important to note but on the other hand the hacker spaces tend to run as small organizations and in some ways to get non-profit status actually form formal organizations so that they need bylaws they need to be concerned with legality have you guys addressed that at all well once you once you move past a certain size where it's not the little group club anymore and you move past the kind of 8 members and you start to get real businesses that you're renting space from and now you're inviting more people from the community who may not be a part of your space or may not be a part of your regular group of friends you need to consider yourself a business and start to treat things a certain way so it gets a little sketchy of course you can definitely overdo it we went a little overboard at first and then we back down a little bit to what seems to be the right level it's a tricky thing you have to look at it and honestly small business courses really helping that so if you've never taken one of those it doesn't hurt when it comes to lodge these rules and obligations and legalese that's getting in the way you can always protest and vote by not attending I mean to hacker spaces that are collaborative efforts between groups or within groups we're not dick bags well yeah I'm speaking for us not everybody people like coming to a group that they feel a support network for that they feel is expanding their knowledge and giving them a free and open space to work if you're locking all your shit down and people don't want to come to share ideas they just want to come to leech you can have a group that will go on with three members and those three guys will keep paying their dues and no one wants to go and hang out with the dick bag clan and then those people everybody that wants to create a collaborative like an open space there's nothing stopping you from starting another hacker space along those lines you really don't want to fragment your hacker scene too much in your local area but there's nothing stopping you from having multiple depth conjures or hacker spaces you gotta always avoid the drama llama but people that are holding back the sharing of knowledge can be shut down in my mind but there's also not just in the group that you belong to or the group that you're thinking about doing there's other groups that we're up here if we can have more of a global connected collaborative sharing of ideas the reason we're having a panel give you the thoughts to go out and spread and mutate and make your cool shit in your own time let's take some questions we got some waiting as a quick comment to that there are a number of lawyers who attend DEF CON every year and if you get to the point where it matters talk to the groups I know a couple of them some other people here just go through the network and you'll find somebody but a lot of the time you get non-profit status don't sweat it you're a disconnected entity it's the group it's not you I went and messed up somebody's system and this will vary state to state but in the state of Maine if I'm volunteering for somebody I volunteer at a railroad museum every now and then if I'm driving the train the thing jumps off the tracks 20 people die is it volunteer in that capacity? I can't be civilly sued definitely there are a lot of different state protections when you're in the non-profit world as opposed to being Google speak to a lawyer but you shouldn't have to have your members signing like 2-page 3-page 15-page documents you've gone the wrong way if you get there I agree if you have legalese to limit your liability as a group to an individual's action you definitely have segmented yourself from the path you should have taken the way federal laws work are a little bit different and if people talk state to state you know we're talking about more or less interstate communications so when you look to the federal laws they're more reactionary so if you do have a non-profit that's associated in performing a function and an individual acts badly the group is not going to be liable but ultimately you should honestly defer to the EFF the same way tour exit nodes are operated would directly affect the way your exit nodes are operated within your own VPN that law is the same I'm not a lawyer like I said you should ask the EFF and I agree completely with this point of if you have a disclaimer that reiterates federal law you're going the wrong way but if it's your bylaws saying dude if you act an ass you're going to get kicked out well I mean that's appropriate but like you should even have to write those if you have to write those you're still doing it wrong so from the community aspect I'm with I3 Detroit founding member I had a really positive experience with the high school robotics clubs especially with high schools continually shrinking budgets and we actually unfortunately one of them completely lost their funding have you guys had good experiences with bringing in high schoolers and we've been running for about two years now and it's really awesome that we're now seeing this generation of high schoolers who are now 18 you know going off to college and coming back in the summer rather than being a dick to the little kids it's really benefiting us to just basically deal with a couple of broken drill bits here and there we deal with that with we deal with that with members that aren't in high school yeah specifically on your point I think we should shove it down even lower DEF CON kids point right I have a 10 year old daughter, Sparkle she created the first DEF CON kids group she has 25 kids she gets in Ruby, JavaScript, PHP MySQL she enjoys social engineering she writes RPGs and she has 10 she participates in the MIT scratch forms as part of the IDE open source development project the premise is who the fuck cares if they break something it's nothing you can't fix or replace that chain listen we don't naturally perpetuate this is not something that goes on without being pushed I forget high scores I want LEGO mindstorm kids in the kindergarten classrooms we're not playing here we have generations of kids that are going to be growing up in an ever evolving environment of threats of areas that they can create we have to propagate those interests get go. We have to actually inform them, sit down, take the time and say, okay, let's play with this Arduino board. Let's turn a motor. Let me show you how this operates. Let me show you how this, I mean, you know, whatever the kid is, whatever the method is, you cannot be afraid to show children and to show the earlier generations how to protect themselves, how to build and how to create. If we deny that, I know a lot of people have diverse opinions on Dofcon kids, but if we deny the ability of our earliest generations at their prime points with their aptitude set on hacking or evolving, you know, our community, then we are doing ourselves a disservice. And as much as people don't like kids running around Dofcon, I mean, it is our social scene, you know. You have to remember that they're already kid goons. You know, they're already kids who are not a social engineer. And if you have kids, I would rather your kid know how to detect someone's social engineering them to be victim or subject to it. And it goes along the lines, this is what we are here for. Playing it simple. Plus, you can't knock the feeling you get when you teach someone like kids and stuff like that how to lock pick for the first time. And you see their face when they bust open that lock and then you look at the person who's in their 20s and 30s next to them sitting there frustrated like they can't even believe what just happened next to them. And you see their parents absolutely in fear of what you just did. But it's really, it's also very cool to, you know, teach people who haven't seen all this stuff, my failures and my mistakes and go, hey, look, this is, this is how you can do it a different way. And guess what I learned from it? So it's kind of, it's somewhat selfish in that respect, but it's a good kind of selfish.  Just teach them how to solder it. And then that way you have free labor when you need a giant LED matrix system. It's, it's really nice. And I would agree that getting the younger generation involved is really important. But as far as schools goes, I don't know if it's just me, but I happen to get chased off of every school I go to and tired to talk to them about deaf colleagues. Maybe I'm just ugly. I don't know. But I've had bad experiences with school. Or I guess government institutions in general, when it comes to DC 414. So it might be the stash. It scares people, I guess. Can you repeat that? Because he couldn't understand you. It's hard to hear up here. The reverb's pretty badly. So who? What? Black. Tell me, tell me who you want to repeat what. Yeah. Energy Angel. Yeah. The guy leaning back who just spoke. Speak this way. We can't hear you. Basically, what I was saying was I've had bad experiences with going to schools about getting the word about DC 414. I wasn't sure if it was just because I was ugly or my mustache. But I get run off of all the schools I've ever been to to try to talk about getting kids to come to DC 414. It's just I don't know if it's if it's our area. Maybe other people in other states have had better success. But just in our schools, they hear the word hacker and I don't know it turns them off or even computer security seems to people are in least in our state are timid around it. I don't know why but Well, there's there. There's some balance that you have to have because at the lodge would you have some like 21 and up we have some adult oriented events or you know with the issue with kids. You need to rephrase that a little bit. Well, what? Events with alcohol versus events where no alcohol is there. Yeah, we have we have you know open space for people to come by. Check out the place during normal operation hours.   Maybe something they want to get the group involved with and get community effort. But also we have, you know, private stuff and it private like after hours movie nights where they're drinking involved. We took kind of page out of the book that 23 B guys where we have a projector on the the other block of buildings in the industrial space. So we're also parking lot. But there's there's this balance that you have to have between, you know, there is there's some stuff that's going to go on that isn't kid friendly, or have have something that granted, you know, there's a lot to say about how you're going to present yourself to adults versus how you're going to present yourself or what options you're going to present to kids. It's mainly about education. I mean, if the public knew exactly what hacking actually originated as and if you exhibited those ideals in your day to day above board activities under your group label, we wouldn't be fighting much of the way that we're fighting the wars we are now in the media. The issue comes when you begin to label private activities amongst groups of individuals that would normally gather under your group flag outside of the group. Maybe those things don't need to be put on the front page of the American press, you know, you have to continue if how can someone dislike your hacking group when you're feeding the hungry? I mean, yeah, so we're actually running out of time here.  I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. But all right, we're going to have a Q&A session right after this. So you guys want to join us. I have one question to wrap up because I asked how many point of contacts we had in here for Converge. I'm going to put you on the spot. What can we do as Group Point of Contacts to help you as the coordinator? Well, moving forward, we're going to be adding a lot. Probably the card of the problem that we've had with all of the groups. Currently, well, aside from not knowing where they are or who they are, is communication. Like we really don't have a dialogue going on between the groups and we're going to fix that. So we're going to be firing up Twitter accounts, Google Plus accounts, Facebook accounts. We're going to be setting up an IRC server, maybe, like I heard discussion of that. Coming in the near future, probably later this year, we're going to be launching a DEFCON Groups website that is just for DEFCON Groups. It's going to have a forum just for DEFCON Groups that's active, it's focused. And we want groups to interact. We want groups to send us what they're doing that's cool. If you want to be featured and show a cool project or even a dumb project that was just fun, like be in touch with me, be in touch with the other groups through those means and we'll get it out there and we'll start seeing what we're doing and we'll start showing other people what we're doing. Maybe they'll get interested too. DC Groups at DEFCON.org. Yeah, give me an email or hit me up online. Are you actually looking for like a list of active groups? It's on the website. It's on the DEFCON website. All right, with that, I think we're going to wrap up and move over to QA. What QA room are we in? Pavilion number four, so it's going to be down the hall. And we'll see you guys there.


Jason we're happy to have you today. Thank you for having me I'm so excited to be here and to kick off this new initiative from y'all I'm truly blessed thank you so much for having me. Yeah welcome so Jason we'll we'll just get right into it and we'll just start picking your brain on your creative process so what has been inspiring you creatively these days and what have you been playing watching reading or listening to lately? I've been playing a lot of Super Mario Odyssey and a lot of a lot of Nintendo Switch this year Super Mario Odyssey is my current favorite right now but I threw in a lot of hours in Animal Crossing and I've been playing a lot of a lot of older Super Mario titles Super Mario is 35 years old 35 years young this year so I've been playing a lot of his older games on the Nintendo Switch like Super Mario Brothers 3 Mario World and I'm really looking forward to the upcoming Super Mario 644 re-release one of my favorite games of all time so a lot of Mario and a lot of old game-dead videos. So when do you feel the most creative and how do you handle creative blocks? When I feel that big burst of my aha moments with creativity it usually comes through after like days or long hours even weeks of maybe tormenting myself over like a specific idea that it may have about something I want to approach and I get my aha moments at the most random times but usually I've been trying to channel a lot of that creativity lately because it's really it's too easy for myself like me to plug into like maybe I can't do something or I don't know how to do something I've been trying to step back a little bit approach things with a clear mind to figure out how to do things creatively because like listening to I've been listening to a lot of a lot of old-school rap a lot of New York old-school rap so I've been listening to a lot of music and I've been taking some walks around like take a like walk around my complex and allow myself time almost like pacing but rather than pacing around the house I'll take a walk maybe around the block or while listening to music removing myself from my environment to allow myself to think about something away from my usual space and usually that provides me that I'm over a contact that it may have to like reeks of honestly just sort of struggling with how to approach something creative I feel like a lot of the creative that that output that happens is a lot of maybe it happens in here you know and then finally I have the moment and it comes out so usually allow myself some music time and like rather than pacing around my home stepping outside for a little bit and maybe just taking a walk around the block even if it's just like back and forth on one side just giving myself some distance from my normal everyday environment so we had a bonus question that wasn't included in the questions we sent you and we wanted to know what was the last song that you listened to oh my goodness okay so the last song was actually a Whitney Houston song that randomly played because I was just searching through old 90s like rap and r&b and I was just I was just I just typed in 90s r&b 90s rap and just like different genres of music and a Whitney Houston song popped up and I listened to it it's from the movie The Bodyguard and then now YouTube is like slowly like slipping in like Whitney Houston which is fine I'm totally down for it but it was a Whitney Houston song I don't remember the name of the title but I'm pretty sure it was from the movie The Soundtrack of The Bodyguard that she like started and created the whole soundtrack for way back when it was a huge hit yeah old movie it's funny how YouTube just like and unexpected buries you deeper into the hole you're in yeah it either knows what I was listening to it with my mom when I was a kid which totally was Whitney Houston um or you know I just wanted to scratch it itch I didn't know I had so I'm down I'm always down for it did you sing along I know all the lyrics actually that's the that's no no like some of the songs like that's why I want to look up the titles because like the the actual lyrics are played in my head because I'm serious like I grew up in Queens and uh my mom and I and my family would visit my aunt in Staten Island and it's a 90 minute drive from Queens to Staten Island in New York and throughout the whole entire I remember one summer it was just the Bodyguard soundtrack playing over and over and over again so so when you say that you joke but my brain auto completed a lot like most of those lyrics I was just blown away by how much I remembered but also more correlate like how I was vibing to the music so that's awesome that was a great story earlier earlier you mentioned like you're watching some like game dev footage and uh like I saw some game dev footage like when I was watching this documentary about the worst game ever made the the ET game and they're showing like Atari in the golden days and it just looked like such a cool time to be making video games with like a group of people and uh yeah now I want to ask you about some game dev questions so can you tell us a little bit about what you do within the game development world for my my role essentially within game development is providing a platform for people that don't have a voice to have a voice putting a spotlight on them making sure the industry is paying attention to what's going on and then having that dialogue amongst everybody and then moving forward from there that's that's awesome man so you're like basically a producer you're like PDD PDD of I'm a naveler of opportunities yeah that's like people need that you're creating those opportunities try my best and I'm not alone but I'm trying my best yeah no I think when you do stuff like that you inspire other people to you know to step up to the plate um so do you have like a favorite thing about your job about like your what you do in the game dev community yeah I think it's looking at all the upcoming talent and seeing a lot of the great games that are being developed you know like for me like going on twitter and maybe hopping on a hashtag uh for maybe like a game jam with some sort of creative virtual creative environment that people plug into um you know there's so many community efforts from around the world you get to see like people creating games at the Uruguay and I'm like whoa that's really cool like you know you get to see how game developments handled I get to see like how it's handled in Brazil so like I feel like I get a first look at where it's going just by naturally paying attention and then you know my favorite part is seeing those people that are doing the hard work and seeing a lot of the great games that are being made and then and and taking that and and then seeing that as like an opportunity to present it to the world like that to me is like that that's just the best because you know I could be I could be paying attention to it all day but if the industry and the the community and everyone that loves games at large doesn't know that Latinx people are making video games and we're making great games like you know for me it's like what's the point so I just love seeing all the cool stuff coming up like there's some great stuff being developed globally that like you'll be able to see a lot of that a lot next games festival but I'm telling him like there's some good stuff coming really unique stuff yeah that's awesome I'm excited to see it um you kind of talked about like how you got started in game dev but was there a particular moment or experience that made you realize that you wanted to pursue game development kind of like an origin yeah so I think a lot of it was born out of playing video games and I was really young and then I would finish them and like in the 80s and 90s the credits you would see like game designer and it would be a lot of the games are made in Japan but they never really credited the the creators so it wouldn't be their names it would be like what would look like gamer tags right now there were just a bunch of nicknames uh and I was always like who's making these games like who's making these games so um uh I'm a little older so like I grew up reading magazines video game magazines I didn't I didn't go on the internet to like on youtube like it is so amazing on my phone I had to like read video game news and then interviews of game developers that was like months old but I used to live on that so like that sort of planted the curiosity the seed of you know game development like how do you do this um but but really a lot of it I think was born from the PlayStation Nintendo 64 Sega Saturn where they made the jump from 2D to 3D and there was more the internet started booming so there were more conversations around how these games are being made and it was that time period that took the curiosity I have had as a youth sort of like slowly getting a peek behind the fourth wall of game development to outright having like even though it took like a long time to download like a one minute trailer of a of a video game that I really want to play or an interview from a game developer of a game that's coming out like next week you know we're talking late 90s so to have like that information with this big tech not like technology shifting games also going through like a globally transformative experience with the internet during that time was like okay not only am I armed with the knowledge I'm totally curious how do I do this so from from then on it was just always like slow steps with like my career or whatever I was doing at the time I feel like it was always slowly building every year like a season in the series going toward like that end goal and that end goal is what I'm doing right now which is Latinx Games Festival to me this is always like essentially what I wanted to do but a lot of that was born out of the curiosity of flipping through magazines and the internet and the big tech shift that happened in the late 90s and I just couldn't undo it what were some of the games that inspired you early on I grew up on Atari which was a hand-me-down for my parents so I played Pac-Man the 2600 edition probably buried along ET for Atari 2600 out of the desert I'm sure because it caused it helped cause the big crash of the 80s almost killed the video game business and it took a while to recover thankfully Nintendo came in and essentially saved it with their arcade games and then Super Mario Brothers and that ended up being a big hit so that's what essentially like influence me was old Atari and then seeing that jump from Atari games the Nintendo was like almost a similar scene like the 2D the 3D jump I just started seeing more colors I started hearing more like like more sounds there was just more more more creativity more story it was just a lot of more but also like the games themselves found they were just great these are the timeless classics that people still play today with Super Mario Brothers Legend of Zelda Donkey Kong Metroid these are franchises that are strong and live on to this day so really it was like early Atari got me going but I think Nintendo is what really made it like like truly inspired like my love of video games so how has working in the game industry affected how you play and think about games well I think for a period of time I was so invested in like getting started uh to break in into video games I stopped playing them for a bit and then there was this like sort of almost unspoken of joke where I would go to an industry event you know maybe it's at an after party or some networking situation where you're talking to people and then you know I was I was new in the game I was green you know I was trying to break in and add all these questions but one of my icebreakers was who gave you a plane and then either it was followed with laughter or like a chuckle like I don't play games only game I play is whatever I'm working on or whatever I'm tasked to whatever is part of my you know my publish like whatever it was there was a whole lot of like and cynicism or like I'm not really playing anything and the guy I kind of had that a little for a little bit um but so like I think break in it it didn't change my it changed my love of video games but it didn't change that I love video games I saw like a lot of people maybe like couldn't look at games objectively anymore and had like a chip on their shoulder about it because like game development is a grind so one of the things I always try to do is just remind myself that like I love video games and to play them so uh if anything it just changed the way like I think about the business end because like if I look at a really great explosion or I hear like a celebrity speaking on thinking like well how much did that cost uh it was our conversation of like you know like like what got cut to to to get to this part of the story or like wow how did they get there what was the storyboard look like I started thinking of like how how did they put it together uh but what one of the things they always try to remind myself is that since I love video games is to just get lost to them and uh don't don't constantly remind yourself all the game development tricks that are used to present this fall in love of what you're experiencing just allow the experience to wash over you so like like they change the business part of it totally and I can never undo that but I always I not run by myself I just dive into video games and remind myself that they're just really cool and to play them and enjoy them uh to never forget it so it almost almost changed it almost took my that part out for like nah especially not in 2020 it switches the hero 2020 with all of us you know with lockdown it was like the MVP this year yeah how did lad next game start like you mentioned you know why you got why you started it but how did it start I guess what is that story so with latinx games festival and here's the thing with that like with latinx games festival I wanted to buy a ticket and attend the festival like I would talk with people over the years of like would it be cool if there was just like like you know you have like your e3s and your game developers conferences and your indicates like especially out here in la you have like all these really cool gatherings of of creatives that kind of like specifically focus on that time of the year like this is what we're spotlighting and I always thought like wouldn't it be great if if there was a way for us to get together and I want to buy a ticket to that so it ended up turning into like loose conversations with people until like hey like I'm going to do this I don't know when but you know I'm going to do it and as I was co-organizing games as color I started to learn like essentially how to do this on your own without a major support system you know like how do you do this how do you find funding how do you get the support how do you source out of any how do you do like all the work to have that one or two days where you have that gathering of people and you know essentially just started out of the out of realizing like it wasn't going to happen unless someone started doing the work you know so I started doing the work but I was also just busy with you know my my existing business and you know like all the passion projects you know just overwhelmed and busy so it was always like something in the back of my mind I was secretly hoping like someone else is going to do this and I'll be able to just throw my support in that way right um but um my wife and I we we were looking for a place uh outside of New York City um so what we were doing for a couple months in 2018 was we were essentially Airbnb in different cities and we knew we would end up in in Los Angeles uh so we're Airbnb in different places there we ended up in Long Beach uh first day in Long Beach and I was we were looking around and I went off by myself sort of like on an adventure to see what was in Long Beach because I grew up with it in like music and music videos in Long Beach sort of I have different I had like a different image different perspective perception but I was like hey Long Beach so I was like let me just explore and I was walking around and I bumped into the museum of Latin American art I bumped into Mola and yeah I had Mola on my dream list but probably unattainable like venues for a Latinx games festival in my mind I was like that's a dream venue I don't live there I don't even know how to start that conversation but boy it would be great and I put it away and I started planning for something very smaller and very different a little more direct and then when I saw that as we're in the middle of finding a new place I was just like time out time out done done you found our place I found my venue and and that was it and it just felt so right and it felt like just it was it was just perfect even it was just a complete accident it was perfect because it was what I wanted I didn't think I can get it and I was just going about my own business still sort of planning for this in the end I end up bumping into the venue that ended up posting this event so you know it started out of like necessity and then a want and then it happened out of just like beautiful circumstance and then everything just fell together with the sponsors like Nintendo and Xbox and Amazon Games and Unity Niantic and everybody coming through you know to like make this event happen it was it was just a really beautiful thing but when I saw it and I started turning you know like turning the gears on it it was like full speed ahead and you know it was just like blind and speed from that point on but yeah it was just a lot of a lot of back-end work for a little bit and a beautiful circumstance. Why is that so important to you? Because every year I do this I always discover something new about how communities exist and how we it coexist in a space and one of the things I wanted to do when I when I came out here was to find a place where I felt I can exist and like plug into I wanted to kind of easily just plug into something and not have to you know like do all this work but um it kind of almost goes back to never feeling like I had a spot to fit in anyway so you know a lot of it was really just driven by wanting to make sure that I was able to have a community and then find all see all these different community members sort of doing stuff and getting them together you know like I don't want to I'm slowing because I don't want to say selfishly because in my mind it's I just really wanted to see this right like I really wanted and needed this to happen and so some of that is driven by like what I see is the obvious there's a lot of people doing great work get them together boom yeah three things happen and also my need and want for like where's where's my crew where's my you know where's my circle who do I vibe with who do I connect with out here so maybe it's a little long winded a little like branching out from the original question but like it's really just driven by like my my wants and the obvious needs of the community and those two things meet usually when I'm very driven and the community is very driven to do hard work thanks so um I guess this is kind of a opportunity for you to share what you have coming up on the radar for yourself I guess you have a game jam of some sort coming up is that is that so we have so we have in partnership with Latinx in gaming which is a charity organization that's focused on also uplifting and highlighting Latinx voices they'll be hosting a game jam that we're partnered up on so we'll be using our platform to showcase a lot of the great work that the community is doing and and looking for like hidden gems that don't exist yet to spotlight for our upcoming festival which is Latinx scene festival should be the second year virtually online of course that will be on November 21st or 22nd three days before that we're going to have a career fair which right now our sponsor is right now we have signed Valve um you may know them from Half-Life and Steam you know Small Indie Company and then we have Niantic and we have uh we have Playdate which is a really cool that it's from Panic they published the untitled Goose game it's a really it's called Playdate it's a really cool portable that's like a hand crank and it's a really interesting like like game development ideas that people can play with so like um you know I'd love to see what happens with that but we have a lot of support editing into our career fair which is on the 18th and 19th and 20th we have more partners to announce soon and for Hispanic Heritage Month for the whole month we'll be supporting the Unidos Game Jam um which is um happening throughout the whole month of Hispanic Heritage Month so um we're looking forward to seeing what the community creates and we're really looking forward to enabling people opportunities to um get hired get funding or at the very least get noticed we'll be having portfolio reviews during our career fair so from November 18th to November 22nd is Latinx Games Festival but the content presentation the panels the workshops roundtables uh speaker spotlights games all that uh the Latinx game awards that we're having that that'll be on the 21st and the 22nd so what are some of the challenges you faced in shifting your focus to like online platforms figuring out how to actually do it to be you know to be just keep it like the tools are super accessible accessible you have twitch and like really you know like I can use my phone as a media like manager and I get that that itself is the producer and everything to have a great live professional broadcast you know like it doesn't take much but like I'm not a streamer my a lot of folks on my team you know they don't stream so we're really good at like in real life conferences so the biggest shift was like how do you how do you do this we do how to do it but it was like how do you present what do you do in the meantime because we felt like we had to do a little bit more than just the festival also just to test our bandwidth for a live stream presentation so we did some smaller events um to get our feet wet and understand just what this looks like and allowed ourselves room to grow and some and to take a lot of learnings from those smaller events so we can take that and pour it and pour all into the festival coming up in November but really it was just the biggest shift was like okay how do how do we how do we do it now we have we know what we want for content we know what our presentation will look like we can be really creative and keep the festival special while also experimenting with smaller events so just just just going virtual was the biggest like how and then once we figured that out we knew exactly like what the festival in November will look like we had a very clear vision of like okay now that we had that experience we know what we want to do so it took us a little bit to sort of figure it out but like when we had our aha moments kind of like uh step out and pace around for a little bit when when we as a team had our aha moment of our experiences with doing this virtually like what November will look like at all everything just started falling into place so long story short actually going virtual yeah that's awesome because I think even when things open back up again you could still do like virtual sessions to to you know open the doors to people who don't live in Long Beach it forced us to do things we should have been doing anyway which was thinking beyond Long Beach but since we had to organize in a real-life festival you know you're really focused on getting that right but now you know due to the pandemic it forced us to think differently and creatively and we can't undo those learnings and those learnings are being poured into like our presentation this November but also how we move forward and reach out to more people throughout the year so it ended up being a really good thing you know a cool thing in the end awesome so we're gonna shift gears a little bit and ask you some Long Beach questions uh what are your favorite places in Long Beach uh what are your favorite places to eat I like going to Mola sometimes there's like food trucks outside there so that's always cool too um I've been on seabirds I've been ordering their fries and their watermelon and kaffir soda uh so like I'll go over there and get their fries so like uh or their um avatacos their their beabreaded avatacos or their kimchi taco uh so like I've been I've been on seabirds and then um yeah there's there's a variety of ice cream pizza places around here that are that are that are fun I haven't really like eating out as much lately but um when I do it's usually seabirds nice I haven't got to try seabirds yet but I'll check it out it's fun so what would you like to see happen in our city in regards to a game development community so you already started the Latinx games but do you have any ideas like what's going to happen after that if you continue to expand I mean I guess at this where we're at now would be like getting back into Mola when people can safely get together right so I would say that would be the first step and then once we get there thinking about how to grow it and what game development looks like here I think with like you know with the Long Beach Public Library doing their thing and then with the Mola being invested in and and the arts of you know like not just Latinx game development but like Latinx creativity and then Latinx games festival focusing specifically on Latinx game development I feel like Long Beach already now has a lot of these strong elements co-existing working together communicating whatever it is in different ways the the the gears are moving on all ends and they're really strong so I think what's going to happen over the years is as naturally the youth of Long Beach and I feel like Long Beach is a super creative community focused town anyway as as we keep doing our thing and then stuff starts to open more where the people at Long Beach can like attend you know like our festival or attend something that's happening at the library or attend something that's happening at Mola um a lot of a lot of our effort and energy and a lot of that gathering is going to build into like a really booming creative I wouldn't say game development focused town but like gaming is going to look different in like 10 years right so like I see I see a middleware tool like immunity less as a game development platform and more of like a open canvas for creativity right it doesn't have to be video games maybe use it for an art installation maybe use it for a presentation for school maybe you have a hobby or a vision and you start using these tools to tinker with as digital Legos whatever it is I start just I'm seeing I'm thinking that the work that we're doing as long as we keep doing it and we can start getting the folks of Long Beach connected whether that's virtually in real life the more that happens the more people start thinking different creatively and then on the game development and that on the game development and that different way of doing things creatively will allow them to utilize game development like I was saying before is like a canvas like a tool for creative expression and I think when that happens we could really see not just unique games but unique thing just unique creative forms of expression being done within Long Beach utilizing game development tools so like that to me is like secretly and suddenly like my biggest like hope is like we keep doing our thing we'll just enable young creatives to do things differently because eventually these game development tools just like they're being used now they've been used for movies TV shows in light of different standards for filming these shows and movies and with COVID and everything a lot of 3d effects are have to be used a lot of middleware tools got to be used to to to fill in the gaps of this so like I just think it's going to enable a lot of people to be creative and then eventually allow them to either just be creative and tap it as a creative outlet or flip that for a career in whatever specific discipline they happen to utilize as a hobby so long story short if we keep doing our thing for Long Beach Long Beach you'll keep tapping in and over a period of time we're just going to have a bunch of really cool creatives doing very different things that you and I and everyone here we came to think of right now and I'm really looking forward to that we're almost at the home stretch we just got a few more questions for you so do you have any favorite games created by Latinx developers that you want to shout out I have a few um but I'll take this all right I'll take this up I can name a whole bunch I'll take this opportunity to spotlight a game that I really love it's a virtual game it's available on I know it's definitely available on PlayStation PlayStation VR I know it should be available on Steam it's called pixel ripped there's two versions but there's a version of it out right now called pixel rip 1995 and what that is it's developed in Brazil and what that is is it's a it you play as a young person in the 90s who loves video games and since it's VR you're you're the kid like in your bedroom with your you know whatever the in-game version is of the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis that you're and virtually you're playing a 2D game in the 3D environment so you're looking around and you're seeing like your bedroom the posters you have in a while and your bed and where you're at but you're actually playing another video game and then that video game that you're playing breaks out into your actual 3D environment so if you're playing like a really cool 2D game that's an actual 2D game like on a Game Boy or on a fake game or on your television whatever it is when it bleeds out it's a real world you have all this amazing 2D action happening in your virtual augmented reality that you still have to like look around and play it is a fantastic example of what you can do with the virtual environment while still utilizing like core gameplay mechanics like like you know sound 2D gameplay I may almost all love 2D games so to me it's like you can't lose right but like that is an amazing game so pixel rip 1995 it's a sequel to pixel rip 1984 it's the 80s version of that this is the 90s version so there's a lot of in-game jokes and references and when I spoke to the game developer her her experience and her inspiration making this game was actually like having a dream of like playing a Game Boy in class and then having the Game Boy game break out into the middle of the class so not only does she have to like pay attention to school and not get in trouble by the teacher because she gets caught playing the Game Boy she gets in trouble but she has to solve the level and the boss level which is now broken out into a reality and that's an actual level in the first one that's how you start out so it's a really cool game look up the trailer pixel rip 1995 and pixel rip 1984 fantastic game I don't think it gets enough credit or attention so I'm just going to take this opportunity to spot like that and say like if you have a PlayStation or a PlayStation VR or you got a PC that can run it go get it because it's a great experience at the very least check out a let's play of it really cool idea for VR and just like a great video game flat out Latinx or not great video game sounds like an amazing concept um what advice would you give to someone who wants to start making video games and how would you recommend they get started this man I don't want to sound dismissive or sort but like make them like start join a game jam find a discord with the community if you're in Long Beach you're lucky to have a lot of these cool institutions doing stuff with game development tap into what they're doing but the most important thing would be to to get started right like I mean so many a lot of people and I speak to a lot of people that like are they love the idea of game dev but then there's a lot of work that goes into it you're utilizing bitsy for your program coming up right so like bitsy is a great way to start um if you're brave there's unity not brave but like there's an asset store within unity an epic that you know you can buy pre-made stuff just get started tinker with something look look up on youtube like how to make a game use an easy to start middleware tool to to get started but you know get get started with moving something left to right get started with the creating part just just get started and then you know since there's a lot of efforts going on join a community join a game jam create something but just get started and it will be frustrating or be hard but the end result is always rewarding and that's where the fun is right like and if you can get through making something move and making something work and you can make a game or you can make an experience or you can express yourself now in a different way so just get started just get started can you share a story about a memorable library experience oh my goodness okay so the the first one that comes to mind was i was gosh i think i was six or seven and i had a book report that i had to do and this is like in the late eighties early nineties you know there's no there's no google there's no cell phone i can scream into like give me the answers to everything none of that so i'm tasked with doing a book report on jackie robinson and i'm like cool how do i do this so we were told go to library and like i i actually never been before i knew what it was i knew it existed we had one in our school but i never went to like like the the time the public library like the town one right and i remember going in there um and speaking to the librarian and um looking at all the books i was so small in the library felt so big and i grew up with uh a cyclopedia like the a to z is cyclopedia so i would always like put through like r what's in r what's in z so like to me i was just like i knew there was knowledge in books so when i saw like essentially like a house of knowledge i was at first i was over one but it was more like wow like to me at that point i might as well been walking into like a toy store because i i i didn't love reading i wish i could read more now i mainly re-liking dev books or like you know online articles but when i when i saw all those books i was really excited so when i found out there was just like like there was a couple of books in jackie robinson and i was just diving into it i was like this is incredible because i just thought it was really hard and when i tapped into like that wealth of knowledge and i realized like okay anything at my fingertips i can find out it's right here it felt it felt at home and um and then and then my like so so doing my first book report on jackie robinson and getting all that like getting all the information from the from the library was and being helped out and just feeling like like it was a great environment to learn and also just remember like being quiet and not really hearing that type of quiet before and feeling like a a vibe and energy of people like really focused on what they were doing and sort of like not knowing what that was but being able to plug into that energy too and like focus and be excited about it um that's definitely like like a really cool early memory of going to the library and then getting the library card and i say library because i'm from new york so to me it's a fruit um people give me a like you know crap for it all the time but like i think when i got that card i was like this is like essentially like the key to unlock all knowledge um that you know with the internet and then like seeing like what y'all are doing and and how how the library could be like a source for not just not just books but like like a place to get knowledge and a place to be acknowledged and a place to form community and to really learn and plug into like what your town's doing and to nerd like to be nurtured um while being also i think available resources especially now and like i think the the there's a thirst and quest for knowledge that goes beyond what do i find on the internet and i actually think a lot of people have discovered rediscovered like not just like books but like like the library is a source for um community development and uh i'm really excited about like that potential because i never really had that before but i just had like that that i don't know if people get that with books now but like walking there and just seeing all that you know it was it's really overwhelming as a kid but then like when you pass you get a good grade and you learn something it's like whoa like you understand the like the power of it and then for me seeing what y'all are doing with game development it's like oh like to me that's like that that's the perfect experience for a kid so i cannot wait to see over a period of time what kind of influence y'all have with what you're doing it's different from the question how i felt but like i said thinking about what i would want as a kid what y'all are doing is what i would want like as a kid so like i can't wait to see like what kind of long term effect that has on this community and everything but long story short all those books all that knowledge and i passed and jackie robbins cool so you know one of my earliest and actually favorite memories as a as a young person so where can people find out more about your work and your upcoming projects you want to you can you can follow me on social media on twitter instagram um i'm on vega pedia v e g a p e d i a vega pedia on the internet and all the socials and you can find out more about latinx games festival at latinxgamesfestival.com we have links to and videos to like our previous work and panels and shows all the information about the speakers and games that were featured our sponsors who we're partnered up with and what we're doing with them and of course all of our activities and everything for our upcoming festival on november 21st and the 22nd with our career fair being on the 18th 19th and the 20th all that information and more at latinxgamesfestival.com um pop in and support it and if you're if you're watching this from long beach you know it's it's it's it's online from long beach with love so hope you all come through and support it and if you have any young people that are really interested in game development and want to know like how to get started or what to do or to hear from people that are doing great work at latinxgamesfestival.com we're going to have all that and more so hop in there and get everything you need and uh you know i hope you all hope you all come and tune in should be cool should be cool like said i'm biased but should be cool latinxgamesfest.com festival.com okay so thank you so much for joining us today on web chat wednesday uh chris you want to you want to take us out take us home thank you again thank you to the viewers watching this and see you next time for web chat wednesdays thank you all so much appreciate it


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