Interactive Arts Alberta hopes that its newly opened Walkthrough Collaborative Centre on Whyte Avenue can help make Alberta "the best place in the world to make games," one staff member said.
Walkthrough, located at 10435 82 Avenue NW, is a coworking space for game creators that offers workspaces, events, networking, and mentorship on a by-donation basis. Amenities include high-speed internet, private boardrooms, permanent and hot desks, storage, snacks, a kitchen, and more.
While this may sound like most coworking offerings, IAA said Walkthrough is called a collaborative centre for a reason. "We don't look at this as a business," the organization's board chair, Derek Kwan, told Taproot. "This is more of a community-investment approach. (We aim to) to invest in the studios, the indies, who are building products, and make sure they have fertile ground to find talent and have a soft landing if they have hard times."
Locally and globally, the games industry is having hard times. In late 2023, Humanoid Origin closed and Inflexion Games laid off at least 66 employees. Meanwhile, Madison Côté, the executive director of IAA, told Taproot that, globally, approximately 1,000 gaming jobs "evaporated" in January alone, and that the average career for a game developer is three to five years due to burnout.
Côté and Kwan want those hardships to end and think changing culture is how they can make Alberta the best place to build games. To help achieve this, Walkthrough has a code of conduct that prohibits disrespect and harassment. It's also a dry space, based partly on instances of drugging at games events, and because some developers are more comfortable in sober environments, Côté said.
"We want the space to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible," Côté said. "(The absence of alcohol) is just a worry off of so many people's minds."
Location is also part of the cultural thinking. Kwan said downtown Edmonton, home to coworking spaces like Work Nicer and Homestead Coworking, has more of a tech culture, while Whyte Avenue is more rooted in the arts. Whyte Avenue is also apt for Walkthrough, in part, because it's home to game studios like Beamdog, which is in the space that once housed "the first real" BioWare studio, Côté said.
The IAA wants to expand Walkthrough's current hours of 10am to 6pm on weekdays, but getting there will be more feasible if the organization realizes $9,000 in monthly donations. Kwan said he doesn't know exactly how much has been pledged so far, but Walkthrough is "definitely not sustainable yet," and the next six to eight months will be critical for its future.
Another goal is to offer a studio-in-residence program, so the expertise of local game pros is available to the community. "A big part of what we want to do is institutionalize a lot of that learning," Côté said. "Having folks who can answer about the Canada Media Fund, having folks who can talk about intellectual property law (is something we want to make available)."
Interactive Arts Alberta's new Walkthrough Collaborative Centre had its grand opening during the Global Game Jam. Here, Jon Renish, an industry veteran who once worked at BioWare, gives an opening address at the jam. (Supplied)
Walkthrough's grand opening over the last weekend in January happened alongside the Edmonton chapter of the Global Game Jam. Game jams are events where people form teams and build a game in a short time. Cozy Comet Games, a worker-cooperative game studio that Côté and Kwan are part of, participated in the jam.
Jams are often intense sprints where participants work all night, but this one was different. The IAA does not promote crunch culture because it's harmful and pervasive in the industry, Côté said.
"We know several people with post-traumatic stress from being crunched, intensively, at various studios throughout the years," she said. "It impacts their entire quality of life and changes who they are, fundamentally, as a person. There are some people, if I even mention the name of their game, they start shaking."
Kwan said Walkthrough never could have happened without a $100,000 grant from Alberta Innovates that IAA received in 2023 to conduct research, build a business case, and chart an ecosystem map. He and Côté studied collaborative spaces for games in Canada, the United States, and Japan. One that stood out is Indie Asylum in Montreal, which Côté credits with building success for studios there.
But IAA did not just copy and paste ideas, Kwan added. He said "tweaks" were needed for the collaborative centre to work in an Albertan context. "That rugged individualism of Albertan entrepreneurship is something that we've really tried to disabuse," he said. "The biggest thing (we want to change) is trying to get people to think of moving towards a more collaborative stance."
Aside from Walkthrough, another way IAA supports the local games industry is with the annual Game Discovery Exhibition, better known as GDX. It includes an exhibition for developers at the Edmonton EXPO Centre during KDays and a conference at a venue that's yet to be decided. GDX runs this year from July 16 to 27.