The Nordic Game conference feels a little like a family gathering. Despite taking place in a giant corrugated box on an industrial estate in Malmö, Sweden, it’s a considerably more informal and intimate affair than GDC, with a sense of easy familiarity between delegates – at this year’s event, there was even a bit of a singalong.

Of course, this convivial atmosphere partly comes from a sense of shared purpose: the conference’s remit is to encourage a unified regional stand on the international stage, and a good portion of this year’s schedule was given over to worrying about – and celebrating – the state of Nordic gaming. You might not have known it from the keynote speeches, however, which were dominated by names from beyond the region.

UK developer Traveller’s Tales opened the proceedings with an entertaining retrospective on the Lego Star Wars series. Lego may be a Scandinavian icon, but the story was largely a British one – and it was perhaps surprising that this should have led a conference dedicated to Nordic games.

The closing keynote of the first day similarly strained its relationship with the Nordic, but seemed well received by the audience nonetheless. Zoë Mode’s creative director Ste Curran was joined by friends to deliver a series of stories about gaming and the videogame industry – climaxing when Traveller’s Tales’ Jonathan Smith led the audience in a song lamenting the tedium of so many videogame plots.

This theme was more explicitly laid out in the following Q&A session: the best stories about games aren’t those that emerge from their plots but one that gamers construct – often with other players. Curran and Smith voiced frustration at gaming’s tendency to ape other linear media when interaction should be the focus. Perhaps this argument was a little diluted by the fact that so many of the stories related to multiplayer games; much of their value was clearly a phenomenon of socialization, rather than being unarguably the result of interactive media itself.

The UK wasn’t the only non-Nordic country to receive a fair amount of stage time. A rare appearance by Fumito Ueda outlined the idiosyncratic production of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus, while Keiichiro Toyama, creator of Silent Hill, showed Siren: New Translation, the latest game in the franchise.

Despite a greater global influence on the line-up, there remained a large amount of Scandinavian material – an awards ceremony doled out gongs to The Darkness and World In Conflict, while another event issued grants to promising developers – sparking discussion over what the Nordic governments should be doing to ensure the region retains creators despite rising costs. It was an issue raised in the conference’s closing discussion, which brought together representatives from Nordic heavyweights CCP, Remedy and DICE. Even if the conference’s headline acts strayed from the message of Nordic ascendancy, one thing was clear: whatever the difficulties that lie ahead for Nordic developers, there’s a resolution to face them together – that’s what families are for.

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