During a breakfast meeting at CES 2007, film executive Kevin Ping Chang and entertainment reporter Ben Fritz began to discuss which videogames they’d been playing lately. The discussion continued upon their return to Los Angeles, and soon grew to encompass their friends, including the likes of talent agent Derek Douglas and screenwriter Justin Marks. The group’s interests and activities were chewed over via contributions to a mailing list, and their friendships cemented online playing the likes of Gears Of War. Thus, Nerd Poker was born.

Today, the group numbers nearly 100 members, comprising comic-book writers, movie producers, videogame developers and others working inside the many-tentacled beast that is the modern-day entertainment industry. Until this year, it had been just a group of people playing games, discussing them, and meeting up at parties to discuss them some more while drinking beer.

At E3 in May, however, they launched House Of Game, an event intended to bring together the Hollywood and videogame industries. The movie world, it was decided, needed help in getting its head around these new-fangled videogame things. We met with some of the key Nerd Poker players to discover how they hope their event will benefit Hollywood, but also help gaming, too.

From left: Justin Marks, Kevin Ping Chang, Derek Douglas,
Ben Fritz

Why did you choose to formalise Nerd Poker with House Of Game?
Justin Marks: I think one of the things that we really started to see was that Nerd Poker was a really big hybrid group – you’ve got videogames, you’ve got movies, you’ve got comic books, and creators, writers and executives – and what we saw over time as we all played games together is that there’s a big disconnect between the game community and the film community when it comes to really understanding what’s out there. There are a lot people in Hollywood who would say: “Oh, you play games? Well, I’d love to play games and I’m really interested in them, but it’s so intimidating, it’s so hard to get over that hurdle of just starting to understand what people like and what it’s all about.” You’ve been to the convention centre floor at E3, and it’s kind of hard to see what really works at that place – “Is it that game or that game that I should be looking at?” So we said, well, we know through our connections within the gaming community that we could bring an event like this together, and we know through our connections within the Hollywood community that we could bring our friends to come and see this, so why not create a very small, intimate event that could focus on just that – to hold people’s hands as they come round and see these games one at a time?

Are we talking about people who have hardly any experience of gaming at all?
JM: Some do, some don’t. Some people I saw at House Of Game are people we play games with, and some people are just starting to do movies that are game adaptations, so they want to learn more about it. There’s a full range.

Ben Fritz: I was showing around a TV producer who just really wants to learn about games, but he doesn’t know where to start, and that’s exactly what this is for, to help people who are in Hollywood who are creative people but who don’t know where to start with games. So eventually the idea that we all want is that games stand alongside movies and television culturally and business-wise as just another part of media.