On February 15th, war has begun! Dominance War III, that is. For those unfamiliar with it, Dominance War is an annual event that pits several invited art communities against each other in a friendly game art competition. To get a better look at how this competition came about, and what can be expected in this year's event, I talked a bit with Joe Mirabello, publicist and one of the organizers of Dominance War.

Tell us a little bit about the history of the Dominance War competition.

The Dominance war contest is now in it's third year, and it's really beginning to become something big. This is the first year the contest will be run in multiple languages, the first year it will involve such a sheer number of forums and the first year the contest has seen such industry support. It's pretty exciting!

As for Dominance War's history--the contest started three years ago as a face-off between cgchat.com and polycount.com. Fred Hultqvist ran contests on cgchat at the time, and he was the one who came up with the initial idea, gathered the necessary people and prizes and organized the whole thing. It really is a product of his hard work. At the time the largest competitions in the industry were the "Make Something Unreal" contest and the "Blizzard Art Competition" and Fred wanted to make something to rival those, only be independently managed.

The following year he opened a site specifically to help run the contest, http://www.dominancewar.com. By then I had become his replacement on cgchat.com, and cgtalk and 3dtotal were added to the roster as well. That was when the contest began to really take off. Fred managed to pull together $10,000 in prize money and companies really began to focus on the contest. It's become a proving ground for who's up-and-coming in game art.

This year there will be nine forums, and the contest is being translated into five different languages...so it's going to be a bit interesting trying to manage it all. It should be fun though.

Who came up with that fantastic storyline for this year's event?

Fred Hultqvist came up with the story; It's been a tricky task since each year any one of the forums could win, as well as he needs to keep each year's theme somewhat fresh and different. So he's had to have the storyline evolve in bursts one direction and then another. It's really just a device to tie all these different forums and themes into one 'world'.

How does an art community get involved in the competition?

Communities are recruited in a variety of ways. For a forum like Game Artisans, it was a matter of it being the spiritual successor of cgchat, one of the founding forums. For Hxsd, I believe it was because last year's winner actually called that his home forum, and was able to successfully foster a relationship between Fred and Hxsd.

Fred specifically looks at how active their game-art community is, and whether or not they'd be able to gather enough interest in such a contest. Most of the forums for this year's Dominance War were locked in fairly early, and it's become a bit of a task to organize everything. Personally I'd love to see the contest grow more every year; we'll have to see how well this year's goes.

I noticed it is mandatory to show work in progress. That must really make the competition intense. Has there ever been any problems with this?

Actually, this is a rule to help level the playing field. People in the past would occasionally enter a contest last minute--trying to hold their ideas in until the very end. That compromises what Dominance War is about--community interaction and forum building.

When is the deadline for getting started in the competition?

The contest has just started! And you can enter new entries up until the last week or so of the comp (and the only reason you can't go later is because of that WIP thread rule). To enter, people just have to choose a forum that's participating and start a WIP thread. In a few days the formal submission system will go online for completed entries and cross-forum browsing. good luck to any of the renderosity crew who decide to join in!

How well has this competition assisted participants in finding real world jobs in the field?

Well, online forum competitions in general are starting to become 'training' grounds for young artists. It's how I myself first got hired, and I have found myself since then actively recruiting and recommending people from the message boards. Dominance War is by far the largest of these sorts of events, with the largest exposure--and it's not always about the top placement either. Sure, the winners will get a lot of attention from various companies, but there are a lot of people who already HAVE jobs that enter Dominance War just for fun. They'll be watching to see what other people are making, how well people act on the forums, whether or not they might be fun to work with, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the offers came about because of community networking during the competition, moreso than due to any prizes won.

Thank you, Joe, for taking the time out of your extra busy schedule to answer some questions!

Dominance War III Ends:
April 7th 11:59 p.m US & Canada Eastern Time

Links:

• Dominance War Home
• Dominance War Rules

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