In a terse press release, the International Game Developers Association announced that Dr. Tim Langdell of Edge Games has voluntarily resigned his position on the IGDA board. As such, the recently announced special membership meeting to vote on Langdell’s possible ouster will no longer take place.
Regardless of your position on the recent furor over Dr. Langdell’s and his company’s behavior, it is interesting that Langdell’s resignation comes at a time when public opinion was ever so slightly beginning to swing back in his favor, due in part to a huge document dump from Edge Games that suggests – though doesn’t really prove – that indie developer Mobigame was much more in the wrong regarding its trademark infringement battle with Langdell than most had initially assumed. It is also interesting to note that this announcement came on the same day that Bob Bates stepped down as Co-Chair of the IGDA Board, to pursue another opportunity. The two resignations appear unrelated, though the IGDA Board, including Bates, was harshly criticized in the weeks leading up to today’s news for circling the wagons and refusing to take any public position on the Langdell issue beyond boilerplate statements of support. It does look like Bates will remain on the board, his Chairman responsibilities taken over exclusively by his Co-Chair Tobi Saulnier of Vicarious Visions.
Langdell’s departure leaves an open seat on the board. Three board seats are up for election this year, and this fourth grants IGDA members the opportunity to significantly reshape the board’s politics should they choose. Reformer Darius Kazemi is a likely victor, but three other seats are up for grabs. One does hope that the IGDA membership gets past its own crushing apathy and votes in individuals committed to long-overdue IGDA reform, before the organization is defined by nothing save its own irrelevance.
Update: Langdell has released a statement regarding his resignation. Kotaku has run it in its entirety here.
Update Update: it would appear my earlier comment about Bob Bates remaining on the Board was incorrect; he has resigned both the co-Chair position and his seat on the board.
Good rundown. I am still wary (I neither support nor want to distort Tim himself) – and wanted to see more information. I think this all came to a head mainly because of complete and utter blackouts of information – so people investigated and came up with what they could. The trademark issue is part of it, of course, as is other things (Tim’s list of produced games was one thing).
The problem with the way it was going, was entirely the fact nobody was speaking. Wars have happened over a lot less. Frankly, it’s not to me the trademark abuse, or anything else, it’s everyone being so damn quiet in an organisation based around, basically, a lot of communication. That completely sucked.
Whether or not Tim’s release about “a minority of members” causing problems and so forth is correct depends too (how many active members are there? I’ve no clue), but even if that was the view, it doesn’t matter when most members were “can I have more information please? what’s going on!?!” and had to go to TIG Source or other places to know even the basics.
I think I’ll leave this for a month or two and then gather all the information I can find on it, it’ll help my IGDA History project – this possibly is one of the more important events so worth recording right now about the org, for good or bad the way it happened shouldn’t happen again.