The Toronto, Ontario-based McLuhan Festival of the Future announced the launch of this year’s The Vortex Competition, which revolves around aspiring game entrepreneurs and companies across Canada.

A judging panel will review submitted concepts and prototypes of games in two respective categories. The competition, now in its fifth year and open to entrants across Canada, will take place on November 4 and 5. Judges for Vortex 2009 include software entrepreneur and star of the TV show Shark Tank Kevin O’Leary, Ubisoft Canada CEO Yannis Mallat, GameTap founder Blake Lewin, and game columnist and TV personality Marc Saltzman.

"We have a very big hub of video game developers involved in the competition," said Val Dooley, founder of Toots Capital in a phone call. She’s helping organize the competition, which has strong representation from major Canadian cities Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. "Some of the people [in past Vortex Competitions] have developed companies that are very successful," she added.

IGDA-Montreal is excited to announce a fourth edition of Dominance War, a massive international online game art competition. Dominance War IV, starting February 20th, is a truly unique game art competition. It brings together the globe’s best online art forums to compete for world champion standings in an Olympic-like setting. In this event, Game Artists are the athletes and online forums are their countries.

Dominance War gives game artists a fantastic opportunity to showcase talents, get employed, make great portfolio pieces, receive recognition and enjoy the challenge of competing with fellow game artists on an international level.

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