Hi folks! This one is a little different: no derivations today (well, almost), just a story from my home state.

What Is PlayMinas?

In June 2025, the government of Minas Gerais launched PlayMinas, a program that uses games as a way to reach young people: education, digital inclusion, technology and the creative economy, all through the universe of digital games. It is an initiative of the state government, through Sedese and Codemge, run by the Instituto Novare.

Between 2025 and 2026 the program runs in eleven stages, mixing in-person and online activities: robotics, virtual reality, hackathons, an amateur e-sports championship and cultural contests. It travels across the state, with stops in Belo Horizonte, Pedro Leopoldo, Barbacena, Betim, São Gotardo, Santa Rita do Sapucaí, São Sebastião do Paraíso and São João del-Rei, and its final stage joins Game Fest Minas, the state’s first gaming fair, planned at Expominas for April 2026 with free access for public school students.

And right in the middle of it all: the PlayMinas Intergame Summit, the first scientific congress of the games industry in Brazil.

Why It Matters to Me

Two cities on that list are part of my own story. My very first job, back in high school, was writing SQL for the city hall of Betim. And São João del-Rei is where I studied Computer Science, at UFSJ, and where I did my BRDF research, the one behind the Material Explorer.

Back then, making games and graphics in Brazil felt like something you did on graphics forums, building D3D9 demos. Seeing my state treat games as education and opportunity, with a scientific congress included, is something my younger self would have loved to see!

At the Intergame Summit

On December 2 and 3, 2025, I was in Sala 3 at the summit in Belo Horizonte, with a talk and a round table:

  • Matemática & Games: 3 Equações Revolucionárias (Math & Games: Three Revolutionary Equations): how the dot product, the rendering equation and the quadratic equation took games from Quake’s lightmaps to ray tracing in silicon. Watch on YouTube, where it goes by the session’s title in the program, Matemática da Luz. The full write-up, slides included, is in the next post of this series.
  • Round table with fellow speakers of the summit. Watch on YouTube.

Many thanks to the PlayMinas and Instituto Novare teams for the invitation, and to everyone who showed up with questions. You can find all my talks on the Talks & Publications page.

Live long and prosper!