GDC Day 5

The final day of GDC is always a quiet one. Instead of going out with a bang, GDC slowly empties over the course of the day, as hung-over game developers find they lack the patience and will to continue going to lectures and roundtables. By the end of the day, only a few attendees walk zombie-like from lecture to lecture, like some scene out of Dawn of the Dead.



Requirements for a Next Generation Massively Multiplayer Online Game: Gordon Walton
Description: Gordon Walton goes over what he thinks are the 9 things a next-generation MMOG needs to succeed.
What I Expected: Gordon Walton is famous for his no-holds-barred lectures that get right down to the core of the subject, no matter how dirty it gets. I went for the entertainment value of the lecture.
What I Got: Gordon has been getting nicer and nicer as time moves on, thus his entertainment value has dropped. However, I’m sure this has made getting along with him a lot easier. Of his 9 things, only one was thought provoking, which was having an audience mode for games. With this, people who weren’t playing the game could watch the activities of the people who were, and get enough voyeuristic thrills that they would become players, as well. At the time, that sounded pretty interesting. In retrospect, it reminds me of what happens after you die in Counter-Strike. If you die late in a game, and have a lot vested in the outcome, it’s pretty interesting to try to see how the game is progressing. If you get killed early in the game, then being stuck watching people go down halls is nothing short of boring. Without context, watching other people playing games is probably not the great selling tool Gordon made it out to be.

His other points boiled down, basically, to two things: players are expecting more quality from their games, and are expecting those games to suit their play styles. So, I guess it’s actually one thing: players want their expectations met, which is, basically, what they have always wanted. Otherwise, the talk was pretty good, and it woke me up enough to go to the next thing.

Triangulation: A Schizophrenic Approach to Game Design: Will Wright
Description: Will Wright talks about his design process.
What I Expected: Will Wright is pretty much the smartest guy designing games that can actually talk to an audience. There may be smarter people, but they aren’t nearly as entertaining. I’ve missed Will for the past two years, and have regretted it, so I decided to go this year.
What I Got: Will, once again, did a highly entertaining lecture that ranged from film clips of robots calling for help to a Russian Space Minute that showed how a solid interface can win over a more complex one. His design method looks a little like the way David Bowie writes songs using a random word generator. Lots of laughs, and really entertaining. On the other hand, duplicating this process requires the mind of Will Wright, which not many people can approach.

SciFi MMPs: Lessons from Star Wars Galaxies and Earth and Beyond: Chris Klug, Raph Koster, Jesse Schell
Description: Chris Klug of Earth and Beyond, and Raph Koster of Star Wars Galaxies constitute a panel led by Jesse Schell of Carnegie Mellon University talking about Sci Fi MMOGs.
What I Expected: I was unsure what I would get from this panel. However, a few friends were going, so I tagged along.
What I Got: Basically, this turned into a post-mortem of both Galaxies and EAB. It was interesting that Chris admitted that not having avatars in a real sense was a really bad decision. There was also some good talk on the fact that MMOGs no longer have the same growth pattern that the early MMOGs like UO and EQ had when they started out, meaning that the audience is more experienced, and has an easier time letting go than previously. It seems MMOGs are more like a virus than an addictive drug. Once you kick the habit, you are pretty much cured, and new games must now overcome your resistance to get you to play as much as you did previously.

Game Credits: Towards Industry Guidelines: John Feil, Dave Weinstein
Description: Our second roundtable on establishing credits guidelines.
What I Expected: More of what I got on Wednesday.
What I Got: Lots more problems with how companies credit games, such as: Small teams often don’t have leads (so who is the lead designer if you only have two designers?); how do you credit contractors; how do you credit cross-department contributions; what about international outsourcing for localization or software development; what about programmers who have built a C++ library that is used by the company in game after game, are they credited as a developer for each game; and, what about crediting people working on a live product, like a MMOG? All in all, this session was a bit more valuable than the first one. Now comes the fun part, where I get to collate the problems and also create a document with all the basic roles developers have in making a computer game. Whee!


Thus ends GDC 2004. I liked this one better than 2003. The lectures were better, and the networking was amazing this year. I collected as many business cards as I had in the four previous years combined. Pretty amazing. Looking forward already to GDC 2005.

GDC Day 4

Sorry I'm posting these behind schedule... but at least I'm posting them!

GDC Day 4

Today was, if possible, more crowded than yesterday. They say that this is the biggest GDC ever, and I believe it.

Here’s what I attended today:


Would The Real Emergent Gameplay Please Stand Up? Harvey Smith, Randy Smith
Description: Harvey and Randy of Ion Storm talk about emergent gameplay. Emergent gameplay happens when game mechanics interact with one another to create more gameplay than what you would get if they couldn’t affect one another. An example would be that bullets rupture barrels, barrels contain poison gas, poison gas kills humans, when humans die, the guns they carry drop on the ground, when guns drop on the ground, they have a chance of accidentally going off. In this example, if the player shot a barrel near a guard, the poison gas would kill him, the guard would drop his weapon, and more guards would die from either weapons fire or more ruptured barrels.
What I Expected: I’ve watched Harvey’s talks about emergent gameplay for a couple of years now. I wanted to see if they had found out anything new.
What I Got: They didn’t find out anything new.

Toward Relevant Research: Collaboration 101: Mark DeLoura, roBin Hunicke, Raph Koster, Michael Van Lent, Will Wright
Description: Academics and Developers want a relationship: The Universities want money, free source code to play with, and for game companies to hire their students. The Game Industry wants universities to research new ways of making better games, and to give that research to game developers the results for free. They are currently trying to meet somewhere in the middle.
What I Expected: I wanted to hear about new research that might have an impact on how we can make games.
What I Got: The academics asking for money, free source code, and jobs for their graduates. The industry guys trying to say, in a nice way, that academia is unprepared to interface with the much faster paced game industry. It was an interesting panel, but ultimately not very valuable.

IGDA Annual Meeting
Description: During GDC, the IGDA holds a face-to-face meeting to go over what has happened over the previous year, to address concerns, and to have the candidates for the board of directors gives a short campaign speech.
What I Expected: As a member of the board of directors, I expected to sit behind a table and address questions asked by the audience about the business of the GDC.
What I Got: Usually, these meetings are fairly long and onerous. This year, it went very smoothly and it felt like we got through it without too many people falling asleep. I don’t know if this is because I was behind the table and have an insight into the IGDA now that I didn’t have before, or if it was actually better. I do know that we managed to bring food in to the meeting, and that helped me out a lot, since previous years have been a battle versus long-winded speeches and hunger. The board candidates are very impressive this year, and I look forward to seeing how that goes.

The Secret Of Pac-Man’s Success: Making Fun First: Toru Iwatani
Description: Toru Iwatani was the designer of Pac-Man. He gives his insights on classic arcade games and the secret of Pac-Man’s success.
What I Expected: I followed a friend blindly into this one, so I didn’t have any real expectations.
What I Got: This was a translated talk. Everybody in the audience got a pair of headphones with which a translator whispered in English what Toru was saying in Japanese. It felt like I was in the UN.
One of the problems of translated talks is that anything the speaker says is filtered by the knowledge of the translator. This filter generally reduces the relevance and insights of what the speaker is saying due to an unfamiliarity of the technical lingo in one or both languages. Also, cultural differences reduce a lot of the meaning of what the speaker is saying. Usually, I avoid translated talks for this reason. When I saw the nifty headsets, though, my gadget-geek instincts kicked in and I decided to stick around. Unfortunately, the lecture still suffered from this filtering effect.
The talk, given the circumstances, was pretty interesting. Toru, like many Japanese designers, believe in simplicity as a core design element, and said that Pac-Man’s strength was in that simplicity of form and function, which I really can’t disagree with. He also talked about his design method, which is heavily based on the observation of systems and trying to get to their core functionality in order to replicate them in games. An example he gave was a pair of escalators. His interpretations of these escalators were that they were a perfect system, because even when not functioning, they still retained their function. In other words, an escalator works extremely well at moving people up and down the levels of a building, and, if their power is turned off, they still retain their function as stairs. Admittedly, I can’t see the beauty he is seeing in this system, but I think that this is a clue as to the difference between Japanese and American designers. Personally, as a level designer, I see escalators as a choke point where I can reliably predict where players have to go in order to ascend levels.
All in all, this talk would have been much better if I understood Japanese.

Adventures In Character Design: Tim Schafer
Description: Tim Schafer is the well-known designer of Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, and other LucasArts adventure games. His talk covered his thoughts on how to create interesting characters.
What I Expected: An entertaining talk on making funny characters.
What I Got: I got pretty much what I expected. Tim is a funny guy and makes very interesting and funny games. His talk had a lot of interesting tips on how to create deep characters for computer games. The best part was his using a Freindster-style information screen to develop character traits.