The penultimate day at GDC 09 finds me weary, delirious, and sporting a pronounced limp. My right eye is wandering lazily off-center and, like a broken compass, seems to always point Southeast regardless of which way i’m facing. i’m starting to confuse people’s names with colours, and i’m blurring session titles with childhood memories, like all those times i would go down to the old swimmin’ hole in my John Frederickson-coloured shorts and talk for hours about recent trends in emergent gameplay. i’ve also developed a rather uncomfortable case of testicular Zoroastrianism, which is exactly what you think it is.

Tonight’s the night when everyone overdoes it at parties. i’m heading out soon to drink spiced non-alcoholic Fun Rum™ from a pineapple at the tiki-themed Tonga Lounge with some other Canadian folks in the industry, and i’ll likely wind up at the W Hotel to see what Suite Night (a series of hotel room parties) has to offer. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the lessons of the day.

Session: GDC Microtalks
Speakers: Assorted

This pecha kucha-inspired series of talks from ten speakers was fun, fast, and inspirational. It got off to a very slow and pretentious start with John Sharp discussing the Primacy of Play (snore), and Tracy Fullerton throwing out needlessly decorated terminology in a show of exactly why i steer clear of academic speakers as a general rule. Here’s a sampling of Tracy’s linguistic self-love:

• liturgical
• transcendence
• sympathetic magic
• educated spectatorship
• spiritual exhileration
• ritual power

i mean, i know what all of those words mean on their own, and i’ve definitely been guilty of churching up a sentence or two. But you have to pace yourself. i like to surround one wealthy word with a bunch of mono-syllabic beggar words, like a crowd of Indian kids swarming a well-off German tourist. It’s my trickle-down theory of sentence composition: you have to give readers time to let the big words to sink in, but the million dollar words help to raise the rent for the rest of the sentence.

N’Gai Croal

N’Gai talked about sliding difficulty scales in games and how great they are. Not easy/medium/hard stuff, but more like games that make enemies stronger the better you do, or games where two players can play co-operatively at different difficulty levels. For this last example he held up Gears of War, saying that it’s a great example of a game where a parent can play with a child. i thought it was irresponsible of N’Gai to suggest that children should go anywhere near a game like Gears of War. It’s kind of like saying that the broad physical humour in Kill Bill is great because it will keep the kids entertained while you watch as a family. Check your head, N’Gai.

N’Gai’s take-away was that players who criticized Prince of Persia‘s forgiving “death” rewind should re-consider what they value in games, because a punishing “fail” screen isn’t necessarily key to a game’s fun factor.

Robin Hunicke

Robin is pretty, so she commanded my attention. i’m afraid that’s just how the world works. Her talk was a tad bubbly and less inspiring than the others. She spoke about how she was disappointed with Sony’s Home virtual world, and listed a few features that would make it a great place to be. These included:

1. graffiti@home – walk around tagging the joint
2. jam@home – give everyone drumsticks to tap on the environment and make music together
3. climb@home – jack climbing pegs into the world’s surfaces to turn Home into a massive virtual rock-climbing club

Robin admitted that these were not quick features to implement, but lamented the fact that Home‘s only purpose was apparently to sell virtual Jordache jeans. She looked at these features through the lens of the four C’s, which i’m ashamed to say i’d never heard of:

1. Creativity
2. Collection
3. Competition
4. Community

These four C’s were the most crucial and applicable piece of learning for me in any of the talks, but i don’t think Robin is credited with them. Does anyone know who came up with these? They sound like something Bartle cooked up. (note to self: Google works wonders)

(additional note to self: notes to self need not be published publicly on a blog, as they cease to be notes to self and become, instead, notes to everyone)

Eric Zimmerman

Eric wrote books like The Power of Play and others that i haven’t read because heady game theory annoys me somewhat. But he may have broken my will with his “talk”. He passed out coloured cards and engaged the entire room in a game of card-passing, where the goal was to end up clumped with the largest number of people holding the same colour card as yours. The room erupted. Strangers became allies, smiles became frowns, and a number of people took of their clothes and spontaneously started having sex with each other in the middle of the conference hall. After it was all over and cigarettes were lit, Eric joyously proclaimed the power that games and playing had to transform the way we think, socialize, communicate, blink … it was definitely an energy booster, and the perfect thing to wake me up during a very draining conference. i may read the speaker’s book after all.

Clint Hocking

Clint’s famous potty mouth starred in his talk about the “cult of 90″ in the wine review circuit, where much is made of the difference between an 89% wine score and a 90% wine score. Clint’s talk was essentially a rant against MetaCritic, but his proposed solution was a five-star system, which wouldn’t solve his problem at all – the cult of 90 would just suffer some division and become the cult of four or five. Clint’s talk turned me into a whine critic.

Jenova Chen

Jenova’s talk was dense, clever, and FANTASTIC – probably my favourite of the bunch. He talked about emotions in games, and compared the emotional “hue” of games in this, video gaming’s infancy, to the emotional hue of movies in their infancy. Both games and movies offered experiences that were empowering and stimulating. (He mentioned two other emotional qualities, but i wasn’t writing fast enough.) He called these emotions “primal”, and suggested that games in the future would take advantage of a larger range in the emotional spectrum. We’ve already seen this with many 99 cent iPhone games, which go beyond empowerment and stimulation, and instead evoke more nuanced feelings of betrayal. i want my dollar back.

Frank Lantz

Frank’s sound bite was “games are not media”. The one concept that stuck with me was the idea that currently, we think of games as things we put into computers: computers contain games. His point was that games are so big and important and all-encompassing and unique that in the future, we’ll put computers into games. Games will contain, or include, computers. That was food for thought.

Jane McGonigal

Jane’s idea of fun includes Chinese philosophy, the zombie apocalypse, and humiliation. She encompassed these in the acronym CZADOF:

• C – Confucius/Chinese philosophy Confucius spoke of the “jen ratio” (not sure how to spell that – Jane used a Chinese character for the word). A high ratio is inversely proportionate to the degree of dickishness going on.
• ZA – zombie apocalypse A game like Left 4 Dead has a high ratio because no one has the luxury of being a dick. Everyone has to pitch in and help his fellow man. (Jane’s obviously never played the tabletop Zombies!!! game, where dickishness is crucial to victory)
• Dance-off This was one of the very best things i’ve seen in the whole show. Jane’s Top Secret Dance-Off is a socially networked RPG game where you level up by completing dance-off missions: dance in a disguise, dance at a cross-walk, etc. You get your friends to videotape you, and then upload the vid to earn points and levels. i nearly spat my food out laughing so hard, and i wasn’t even eating any food. Jane contends that humiliation is a key ingredient to having fun, and Top Secret Dance-Off made me a believer.

Session: Making the Impossible Possible
Speaker: Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid developer)

i won’t waste time talking about this one too much, because it’s probably being covered ad nauseum by fans across the Internatz. Hideo’s thesis was that things that seem impossible now will be made possible through technology and human ingenuity. His definition of impossible was a little loose, and his presentation was tedious and repetetive. i appreciated his point that game hardware only brought him part of the way towards achieving his goals, and that clever game design was needed to bring him the rest of the way. i recommend finding a video stream of the presentation, but you should probably watch it in fast-forward once it starts feeling familiar (that wasaround the 20 minute mark for me).

Session:Multiple
Speakers: i couldn’t decide

i really agonized over this particular slot, because there were about five great-sounding sessions i wanted to attend, and there were only three clones of me. i finally landed in the iPhone talk, which was spuriously labelled a “programming track” session. i must have missed all the programming chatter at the beginning, because the session was a repeat of every non-programming-related thing i already knew about iPhone development – really basic stuff like how to get into the developer program. i did appreciate the speaker’s advice to price your iPhone app at what it’s worth, instead of joining the race to the bottom of the heap with the ubiquitous (and damaging) 99 cent price point.

i skipped the Q+A session and ducked into a session called “Failure is Not an Option”, a talk targeted at lead designers and producers. i had hoped from the title that this would be an entrepreneurial session around how your company’s failure is not an option, but unfortunately it was more project-focussed. Here are the points that resonated with me:

1. hire on demand
2. don’t hire until you get your core game mechanic working in a prototype
3. always have something to demo (this is a great point)
4. re: the good/fast/cheap pyramid, make the right trade-offs during production by actually playing your game extensively

Session: Some long session title about metrics that i can’t be arsed to re-type
Speakers: Trevor Fencott from Bedlam Games, Simon Carless from Gamasutra, Marc Doyle from Metacritic, Michael Klotz from the NPD Group, and Michael Pachter from Wedbush Morgan Securities

It was a tiny thrill to recognize Michael Pachter, as i’m an avid Joystiq reader (he gets covered there a lot). Pachter is very vocal about his predictions for gaming’s future. i think he’s full of nonsense most of the time, but the guy blew my mind with his encyclopedic memory. i stood up at the end of the session and gave the Metacritic guy the business for ignoring sites like YTV’s Gamepad, whose reviews he rejected because they gave Piglet’s Big Game a 9 out of 10 (imagine that? A quality kids’ game getting a high score on a kids’ gaming site.)

Marc dismissed my criticism, saying (somewhat dickishly) “i’ve never heard of Piglet’s Big Game“. Pachter rushed to my defense and rattled off the game’s release date and sales numbers (over 100k copies) like some freaky human ticker tape. Marc tried to deride me by questioning what a 30-year-old man was doing reviewing Piglet’s Big Game in the first place. i didn’t review it, actually – a 24-year-old woman wrote the piece – but his crummy attitude just reinforced the flaws inherent in Metacritic. It’s a site that tries too hard to maintain its street cred with game industry insiders, and it couldn’t care a fig about the gamer population at large: namely, moms and dogs.

In the end, the creators of Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum got the last laugh. Who needs Metacritic when your Wii Balance Board game sells over a million copies? Lesson learned: ignore moms and dogs at your own peril.

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.

Ryan Henson Creighton

View all posts by Ryan Henson Creighton

Popularity: 4% [?]

Be Sociable, Share!

•