GDC 09 is now behind me. i write this entry from the San Francsicso airport in relative comfort. The week was packed with stats, ideas, names and a growing list of todo’s flying at me from all directions, and i hope i have the chance to process it all when i return to Toronto.

The return trip from conferences like GDC are always deceptive. You think you’re going to arrive at the office fresh-faced and equipped to take on the world. But before long, reality sets in and you wind up putting out the same fires and tending to the same issues in the same fashion as before. The mundanity is made all the more unbearable by the fact that your brain is buzzing with schemes and plans to rule the world. After a few weeks or months, you return to the same snail’s pace as before, rotely executing the same old schemes that come most naturally, and shortly thereafter you die. One or two people attend your funeral, mostly out of obligation, and your flimsy grave marker is knocked over in a wind-storm, leaving your mortal remains and memory to languish in obscurity for the remainder of human existence, however long that lasts.

So before that inevitable charade plays out, i’ll choose to remain in the moment, excited by the buzz of possibility. Let’s take a look at the session i hit on the final day of GDC 09:

Session: Negotiation 101
Speaker: Vincent Scheurer

To be fair to Vincent, i came very late to his session. To be unfair to Vincent, the parts of his presentation i did see appeared to be cribbed directly from a popular book on negotiation called “Getting to Yes”. i recommend the book. There’s not much a speaker can do to top it in a twenty minute talk. But if you’re an avid Coles/Cliff Notes reader, or are just outrageously lazy, you might have enjoyed this session.

Session: Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experience (AKA: A Video Game Does Not Stop at the Edge of the Screen)
Speaker: Jesper Juul, lecturer at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab

Jesper wins the award for “Most Needlessly Verbose Session Title That Goes on Forever With a Lot of Words in it and Also Has an Unnecessary Secondary Subtitle”, which is not a real award.

Jesper (pronounced “yes-purr”, which is how my cat responds when i scratch his ears) insisted that designers work towards Failure Cost instead of Failure Count. Failure Count, simply put, is when the player has three lives, and loses one each time he fails. Failure Cost pays closer attention to what the player loses for failing – time, money, dignity, progress, etc. All in all, the session didn’t really gel for me, so i can’t really say much more. i think Jesper wanted people to pay closer attention to ways of letting the player fail that don’t boil down to a simple “you suck! lose another life!”

Session: Paper Prototypes of Spore
Speaker: Stone Librande – Lead Designer, Spore Galactic Adventures (an upcoming expansion pack)

i didn’t expect much from this talk, because after three years i’m frankly rather tired of hearing about Spore – particularly because it didn’t live up to the hype. Stone was an interesting fellow because he was brought on to the team to address the gameplay of Spore long after the technology and the assets were developed. One of the major criticisms of Spore is that as a creation tool, it was great, but as a game, it just wasn’t very much fun. i suppose that’s what happens when you leave gameplay to the 11th hour (or, in this case, two years before launch, which Stone tells us is pretty late in the development cycle).

So Stone’s session absolutely ruled. When faced with a challenge, be it how to make the Cell level of Spore enjoyable, or how to decide what to cook for dinner, Stone apparently runs to his craft drawer and starts cutting out paper pieces to solve the problem. Stone’s slides had the very best visuals i’ve ever seen in a GDC presentation. He included paper games that he created in middle school, all the way up to the complex fridge magnet game that his family helped him to test, which later evolved into Spore‘s Space level. Here are a few things that struck a chord:

1. it’s hard to get people to play your game if it’s ugly (SO true)
2. when creating a paper prototype, focus on one idea at a time (instead of modelling the entire system)
3. be as abstract as possible. You’re essentially moving around ideas on the table, not units and rules
4. don’t worry if your paper prototype is not fun. That’s exactly the point of going through this process: iterating on the concept until it becomes fun
5. creating a paper prototype can help to keep the team’s imagination in sync. Once it’s there on the table for everyone to touch and poke and play with, you’re basically pulling everything out of everyone’s heads and laying bare on a slab for the whole team to discuss.

Session: Flash SIG (Sturgeon Impregnation Goalsetting)

This was the inaugural meeting of game industry folks using Flash to get the job done. i was surprised to hear about all the so-called triple-A console titles using Flash for their interface design, with the help of an app by Scaleform. Scaleform formed the ad hoc committee to form the group’s actual steering committee. They were very grateful to have Dave Rohrl from Zynga in the room, as Dave chairs the Casual Games SIG and had a lot of fatherly advice to offer.

i hope that Flash’s role in console titles will help to lend legitimacy to the Flash scene, which is (perhaps fairly) characterized as a baby program absued by under-20 wanna-be developers producing poor quality games from their moms’ basements. The room today was filled with mostly Flash web devs, with a small console contingency, who want to see that perception changed. Next steps are to assemble the committee (i let my name stand … am VERY interested in this initiative), and to start building out the Flash SIG Wiki on the IGDA website. This is a group to watch, folks. If you’re a Flash developer committed to producing quality game products, keep your eye on this blog and i’ll let you know how to get involved.

Session: Lunch
Speaker: Howard Tomlinson, Director of Game Development for Handmark

Howard and i struck up a conversation over sammies. He’s a … i hesitate to say stereotypical – maybe archetypal … bearded and bepsectacled brit in a brown cuorduroy jacket. i suggested that all he was missing was a pair of elbow patches and a pipe to complete the picture. He’s working on that.

Howard was a physics teacher and is a fellow fan of old-school kids’ programs like the stop-motion Chorlton and the Wheelies and Will O’ the Wisp. i know these shows because the province’s publicly-funded station, TVO (TVOntario) habitually buys UK import shows for kids, and inflicts them on the unsuspecting children of the commonwealth – programs like Dr. Snuggles, Jamie and the Magic Torch, That’s My Gran, the original Paddington Bear, and the like. TVO currently airs Little Princess which, to coin a Britishism, i find quite beastly. i’ve never wanted to discipline a cartoon character so badly in all my life.

Howard’s company Handmark creates mobile games. In his off-time, Howard plays World of Warcraft with his wife “Kirk”, who won an online Star Trek trivia competition, cementing her nerd supremacy for all time. Howard and i found a common bond because we’re both piano players defecting to guitar for its portability (i’m taking a brief banjo detour en route, after the accordion proved too heavy and universally despised around campfires). We both have daughters … his is old enough to play a mean boogie woogie. i’ve lost hope for my eldest, who can’t be arsed, but my youngest stays still enough on my knee to tolerate my playing, so i may make a musician of her yet.

Howard has boxes and boxes of teevee series still in the shrink wrap on his shelf. i asked why he doesn’t crack into them more often. His feeling is that a good show will always be a good show, but the bizdev side of his business requires him to find creative outlets to let out steam. He wonders how many years he has left in the industry if he doesn’t open that pressure valve often enough. He said he’d rather be creating – actually participating in art and entertainment – than idly watching television. i took this lesson to heart, and plan to use my scant spare time mroe productively.

Incidentally, Howard bestowed his British blessing on Kahoots™, our upcoming iPhone game set in fake Britain. i ask Brits about the game every chance i get, to find out whether it provokes a positive or negative reaction. Howard called it a “reasonable pisstake”, assuring me that the right type of people would appreciate it. And for our enriching conversation, i appreciated Howard.

It wasn’t an official GDC session, but my chat with Howard is just an illustration of the kind of conversation you can have when you put thousands of like-minded people together in a convention center.

Session: Fresh Demographics on Teen and Adult Gameplay and How Games Can Teach Kids to be Good Citizens
Speaker: Amanda Lenhart

A Canadian colleague of mine teamed up with me to call “bullshit” on this session, the title of which was about as misleading as they come. The “fresh” demographics the speaker presented were twelve months old, a dog’s age in the gaming world. And the bit about games teaching teens to be good citizens was hung on a flimsy premise. The stats for the back half of the presentation were all about players’ experience in “civic” or “pro-social gaming”. i asked what constituted a pro-social game, because the only title bandied around was Civilization, which i sincerely doubt was mentioned much by the thousand-odd teenaged sample group. As it turns out, this info was based on respondents saying that they had witnessed “pro-social” behaviour in games – things like helping each other out or exchanging kind words. Flimsy. i appreciate what the researchers were trying to do by linking teenaged player data with their parents’ responses about video games, but the back half of the report smelled phony like baloney.

At any rate, you can judge for yourself by pulling the report down from their site:

http://www.pewinternet.org (“pew” is right)

i wrote down a mountain of stats from the presentation, but i’m not sure how useful any of them were. i am wary of this random-dialed survey research method, and of any data based on sample size. This is the computer age. i think we can do better.

For what it’s worth, here are a few stats that jumped out at me:

1. “racing” topped the list of preferred game genres as boys’ number three choice and girls’ number two choice. i wonder if it’s because of their pick-up-and-play quality, or if it’s because the respondents were all playing Mario Kart?
2. 55% of parents polled say they always check a game’s rating
3. 31% of parents play games with their kids (i’ll believe it when i see it)
4. despite these last two points, 90% of the parents say they always or sometimes know what their kids play (IMO the gap between “always” and “sometimes” is immense … consider: i always pay my taxes vs. i sometimes pay my taxes. Is the government willing to group “always” and “sometimes” together? i think not.)

Where the report really spiralled into phony-land, particularly for one ESA (Elephant and Sloth Aggregators) employee, was where the speaker said that 32% of teens say their 3 favourite games are Mature or Adults-Only rated, while 12-14 year olds were just as likely to play Mature or Adults-Only titles.

Friends, i’ve been playing games for a long-ass time. If the final quiz question on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire: Video Game Geek Edition was “name a game that has been rated AO by the ESRB”, i’d be heading home without a million dollars stuffed in my pockets. i can’t name a single AO title, and i doubt you can either. In fact, the ESA employee later told me that there were something like sixteen AO titles rated by the ESRB – ever – and that most were interactive DVDs from the 90′s. No mainstream console will even allow AO titles on the box, leading me to two possible conclusions:

1. The respondents mistook a game that had adult content in it (ie Grand Theft Auto IV or Halo) with an AO-rated Adults Only title, much like many of us use the term “stomach flu” when influenza is actually a respiratory disease
2. The respondents were talking about actual adults-only games that were not actually rated AO by the ESRB, but certainly have some hawt weiner-in-bun action, like the “dating” sims on Flash game portals like Newgrounds

Either way, the slip-up illustrates my point that survey polling is of questionable accuracy, and that we can get much better data in a technological age 100 years removed from the invention of the telephone. The ESA employee accused the speaker and her cohorts of being needlessly inflammatory by including the AO stuff in the report. Due to their year-old data and fallible methods, i like to think they’re too old-school to be considered highly valuable. But as i mentioned, the report is free and the link is all yours. Do with it what you will.

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

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