The second-to-last day of GDC ends in party night. If you’re going to get drunk, make that last deal, or murder a hooker, tonight was the night to do it. i’m staying up super-late to post my thoughts on Day Four of the Game Developers Conference. The free notepad that i picked up at the Flash Gaming Summit on Monday is crammed to its last page. Tomorrow, i’m going to have to start scribbling things on my arm, like that arm-scribbling guy in that movie about the guy who scribbles on his arm.

GDC MicroTalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas!

This is my fourth year at the GDC, and i’ve learned by now that there are certain talks you should never miss. The Indie Game Developers Rant, the Game Design Challenge (see below) and the Microtalks are all sessions that people talk about afterward, and if you miss them, it’s hard to be in the conversation. i made sure to catch the Microtalks this morning, along with a few thousand other attendees.

As i learned last year, the Microtalks are hit-and-miss. i won’t mention everyone, but here are a few hits and misses:

Kellie Santiago – That Game Company (Flower) – Hit!

Kellie hates playing games online, because of the rude, caustic, sexual harass-tastic talk she’s made to suffer. (i can understand why, her being such a hot foxy bitch and all.) She blames this not on the players, but on the game designers, for not cooking up ways to encourage more constructive, co-operative, touchy-feely, i’m-ok-you’re-ok communication in their games. She cited the New Games Book from the 1970′s, which eschewed traditional organized sports with the new motto “Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt.” Earth Ball and Everybody-Sits-Inside-A-Parachute-Together came out of the New Games Movement. Having grown up as a pudgy, unathletic kid, i owe a lot to this book for helping me survive gym class, and i didn’t even realize it. Also, i was AWESOME at parachute.

i found Kellie’s last slide memorable:

Gary Penn – Miss!

Words! Lots of them! From the dictionary! Coming at you! Fast! Furious! … passion, love, motivation, game, design, source, structure, feel, drama, alive, consistent, twist … obnoxious!

Jane Pinckard – Foundation 9 – Hit!

Jane’s talk was on love, and it was a very easily-received message coming from a woman with (as i’ve said in another post) a lovely smile, and a redder-than-Valentine’s-Day dress. (i think that bit was intentional.)

Jane identified three ways she’s seen love expressed or explored in games:

1. Love as narrative – Final Fantasy VIII. The game was in the service of the love story between the two characters. Jane: “i mean, sure you have to save the world or whatever … ”

   

   Voulez-vouz roleplay avec moi ce soir?

2. Love as nurture – Nintendogs.

   

   The “L” also stands for “love”.

3. Love as Discovery – Star Wars: Nights of the Old Republic. Jane said that KOTOR has you uncovering the love story. i didn’t make it far enough into the game to experience that, but i hope it didn’t involve any wookies.

Jane offered a few tips to foster the exploration/expression of love in games:

• Make use of adrenaline-filled moments, as in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
• Let the player express herself, as in World of Warcraft.
• Allow for vulnerability, as in Ico.
• Make the object of the player’s affection unique – Jane found that the love interests in Fable II were too samey.

Jane ended on a great note:

I really don’t care about the Citizen Kane of games – I want the Pride and Prejudice of games.

My wife and i each wanted to share an artistic work that held deep personal meaning. She wanted me to read Pride and Prejudice, and i wanted her to play The Secret of Monkey Island. After months of toughing it out on the can with Elizabeth Bennett, having finally finished the book, i checked in to see how my wife was making out: stuck talking to the shopkeeper on Melee Island, near the opening of the game. Sssssuper.

Ian Bogost – Miss!

Ian’s point was that once the game leaves the hands of its creator, interpretation is up to the player. His talk was about as challenging and relevant as a footrace with a fish.

Margaret Robertson – Hit!

Margaret opened ostensibly with a plug for her new game, the details of which were on a flyer that was placed on every seat in the room. After the audience checked it out, Margarat asked by a show of hands what people were willing to pay for the game. She asked the audience to raise their hands if they’d pay $2.99, $3.99 and $4.99. More people on the right side of the room kept their hands up for $4.99. That’s because Margaret had booby-trapped the fliers … on the left (more frugal) side of the room, the flier listed the release date as April 3rd. On the right side of the room, the release date on the flier was April 28th. 28 is a bigger number, and it subconciously made more people in the right side of the room tolerate a larger price point.

Margaret discussed a few other weird headcases. You’re given a game with three doors. The goal is to open each door until you find which one has the biggest point value behind it, and then you click that door as much as possible to rack up a high score. Researchers found that when they made the other two normal-point doors slowly shrink from the player’s view, the player would click on them to prevent them from disappearing, even though they had nothing to do with the goal of earning a high score. Margaret: “people hurt themselves to keep their options open.”

Here are a few other weird behaviours she shared:

• People work harder for nothing than they do for pay.
• People lie more often in response to things written in horrible fonts.

Margaret’s talk tied into one of the most prevalent themes of the conference – player psychology.

Sam Roberts – Meh!

i didn’t take many notes during Sam’s talk, so i must not have found it that interesting. i did prick up my ears at one point when he talked about how subtle changes in messaging can radically change the theme of the game or the motivation of the player. He gave the example of Grand Theft Auto, a game series where you hijack cars and other vehicles. Player intent and motives change radically when the player is comandeering the vehicle, rather than hijacking it.

i don’t play very many mature-rated games, but this is why i did play and enjoy Crackdown. It was sort of GTA lite, but you were taking many similar actions – taking other people’s cars, running down pedestrians, and blowing stuff up. The key difference is that in Crackdown, you play a police officer. You’re scolded by the narrator for harming citizens, and everything you do is in the service of ridding the city of three diabolical crime lords. i’d much rather crack a few eggs to make an omelet in Crackdown, than to crack a few eggs and murder some hookers and kill innocent civilians to boost my rampage score in Grand Theft Auto, with no omelet to show for it.

Jesse Schell – Hit!

One of the most talked-about conference sessions i’ve ever heard of is Jesse’s DICE 2010 talk, where he predicted a future where everything we do, from brushing our teeth to educating our kids to doing our jobs, is tied to some kind of game or points system. Chris Hecker criticized Jesse in his Thursday talk on the potentially negative effect of game achievements and rewards. i’ll admit that i haven’t watched Jesse’s DICE talk yet, but i gleaned that the original spirit of it was exuberance. Unless Jesse’s being a revisionist, i’m likely wrong about that; he took to the stage this time to warn of the coming war between we the people, and the evil corporations and governments who want to co-opt game design to control our behaviour. He calls it “Gameageddon.”

Schell put up a slide with a few alarmist examples:

1. Achievement Unlocked – You drank 1000 Cokes!
2. Join the American Army, and get a free fortress in World of Warcraft
3. Smoke 10 packs of Camel cigarettes, and unlock the Bentley in Grand Theft Auto

Jesse’s argument is fun food for thought, but it’s not bulletproof. He claims that unless we’re conscious of the coming Gamepocalypse, we’ll be powerless to stop it. Said Schell, “Did you complain when teevee ads jumped from taking up 16% of programming to 36%? No! You just sat there and let it happen.” Sorry, Jesse … i actually DIDN’T sit there and let it happen. i bought a PVR, fast-forwarded through the commercials, and swiped my favourite HBO shows from a torrent site. Fight the power!

Schell identified four types of soldiers in the Gamepocalypse. There are, in reality, so many more, but whatever. We like lists.

1. Persuaders: sharky, amoral business types who are only out to make money from games. Zynga/Farmville weren’t mentioned by name, but the reference was strongly implied.
2. Fulfillers: game designers who live only to fulfill the wishes and dreams of the audience.
3. Artists: audience be damned! Let’s make a game about what it is to be human, while the audience scratches their collective heads.
4. Humanitarians: Game designers

Jesse ended his talk by saying “the war is already here. Figure out which side you’re on.”

Suzanne Segerman – Miss!

i’ve seen Suzanne’s talk given by many different presenters at many different conference. Thank God she was confined to five minutes – i’ve had to endure this kind of presentation for much longer. Here’s how it goes:

Hey – Bob Dylan’s cool. So is Vonnegut. i like Vonnegut. And uh … M*A*S*H. That was a really good show. And Kubrick. Kubrick is awesome. The Wire, All in the Family, The West Wing – great. Great, great shows.

Ugh … times like these, i lack the requisite number of faces to palm. Fun fact: i didn’t cough up three thousand dollars to come to a conference to hear about your teevee viewing habits. i’m not particularly concerned about who you think is awesome. The supposed take-away from talks like these is always the same: Dylan was awesome. Go be like Dylan!

Sure thing. That’s what i’ll do. i’ll go home, and i’ll be like Bob Dylan. Because he’s awesome. That was the solution all along – so simple! i was spending all of my time NOT being awesome. i should try to be awesome intead.

In one of the head-shakingest moments during her talk, Suzanne mentioned Al Gore on her list of unassuming but ultimately awesome people, because of An Inconvenient Truth. Suzanne: “he’s now a multi-millionaire.”

Oh – NOW he is? NOW Al Gore, who served as the 45th vice president of the United States of America, is a multi-millionaire? Well, golly. i’m glad that documentary gave him his big break.

Everything You Know is Wrong

Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, packed an enormous room with MOST of the conference attendees to give what was essentially a bush-league talk on the psychology of game design, which featured no actual psychology … just a few anecdotes from Sid. The talk was disappointingly skippable. Anyway, here are a few things i found somewhat interersting (but mostly harmless):

Fudge the math. Sid talked about Civ testers who were upset that they sometimes lost in a battle with 3:1 odds. They were semi-okay with losing in a 2:1 battle, but they didn’t tolerate losing twice in a row. And they felt that in a 20:10 battle, they should win far more often than in a 2:1 battle. The point is that the cold, hard facts of math don’t always jive with what feels right for the player.

Sid also discussed shortcuts in AAA game development to save money. Two examples he gave were:

1. Put a black curly moustache on a bad pirate. No need to fill out the guy’s backstory – he’s got a curly black moustache, so he must be evil. (This brought stereotyping and racism to my mind.)
2. Describe things through text. If those things mesh with what the player wants to believe, you can save yourself some work. In his example from Civilization Revolution, a text prompt says that to show his respect for you, the Sultan of Zanzibar has delivered a caravn of dancing bears. There are no dancing bears in the game – building, texturing and animating them would be too expensive. But since the player, as a world leader, accepts that foreign leaders should be sending him gifts, they don’t have to explicitly depict that through art and animation. The places where they DO have to spend more time on that stuff are where they have a harder time convincing the player of a certain concept or outcome.

Game Writers’ Roundtable

Daniel James’s virtual goods session was packed, so i ducked into the writers’ roundtable to workshop a few ideas i had for Spellirium. There were a few heavy-hitters in the room who had worked on some very big games, but the vocal minority were a few students, who would have been wiser to sit back and listen rather than chiming in. But as someone with a huge mouth who was once young (and still is, in many ways), i am careful to extend grace to young upstarts. It’s been extended to me more often than i deserve it.

The conversation was off to a very slow and painful start, with writers bitching about how managers wouldn’t proof-read their work (boo hoo! where’s the door?) Finally, i asked a specific writing question about my specific game, and it sparked a lot of great conversation about player expectation, determinism vs. free will, moral decision-making in games, and a number of other topics.

There was an old-school Disney guy in the room who had worked on The Curse of Monkey Island (NOT a canonical Ron Gilbert Monkey Island game, but not a terrible game either). He said something interesting about conversation trees: in those adventure games, the main character’s personality is pretty fleshed out in cut-scenes, but they tried to pack the in-game conversation options with many different off-model options. They’d empower the player to sound suave, stupid, snide, urbane, etc.

i had asked specifically about adding a big twist to the narrative that takes the player completely off-guard, and whether that had ever been done, and if it had been done succesfully or ham-fistedly. The room cooked up a lot of great examples from games past and present. One guy talked about a companion technique to the “aha” moment: the “oh shit” moment, where instead of the player discovering that everything he knows is wrong, he instead discovers that everything he knows is on fire. Battlestar Galactica pulled out a number of great “oh shit” moments in its run.

One word of advice from Disney guy, which is SO LucasArts: “never punish a player for doing something fun”.

Game Developer Challenge: Real-World Permadeath

This was my fourth GDC, and i’ve come to learn that there are certain unmissable sessions that everyone talks about. The Challenge is one of them: a panel of famous game developers presents a game concept based on a difficult, alternative or downright WEIRD concept. In previous years, the challenge had contestants designing a game with a needle and thread interface, and a game around the theme “my first time.” This year’s theme was “real-world permadeath,” a game that involved someone’s actual death.

i have SO MUCH to say about this session that i’m going to save my commentary for a completely separate post. Here’s a sneak preview: game developers are comically insecure about death.

Dinner

Since we were recipients of the OMDC (Optimally Miniaturized Dinky Cars) Export Fund, which pays for half of our trip, we were invited to a special networking dinner on Friday night. A number of well-positioned industry folks were bribed, coereced or blindfolded and thrown into the back of a van before joining us at the event. Not every guest was a good fit for every Ontario company, but i’m sure some good contacts were made.

For my part, i was seated at a table with the head of a triple-A game studio, his bizdev guy, a Hollywood agent representing the games industry, and the head of EA Partners. Apparently Bon Jovi, Stephen Hawking and Jesus couldn’t make it. Just as i suffered the students at the writers’ workshop, my tablemates were very gracious to answer my questions about hiring name voice-over talent, and licensing music for games. Thanks so much!

After Dinner

i headed over to the nearby Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates, Whirled) offices expecting something like the insane bacchanal of three years ago, when the company set up a slip n’ slide slicked with whiskey, and a guy got beheaded in the elevator. (Party hearsay always beats the real thing.) This year’s party (at the behest of their landlord) was far more subdued, but i’ll never miss a chance to visit the fabulously-designed nautical steampunk Three Rings office.

i got back to my hotel room at two in the morning and immediately started blogging the day in service of you, dear reader … but my hotel Internet connection was knocked out, and after a half an hour, so was i.

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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