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 SpellCaster. 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.

Here’s what i saw today:

The 4 Most Important Emotions for Social Games

* view the slides here! *

Nicole Lazzaro (@nicolelazzaro) is a psychologist and games industry consultant who’s been around for quite a while. She has studied emotion in games, and based on her findings, has split fun into four categories:

1. Easy fun – exploration and discovery
2. Hard fun – overcoming really tough challenges
3. Serious Fun – high scores, collections, competition
4. Social Fun – trading, chatting, suprPoking

She found that most of the emotions that players experienced while playing games fall into the “Social Fun” category. She further elaborated on the four emotions that make players share (this lady has a thing for fours, i guess):

1. Amusement – dancing, teasing, chatting and jokes
2. Amici (chumminess) – neighbourliness, visiting, people, plants & pets
3. Amidar (admiration) – ranking, status
4. Amigro (reciprocity) – mechanisms for players to respond to each other socially

She also has a thing for words that start with “a”, and – apparently – using Italian words when English words will do. A few times during her talk, she’d say something like “the concept i’m trying to describe doesn’t have an equivalent in English, so i’ll use the Italian word, ‘casa’.” (um … lady, i think you mean “house.”)

It all came off as sort of elitist and obnoxious, and got under my skin. i really got annoyed when Nicole wondered aloud what we have to do to make a game so socially viable and connected that all 6 billion of us on the planet will play it.

It just … does she realize that a significant portion of the world doesn’t have food, let alone electricity, to play her theoretical Facebook game? Here are some facts from WorldVision: 840 million people in the world are hungry. 2.1 billion live on less than $2 a day, and 880 million live on less than $1 a day. 26 000 children die every day from preventable disease – that 9 million kids a year. Games are great and all, but damn, Nicole … the world has different priorities.

One of the concepts Nicole brought up in her talk played into another talk later in the day. She called it “fiera”, which may very well be an Italian sportscar or gelato flavour, but also describes the burning passion that fills your gut when you finally conquer a difficult challenge, after repeated failed attempts. Remember fiera – it’ll come up later in this article.

Creating Successful Social Games: Understanding Player Behaviour / Developing a Metric Mindset

Speaker Mark Skaggs from Zynga redeemed himself a tiny bit from his very tight-lipped panel at the Flash Gaming Summit on Monday. It’s almost as if GDC was important, and FGS was not, so he weighted most of his efforts to today’s talk. He came off snippy and a bit pompous, but it’s easy to think you’re awesome when you’re wearing underpants woven from the fibers of shredded hundred dollar bills.

The thrust of Mark’s talk compelled listeners to move toward a “metric mindset”. That means that instead of championing design decisions by making statements like “on my last game, we did it this way” or “i worked hard on this feature and i think players will love it,” or “i’m the boss, so we’ll do it my way,” you move toward a place where you say things like “what do the numbers tell us?” and “thank God we have these numbers!” His point was that numbers would essentially design your game for you.

Mark gave the example of a text link above the game cross-promoting their latest game MafiaFishTown, or whatever. The team thought that red was absolutely the right colour for the link, but they tested a bunch of colours, and found that pink was the best choice. That bit came up again in another talk, so remember that too! Keep reading to find out how this all comes together.

The biggest and most straight-forward take-away from this talk was Mark’s list of what to measure in your games:

1. How many people install?
2. How many people make it through the first 5 minutes/past the tutorial?
3. How many people are playing today?
4. Do players tell their friends?
5. Who’s coming back?
6. Who isn’t?
7. How much money do players spend in the game?
8. What do players enjoy doing?

Mark said that instead of trying to answer “what is fun?”, try answering “what do players enjoy doing?”

On the last point, Mark offered the example of Super Berries. The team already knew that players loved planting fast-growing strawberries, so they created a virtual item called SuperBerries. SuperBerries cost more than strawberries, but they gave a 3x return in half the time. The important point is that they chose a strawberry-like skin for the item instead of watermelons or blackberries, because the players liked strawberries. SuperBerries were incredibly successful.

Lunch

Lunch was sponsored by PlayHaven. Unfortunately, the best thing about this panel was the food. PlayHaven assembled a room and a panel filled with iPhone developers, lawyers, and assorted hangers-on. The panel questions and responses were far too basic for my taste … stuff about how to register your business, the 99 cent race to the bottom in the App Store, and the difference between copyright and trademark.

The one bit i think that was worth mentioning came from someone i noted as “bald guy” – i was too far in the back of the room to hear everybody’s names. (Bald Guy! If you’re reading this, please identify yourself!)

Bald Guy said that the only way you can make money in the App Store is to crack the top 100, and without smart marketing, the only way to do THAT is to spend $50k on AdMob inventory. So if it’s down to marketing, Bald Guy listed the following tools for getting the word out about your iPhone game outside the App Store:

1. Create a landing page (www.myAwesumiPhoneGame.com). You have a lot more control over it than you do over your game’s App Store page.
2. Use video (trailers, etc) to promote your game. 53% of visitors click on a video. Bald Guy claimed that having video doubles your conversion rate. (conversion to paid, not to Judaism)
3. Use PR firms. Lots of firms will do cheap grassroots campaigns for you. (Ryan’s counterpoint: don’t waste your money! The quality of the campaign you get out of these guys for chump change is just as easy to pull off yourself for free)
4. Involve bloggers, ScoreLoop, OpenFeint, etc.

Crushing the Overhead: Case Study of a Microstudio Start-up

Randy Smith from Tiger Style, creators of Spider, gave this talk. i’m not going to say too much about it, because it made no sense. He might as well have been up there saying “here’s how we made our game: first, i hit myself in the face with a hammer. Then, we made gumdrop shoes and drove a tank into four lighthouses. Finally, dishwasher passion fruit boomerang moustache.”

i was just mystified during the whole talk. Randy told us about how he got laid off from his job at EA and decided to make a game. He emailed a bunch of people to ask if they wanted to work on a game with him for free, and they said “yes”. He didn’t draw up any legal contracts, but wrote all the contracts himself. He gave everyone royalty points based on how many hours a week they pulled on the project. Some people did 2.5 hours a week. Everyone telecommuted. If something didn’t get done because people flaked out on him, he or his partner did it themselves. When the game turned a $300k+ profit, everyone got paid at the same rate – artists and programmers alike. Dishwasher passion fruit boomerang moustache. i left with my head spinning.

As long as i’m being contentious, i may as well take exception to something Randy said:

“We’re good business people, not evil try-to-get-rich business people.”

i hope Randy’s distinguishing here between trying to get rich, and trying to earn a living. i have a wife, two children, a mortgage, and a diabolical cocaine habit. i make no apologies for trying to be profitable in my bidness.

Little Hands, Foul Moods, and Runny Noses 3: Research for Developing Kid-Friendly Social Gaming Experiences

i saw Carla’s talk last year, and actually preferred it to this one. There was a bit of repeat here, like the term “prosocial”, which means “not being a dick.” It’s the concept of doing something for someone else even when you don’t profit. Carla offered a few interesting points about prosocial behaviour and gaming:

• Young people who play aggressive games (Face-Stabber 4: The Stabbening, etc) donate less than prosocial game players
• When presented with a story starter like “An old lady came to a crosswalk, and …” young adults who play prosocial games finish the story in prosocial ways, like “An old lady came to a crosswalk, and a kindly young gentleman helped her across the street”, instead of “An old lady came to a crosswalk, and bitch got FACE-STABBED, yo!!”

i admit i drifted off with most of Carla’s presentation … a lot of heavy slides came up with stuff like “kids between the ages of whatever and whatever like co-play in groups of like-gendered individuals, while kids of gendered play-co prosocial prefer harmonizing trade agreements passive repsonse play dishwasher passion fruit boomerang moustache.” There’s only so much GDC i can take.

Still, i hope to make it to Carla’s breakfast tomorrow morning, if only to brag about my four-year-old daughter, who can do a lot of the things that Carla said 4-year-olds can’t do during the session question period. Yes, there IS a great game that a parent and child can play together: Super Mario Galaxy. (Daddy does all the running and jumping while his little girl collects star bits with the second controller) Yes, 4-year-olds CAN understand asynchronous play – my daughter gets Fishville gifts from her Facebook friends all the time, and seems to grasp the concept.

Achievements Considered Harmful?

The most provocative and best talk of the day, and the one that the Nicole and Mark talks led up to, was this session by Chris Hecker. Chris C’d his A at the beginning of the talk by defensively pointing out that psychological studies are fallible, and went on to talk about research that suggests that rewarding people to do stuff is a bad idea.

To put it simply, if i give you a tchotchke for doing something – a gold star, an achievement, a paycheque – you’re less likely to be motivated to do that thing again. If you pay people to wear their seat belts, they’re less likely to wear their seat belts when they’re not being paid. If you reward people for trying new foods, they’re less likely to eat those foods again. If you praise or reward someone for doing a puzzle, he’s more likely to seek out a different activity than to continue doing the puzzle.

The researchers tested out all kinds of different types of rewards. Here are a few:

• tangible/symbolic (achievements, candy, money) vs. verbal
• expected vs. unexpected
• informational (“you killed 5 orcs”) vs controlling (“you killed 5 orcs, just as you ought to”)
• dull tasks vs. interesting tasks
• contingent (do this to get this) vs. non-contingent (do this, or not – you’ll be rewarded anyway)
• endogenous (read a book, get a book as a reward) vs. exogenous (read a book, get a dollar as a reward)

A meta-analysis of over 100-such tests on reward systems found that when you had an interesting (vs. dull) task that was rewarded with something tangible, expected, and contingent (like XBox Achievements, or many other reward systems we use in gaming), you reduced intrinsic meaning (giving a f*ck).

However, for an interesting task where the reward was verbal, informational, and unexpected (Hey! You killed 5 orcs!) free choice increased, and subjects self-reported higher instances of giving a f*ck.

He also mentioned that this not giving a f*ck effect has a larger impact on females than it does males.

Hecker took on Jesse Schell’s oft-blogged talk from DICE 2010, where he imagined a world where everything around you gave you points – your toothbrush gave you points for brushing, the government gave you points or money for raising your kids well, etc. Hecker suggested that Schell and two other respected colleagues were talking out of their collective asses, because they haven’t looked at the research, which says (among other things) that when you pay a kid for getting good grades, the kid’s grades subsequently drop. Fascinating stuff!

And in the climax of his presentation, Hecker took a juicy bite out of Zynga. i paraphrase:

If you’re intentionally making dull games with extrinsically motivating factors (rewards) to separate people from their money, i pity you.

i really enjoyed this talk because it was thought-provoking and controversial. Hecker didn’t declare himself right, but he made a compelling case based on the evidence. i got into a conversation during the question period with another small studio head, who lined up to ask the same question i did: if rewards demotivate women more than men, why does Farmville seem to be doing so well with such a large female audience? (i found his answer unsatisfying, to the point where i honestly can’t even remember it!)

The other dev and i went over a pile of cases where the research didn’t bear out: he remembers going to the arcade and practicing Dance Dance Revolution until he could get a Perfect rating on most of the songs on a high difficulty level. Remembering that earlier session, i told him that he was experiencing fiera when he overcame those challenges, which is part of Nicole’s “Serious Fun” quadrant.

The session provided a lot of food for thought, but there were too many DDR anecdotes and exceptions to take the research results as gospel. Still, it helped me cook up a never-before-seen style of reward that i’m excited to pioneer in SpellCaster! i’ll leave it on that mysterious note.

The Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards

Lots of great games, lots of worthy award-winners … a big sweep by Naughty Dog for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. i left mid-way through Gabe Newell’s speech (he heads Valve), because i had to pee and i was kinda bored.

Let me just mention that Farmville won the award in the new Social Gaming category, and that absolutely had to happen. Farmville will go down in gaming history as the first social game to make people stand up and take notice of these new social play mechanics. The guy who accepted the award (didn’t recognize him – anyone know?) gave a very defensive, almost hostile speech, goading the largely triple-A console audience to come fill the over 200 job postings at Zynga. He drew at least one “boo” from where i was sitting. The speech was a bit tense. There was only polite applause when Zynga was announced the winner.

People will say bad things about you when they feel you’ve been very successful (financially or otherwise) and they feel you don’t deserve it. i can’t tell if the many, many Zynga opponents take issue with the exploitative, addictive and manipulative nature of the company’s games, or whether they’re simply jealous? Before Zynga came along and struck gold, we were all talking about how to make games more sticky and addictive. When Zynga finally pulled it off and made a game that was ACTUALLY ADDICTIVE, everyone started shaking their fists. For years, developers have been making games that make players fat, that make them aggressive, and that make them anti-social. Let’s face it, folks: the track record for the games indudstry has not been jam-packed with redeeming qualities. It’s just in the past few years that i’ve seen people really start talking about games for the Greater Good. i feel it’s untoward for the industry to shake torches and pitchforks at the monster they themselves helped to create.

How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process

Speakers:
Robin Hunicke and Kellie Santiago from That Game Company (Flower)

This talk had the potential for greatness, but the speakers fell down when it came to providing concrete examples to illustrate what they were saying. The whole talk was given from a very vague, 50 000-foot-level, and i wanted some more blood n’ guts to make the material more relatable.

Robin and Kellie were talking about how the video game industry is a very stressful place, and how team members can end up hating each other, hating the project, and suffering anxiety and nightmares needlessly. The talk was part scrum advocacy, part therapy advocacy. (Don’t know what scrum is? Neither did i, until i had lunch with an expert! See below for more.)

Here are a few points of interest i jotted down:

• Robin – “We don’t have to burn ourselves out, starve, or suffer to create fantastic works of interactive art.”
• When team conflicts arise, the impulse is to say “i’ll just do it” or “i can’t seem weak”
• It’s easy to dismiss someone else’s ideas when you have to build them. That’s why it’s important for your whole team to have ownership of the whole project (another scrum/agile concept)
• If you iterate, you will chuck stuff. And that’s not a bad thing.
• Robin – “Not everyone who gives you money is stupid.” Me – “HAHAHAHA!” She was talking about how keeping constant, open and honest communication with your funder or publisher makes for a better relationship and less anxiety
• Estimates are fake
• When something takes longer than you thought it would, the conversation you have with the publisher/funder doesn’t have to be plagued by shame and guilt. “You don’t have to wear a hairshirt during that conversation.”

Here were the (relatively few) takeaways the speakers provided:

• Put up a big board for your team with a calendar on it. Add blobs to the calendar across different game dev disciplines and buckets (development, infrastructure, marketing). Massage frequently.
• Keep a task board between sprints (2-week development periods), listing team members’ names across the top, and the tasks they need to complete under their names
• Write a private game dev diary. The more you do these, the more you’ll realize that the problems you have on one project are the problems you have on ALL projects – use this knowledge to help you anticipate and navigate problem situations in the future

Robin is formerly of EA, and you could tell from the talk that she’s been through monstrously stressful projects, and game teams with huge egos on them. The thing i found really interesting is that i couldn’t ignore the fact that the speakers were both women, and that the talk itself was very chicky. i started writing down the most repeated words in the presentation: stuff, concerns, thing, worries, communication, anxiety, guilt, conversation, open. Very touchy-feely Dr Phil stuff. That’s not a bad thing necessarily … it just struck me that i would probably never, EVER hear the same talk coming from male presenters.

When people repeat, to my dismay, that there need to be more women/black people/Down syndrome people (or whatever) in the game industry, so that other voices can be heard, this must be what they mean. i’m fine with having more women in the industry as long as they’re smart, with-it and (dare i say?) worthy women like the two presenters. i get my back up when people try to stack teams based on some minority bingo card, as i’ve said before. The talent and ability has to be there. More on that later, when Robin takes to the stage during the indie rant.

Also, i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again: Robin has the best hair in the industry. Sleek, red, and awesomazing.

Ninjabee’s Top 10 Development Lessons

Next up was Brent Fox, who does NOT have the best hair in the industry (sorry, Brent). Brent was a decent speaker, and kudos to him for breaking his talk down into a nice bite-sized list of ten items. Seems to be the only way to get people to read your blog – bullet points and countdowns. Perhaps it’s also becoming the only way to keep people awake during your PowerPoint question.

i won’t list all of Brent’s ten points, because many of them were pedestrian and uninteresting (again – sorry, Brent!) These are the ones that held my interest:

#10. DLC Doesn’t make any money. Brent bemoaned the fact that Ninjabee’s downloadable content for games like Outpost Kaloki X and Band of Bugs didn’t sell well. He later added the exception to the rule: A Kingdom for Keflings had add-ons that sold very well. His conclusion: DLC is worth it if the game is very popular.

i asked him at the end of the talk whether he’d measured the sales of DLC against how many people had finished the game. i didn’t buy Outpost DLC because i didn’t come anywhere near to finishing the main game. i did, however, finish Keflings, and would be far more likely to buy an expansion for it. To my sheer amazement, after hearing Zynga and the other Facebook devs drone on about how important it was to collect and measure player data, Brent admitted that he had no idea what the correlation between finishing players and sold DLC was. Shocking!

#6. A picture is worth a million dollars. If someone says “You can show me a demo with no graphics and i can look past it”, he’s lying. (i wholeheartedly agree here – pretty pictures are CRUCIAL.) He gave an example where his team had mocked up an example of avatar placement in Keflings, and the feeling from the publisher was sort of like “oh – of course they can do it. They’ve got a picture to prove it!”

#5. XBLA is hit-driven (no surprises there). He did say, though, that on the list of the top games for XML, the gap between the sales figures for the games on page 2 and the games on page 8 isn’t significant … but the gap between the games on page 1 and the games on page 2 is immense.

Brent ended his talk by quoting EA’s CEO, who claimed that in the next year (ONE year!), sales from digital downloads would overtake console numbers. Sacre le crap!

Why Do People Buy Virtual Goods? Ten Attributes to Influence Desirability

Speaker Vili Lehdonvirta from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology is an unnervingly calm, almost robotic speaker. i found him very listenable … if only because i was worried that if i didn’t listen, he’d melt my face with his laser eyes. i didn’t get a single thing out of Vili’s talk, because i knew it all already. Drag.

If you don’t know it all, here are ten factors affecting the desirability of virtual goods as they relate primarily to virtual worlds and MMOs:

1. Performance (+2 sword, +4 sword)
2. Functionality (items that save the player time, like warp gates or loot pets)
3. Visuals and sounds
4. Background fiction (he gave the example of a ring you could get that belonged to a very popular NPC in the game – it’s the same as when people buy Elvis’s underwear)
5. Provenance – the item might have history attached to it (eg a famous player owned it in the past, or a certain item was only given out during an exclusive promotion)
6. customizability
7. Cultural References (ie holiday-themed items)
8. Licensed Items (Nestle Chocobot Power Hour hats)
9. Rarity (he gave the example of an Ultima Online item, horse dung, that did not propagate in the game world. Players realized the stuff was precious and rare, so they started hanging it on their walls as an elite status symbol. Horse dung.
10. Prince. The super-expensive item that you sell to a player as a status symbol.

Getting a Free Phone

After those sessions, and just before lunch, i picked up my free Nexus One phone courtesy of Google. Thanks, Google! That’s super.

Lunch

i had lunch with three great guys – Joe, who you may know on Twitter as @retrogamer4ever, Shane and Vince. It was then that i brought up Robin’s talk, and Shane exploded with a passionate hour-long diatribe about the wonders of scrum development, with Vince chiming in every so often with a “what what!” and “daaaamn!”

i hadn’t paid much attention to scrum, and only kind of knew what it was. Or so i thought. i learned so much more from Shane during lunch. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Traditionally, when you make video games, you use the waterfall method. You write a game design document describing the entire game, you break it up into tasks, and you build the game. The final game MUST keep referring back to this increasingly ancient GDD, and there is very little room for iteration (changing the game little by little on the fly in response to playtesting, new ideas, etc)

Agile development philosophy aims to solve a number of problems that waterfall causes. Scrum is one way to implement Agile concepts. Here’s how you develop a game using scrum:

1. Cook up the KINDS of things you need to build. The whole team meets and decides how much effort something will take to complete. Not how much TIME … how much effort. You assign effort points to tasks. So if you’re talking about a programming system, the programmer talks about what’s involved in implementing it, and the TEAM decides how much effort it’ll take. Not the programmer – the whole team. The aim here is to get everyone owning the project. As Robin said earlier in the day, it’s easier to disregard someone else’s input if you don’t own it, but are just building it.
2. The whole team works towards a sprint. At the end of a 2-week run, the game will be finished. The whole team works towards a common goal: a build of the game. It’s not feature-complete or necessarily awesome, but it’s a working (if stunted) version of the game. The benefit here is that you always have a working, playable version of the game. Vince and Shane told us about the different public humiliation tactics they’ve employed to shame a team member if he let everyone down by breaking the build.
3. Within a sprint, the team members review their assumptions every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
4. Repeat this process every two weeks until the game is done, or the money runs out and the Earth crashes into the sun.

There’s way more to it than that, but that’s a primer. It’s the primer i would have wanted when i was trying to casually understand what scrum was.

The Convergence of Flash Portals and Social Games

* view the slides here! *

It’s no secret: i have a total man-crush on Dan Cook. It was a thrill to meet him in person, and his talk was typical Dan Cook – whip-smart, on the money, relevant and kickass.

Dan’s talk was on the Flash game industry – the devs, the portals, the middle-men, and the incredible opportunity for developers in that space. i have a hunch that most of you reading this blog know most of what Dan was saying, but the way he said it and the slides he’d put together had me riveted to his talk, even though i knew most of what he was saying beforehand.

At the end of his talk, Dan painted a very bleak picture of the Flash games industry, one where ongoing consolidation leads to big, unstoppable companies, and Flash developers serve at the behest of their new overlords. He’s totally right – that’s already happening. But then he started channeling Karl Marx and Sun Tzu, preaching that workers (Flash devs) must own the mode of production, or build their castles on less crowded hills. His advice: be platform-agnostic. Don’t be a Flash developer or an iPhone developer or an Android developer. Be an octopus. Constantly dip your tentacles into many different buckets, pulling out new players and audience members on a variety of platforms, so that you don’t become beholden to the powers that will eventually control any particular platform, given enough time.

My thoughts, of course, immediately went to Untold Entertainment’s site masthead: “We make Flash games.” i hate that credo, but it’s true. i am dying to develop something on a different platform so that i can finally change it, but for now i gotta call a spade a spade.

i love you, Dan Cook. Please have my man-babies.

From Casual to Social: What to Pack

Unfortunately, this talk was at the bottom of the heap for me. Presenter Jeferson Valaderes from Playfish spoke too quickly, in a rapid-fire South American (?) accent. Everything he said sounded like a throw-away. His slides were almost incomprehensible. Ugh. It was just a really, really bad session. The conference volunteer kept bringing him cup after cup of water during his presentation, as if hoping that if he took a sip, he’d magically start being interesting and relevant. Alas, water only keeps you alive. It does not keep you alive and bearable.

Indie Gamemaker Rant!

This series of 5-minute talks from various indies in the increasingly upsetting indie Old Boys Club was hit and miss. Here are a few things that jumped out at me:

Tommy Refenes pulled kind a dick move in his rant about the app store by implying that Adam Saltsman “got lucky” with Canabalt. If i were Adam, i can’t imagine i’d feel good about that. And if i were Adam, i imagine i’d have enough money from Wurdle by now to buy myself a Tommy Refenes-skin rug.

Anyway, Tommy ran a really interesting experiment. He put a game called Zits n’ Giggles in the App Store and didn’t make any money from it. So he jacked the price up to $15, and three people bought it. Then he jacked the price up to $50, and four people bought it. So he decided to keep jacking up the price as long as it kept selling. Fourteen people bought it on Valentine’s Day for $199 a pop. The game currently sells for $350.

He did this to illustrate why he thinks the App Store is a joke, filled with uneducated consumers. It’s hard to argue with him, but his elitist attitude and opening complaint that it’s too hard to beat Mega Man 2 on the iPhone betrays a very close-minded, old-school mentality that implies that games and systems are only valid or valuable if they have traditional controls, and if their games are called Mega Man 2.

Robin Hunicke will be happy to know that her rant tipped me from being a staunch opponent of affirmative action, to someone who now sees the benefit of having a sexually and racially diverse game development team. It’s hard to say what did it: it was either her mesmerizing red hair, or the science she provided that showed that teams are more productive, creative, and effective when they are diversified.

i have a big chip on my shoulder about affirmative action and women in the games industry, because i come from an office where the management layer was suspiciously stacked with women, and the worker bees were almost all men, and a certain degree of nepotism and unfair hiring kept it that way. Many of the women in the management layer weren’t worthy of the jobs they held, in my opinion, and it was hard to get excited about women in the workplace when i was surrounded by so many women who shouldn’t have been there.

Since then, i’ve met many more women who don’t get it, and who have their jobs because they’re women, and that really gets my back up. But i have met a few women who are savvy and smart and really knowledgeable, and i’m very happy they’re here.

Robin talked about a concept called signaling threat, which is where you’re surrounded by people who are all cut from the same cloth (white men … or heck, even black women with green hats), and the imbalance makes you want to run like hell, or stay with all your defenses cranked way up. i think that i actually experienced signaling threat at that old job by being surrounded by those women, so i totally buy the case for diversity now. i’m about to put together a team for SpellCaster, so i’ll definitely keep Robin’s rant in mind.

Journalist Brendan Boyer’s claim was that “Seanbaby has ruined video game journalism for an entire generation.” Seanbaby is an initially funny, but ultimately caustic commenter who had a stint on IGN, and who Brendan blames for poisoning game journalism by making every game insight flippant and rude. He called for 2010 to be “the year we sunk snark.” The point would be hard to argue, if Brendan wasn’t such an ass-grabbing tard-monkey.

Anna Anthropy called for video games to have more personal stories. “i’m tired of male fantasy wish fulfillment and saving the world.” i was later informed that Anna was a pre-op transgender – another case of a different viewpoint enriching the dialogue. SpellCaster actually aims to do what Anna is talking about – the story will completely deconstruct the same tired save-the-world, you-are-the-most-imporant-person-on-the-planet arc that so many video games follow relentlessly.

In Anna’s stack of rants, she also made the bold claim that the term “Indie” is no good, and that it is increasingly exclusionary. i completely know where she’s coming from, and will give specifics of indie snobbery in my GDC wrap-up later this week.

The first two days of the show are Summits days, with clusters of panels and talks in certain narrow or niche segments of the industry. This year, the casual games and virtual worlds summits were combined and enhanced to form the Social & Online Games Summit. There was also an iPhone summit (which last year was called the Mobile Games Summit … telling?), the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Summit, and the Let Me Tell You Summit, which was for British people.

Generally, i was disappointed. This is the fourth year i’ve been at the show, and i almost worry i’m getting too smart for GDC. I don’t want that to sound pompous … i’m just wondering if, having spent an entire year reading and researching, following excellent Twitter posters like @retrogamer4ever, and cramming so much stuff into my brain, that i’ve outpaced the more general-interest tone of the conference?

It’s also … this is kind of weird, but i think it’s valid … the few Indie Games Summit talks i attended are in a cavernous and very dimly-lit room, as opposed to last year’s brighter, cheerier room. The mood in the place is almost ominous or sombre. But i could very well be crazy.

Click on the headers that interest you to read more about the sessions i attended!

Meeting with Push Button Labs

The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update

From Big Studio to Small Indie: Guerilla Tactics from Hello Games

Postmortem: The Design & Business Behind Fantastic Contraption

Standing in Line for a Free Phone

Rapidly Developing Farmville: How We Created and Scaled a #1 Facebook Game in 5 Weeks

i’m hoping there’s more in it for me during tomorrow’s Summit day. Wednesday also culminates in the Canada Games party – your tax dollars hard at work. It’s there that Canadian game devs can get industry folks liquored up and ready to shake on some deals, and/or eat poutine. i, for one, will be there for the poutine.

i spent the past month tweeting rotten poetry to the FGS Twitter account. The entry fee for the conference wasn’t very expensive, and the OMDC (Ontario Mosquito Death Camp) is footing the bill for half of our activities in San Francisco this week through the Export Fund. But if i see a chance to get something for free, whether it’s a conference pass or a Scientological stress test, i jump at the chance. And lo and behold, at the eleventh hour, @FGS comped me a pass … but not before GamerSafe/Flash Game License comped me another one. i felt like the one girl in grade eight who had breasts … so much unwarranted attention! Thanks, everyone. i was very happy to be there and to meet everyone in person.

If you couldn’t make it, you missed a pretty solid show. i almost wish that GDC was one day only, and FGS dragged on for a month or more. Here’s a run-down of who i saw and what i learned.

Bidness

The show was split into two tracks: business on the upper floor, and creative on the lower floor. It was the conference equivalent of a mullet.

i stayed upstairs the entire time. Adam did a great job with Canabalt, but i’d much rather learn how to make myself money than to hear about how he built a walk-in freezer made of money to store all his money, or whatever.

Click on the headings to expand a session that interests you.

Opening Keynote – Jameson Hsu

4 Keys to a Successful Social Game that All Game Developers Should Know

Money in Flash: Next Gen Monetization of Flash Games

Adobe Tools and Services for Flash Games

The Mochis Award Show, Sponsored by Kongregate

Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship

Everything About Sponsorship & Licensing

Turbulence Ahead: The Ups and Downs of Getting a Premium Flash Game to Success

NICE TO MEEEET YOOOUUUU!!!!! (WHAAAAT???)

All in all, it was a fantastic day, and i didn’t want it to end … until the after-party started, and the organizers thought it would be a simply smashing idea to blast incredibly loud club music into everyone’s ears at a networking event. i DO NOT understand why companies do that. After i grew tired of yelling into people’s faces for hours, i left the party and started writing this postmortem back at my hotel.

GDC starts tomorrow, and i’ll do my level best to pussy out of Tuesday’s parties to write more for your enjoyment.