Category: Shows and cons (Page 1 of 5)

I had a great time at GDC this year – it’s the first time that I’d been there for a while, and once I’d spent some time there, I regretted the years that I missed it.  There were some great talks – I’m hoping to come back to a couple later if I have time, especially Riot’s excellent talk on their efforts to clean up their community – but as usual, the best talks were at the bars and restaurants, the breakfasts, lunches, dinners and late night parties, where some of my most favorite genius level game developers freely were willing to swap ideas and points of view, as long as the cups remained full.

And that’s the part about the games industry that is really cool.  Game development is, at its core, a Research and Development field.  Believe it or not, players really DO get bored and sick of seeing the same game over and over again – just as sick as we get of building them.  Pushing games to the next level isn’t just about pushing pixels and polygons, it’s about always getting better and finding new angles.  Making games is hard technology and big business, but above and beyond that its quite clearly art – and one where pushing the state of the art has always been god damned exciting for me and everyone who loves the craft.

What really smart people need is NEW INPUT, something that varies from the voices that they read, hear and work with the rest of the year.

Gamergate was a frequent topic in these impromptu discussions, but usually a brief one, and unless you were at a session directly about harassment, the only topics that came up frequently were the hashtag spamming, the thin-skinned overreaction to a Design Legend playing with a ‘prepared’ sock puppet, and Mark Kern’s bizarre recent career self-immolation – i.e. all the very most recent self-inflicted wounds of the cause.   Even recent awesomely funny events like Skull vs Bathtub made nary a mention in conversations full of drunken gossip.  Most game developers are well detached from the controversy — their opinion can probably be summed up with ‘are we really still talking about this awfulness?’– but the glimpses they got this week were not favorable towards the trolls, and most of us were much happier to spend this precious time we had with long-seperated colleagues picking their brains on topics of greater interest to progressing the art and science of game development. Like, you know, Cock Hero.

Seriously, far more time at these informal gatherings discussing much more interesting questions, both deeply practical as well as wonderfully theoretical.  Is PC AAA actually still viable for new blockbuster success, or were World of Tanks and League of Legends flukes?  Will future MMOs be relegated to kickstarters, or will we see another major nine-figure one like WoW anytime soon?   Is mobile-darling and superbowl-ad-sporting  ‘Heroes’ Charge’ really just a complete ripoff of a game from China called Dao Ta Chuan Qi, and if so, are lawyers getting involved?  Why is the Asian casino mobile market nowhere near as successful as the American one?   What are the ramifications of combining machine learning with teledildonics?  Can the new Harmonix Rock Band product conquer the enormous issues of hardware and licensing that pushed the entire genre of gaming with fake plastic guitars to the brink of extinction?  Is assymetrical gaming actually going to be a ‘Thing’?  How long until someone figures out how to make an Oculus Rift experience that is both awesome at parties and yet doesn’t make the average user want to puke after 15 minutes of play?  You’re startup is going to try what now?  Does it have money yet?  Who wants drinks?  Where’s the next party?

These discussions are like catnip to me, and getting the perspectives of other people who have other expertise is vital to keeping the idea train flowing.  It’s no wonder that GDC continues to be a huge part of the business of making games – we’re still awaiting word that this year’s exact population quote, but estimates of 25000 I believe put it at the biggest yet.  Efforts to describe it as shrinking are laughable – this year, even the Monday summits were packed –as are efforts to describe it as an SJW hugbox.  I was about  as likely to find myself in a discussion about improving breast bounce physics, blood spatter, console device specs and monetization as I was to talk about social justice themes.

A  small but significant number of people sought me out to thank me for writing on Zen, particularly since August, which I always responded to awkwardly, when in fact I was feeling enormous gratitude that at least some of you out there are paying attention.  And despite the fact that I actively sought out Zoe, Randi, Brianna, Leigh and others related to recent events just to shake their hands, I was way more excited about running into Mark Rosewater again, at which point I promptly turned into a blubbering fanboy.

But that being said, there’s one thing that’s significant this year in that regard.  In the past, the social justice themes such as Zoe Quinn’s panel discussion on how developers can protect themselves from awfulness and the #1ReasonWhy panel would have been seen as odd side discussions, a tiny side track attracting smaller fringier audiences.  This year, these talks were full, and felt like part of the core of the curriculum.  Developers are now going to talks and tracks that they were ignoring before.  It FEELS like the events of the last 8 months have elevated the importance of these topics to the point where everyone in the industry accepts that these are no longer fringe concerns, but part and parcel of being in the industry.  For better or for worse.  Nothing captures that more eloquently than the other speech at the GDC awards, the one by Daniel Vella that condemned harassment and urged developers to stand together against it – a talk that earned a standing ovation.

The last 8 months have been awful for game developers in the games industry overall.  GDC was quite the opposite in almost every way.  It was a reminder that the art and science of making games is still awesome, and the tribe I’m doing it with is still a pretty incredible group of people.  Quite simply, it’s a reminder that I love making games, and I never want to stop.