Below the break: GDC In A Nutshell
Tuesday Night
If a terrorist shot down the annual Tuesday night American jump from Austin to San Jose, Texas’ game dev community would be set back 10 years.
Our plane was supposed to land at 6 PM. Instead, we rolled into our hotel at 11 PM. This forced us to greatly compress our drinking. Fortunately, we were staying at the Fairmont, which is ground zero for drunken GDC wheeling and dealing.
Spent some time talking with Jamie Fristrom and Jason Booth, the latter who was treated like a rock star by everyone who found out he worked on Guitar Hero. Seriously, jaded 14-year industry vets were coming up to him and saying that GH was the reason they loved games again.
Wednesday
MMO Economies Roundtable. Let’s just say I love roundtables because I love to throw out seemingly innoculous comments that turn out to be incendiary. This time, my musing was that clearly you wanted your crafting game to result in relatively few crafters in comparison to the number of people buying the goods. This comment sat for a while, before 15 minutes later, one person said, “I wanna go back to that thing that Damion said”, followed by much raising of the pitchforks. I may have to blog about this one later.
Battlestar Galactica. Very good. I learned pretty much nothing I can apply to making video games, but this I went to solely to appeal to my inner fanboi. Ron showed clips of characters from the old show, comparing them to the same characters in the new one, which was very amusing in a ‘DVD Extras’ sort of way.
My Competitive & PVP Roundtable. Probably the best of the three days, this one focused on PVP, PK and ganking in general. I was forced to shush someone who kept trying to steer the whole roundtable into a ‘levels sucks’ direction. I’ll post in more details on these roundtables later.
Bloggers Gathering. This is exactly what you might imagine it being – about 25 bloggers talking about what blogging software you should use and apologizing for overly snarking on each other. I’m told it was the largest Gathering of day one, which is nice, considering I did nothing for it other than pimp it here. At some point, people realized the Terranova gathering had started, and so everyone went drinking.
Wednesday Night
Went carousing with the Terranova gang, then went to dinner with the same gang at a German restaurant that everyone who makes online games appears to love except me.
Second Life threw a party at the San Jose Tech Museum. I spent my time watching a programmer trying to talk his way into a job at Linden Labs while I was tipping a waitress 5 bucks to bring me a drink after last call.
Wandered to the Casual Games party. Saw many casual games, closed down the party recounting the history of CarnageMUD/LegendMUD/Meridian 59/Ultima Online with Raph to the two people who happened to be there and who hopefully found it vaguely interesting. Raph and I feel an urge to do this at GDC every 2-3 years or so, because it’s such an odd piece of history that turns out to be quite formative for the industry as we now know it.
Thursday
What Happened With Tabula Rasa. Richard Garriott did a surprisingly candid talk on what happened with TR, and why it’s taken so long. The most interesting tidbit was how their attempts to blend eastern visuals and western ones to make a truly universal look and feel was an utter failure – as an example, the Austin team tried to make Asian-inspired buildings which ended up insulting some in the home office, who saw them as gross caricatures. Even more interestingly, with their first draft of the character models, 100% of their internal dev staff played female characters in their play tests, because the male characters were all excessively… shall we say… unmanly.
Will Wright’s Talk. Will Wright’s annual stream of consciousness was great, as always. Every year, I pray my sessions don’t run opposite of his. My favorite part this year was how he compared the Sims Online development process to the Bagger 288.
Censorship In Games. Once we got past everyone thanking Leland Yee for agreeing to show up to a really hostile environment, this was a mess, in my opinion. Everyone rambled, everyone was self-righteous, little new insight was voiced, and once the panel was opened to questions from the floor, angry game devs started whacking on Yee like he was a pinata. I’m still waiting for a truly intelligent and thoughtful debate on this issue to occur. At least Yee was a good sport about it.
PVP Roundtable Day Two. The day was about political and siege warfare, and yet we spent a lot of time discussing TrueSkill. Also, someone ELSE kept trying to bring up the idea that levels are evil. I think I know what my roundtable next year will be on.
10 Strategies to Building an MMO. I have to hand it to Rich Vogel – he’s a trooper. My sources tell me that he was so sick he felt like death warmed over, but he still managed to get up there and deliver his talk. The part that hopefully everyone was taking notes for was the content problem: how much content is needed to make one of these things (his ballpark: 5 times that of a single player game), and how important it is to get your tools and pipeline up early. Hopefully some of you starting out an MMO were taking notes for that part and were getting appropriately scared.
Thursday Night
First things first – my 3 coworkers who used to live in California insisted we go to In and Out Burger. I will note for the record that the burger was tasty, but not rapturous, and I don’t see what the big deal was.
At least two of the parties on Thursday Night had Guitar Hero parties. The one I was at forgot the memory card, which meant no unlocked songs, which meant that I’d heard “More than a Feeling” 3 times before I left.
Very little drinking on Thursday, and yet the discussions were even crazier. I suspect this is because I spent my time waxing philosophically with ARG developers.
Friday
MMO Issues in China. Mostly a rehash of what anyone who reads Terranova already knows. Also, if you’re doing a talk at 9 AM on Friday, for the love of god, try to squeeze a joke in there somewhere.
Designing Feature IP. I was surprised by this talk, I think it may have been the most useful one I went to. Neil Young talked about how EA was expanding their games 1-3 features at a time – a philosophy which I note isn’t always as successful as Neil claims it was (see Madden’s quarterback vision system from last year, which drove lots of fans nuts). Still, what was interesting was talking about how they managed to do this and manage the risk in a project, which helps ensure the project can ship on time and on budget. He also talked about how EA is undergoing a tricky transition now, where they realize they must embrace innovation in an extremely corporate environment.
PVP and Competitive Systems. Mine, day three. This one was supposed to focus on non-PVP competitive systems such as diplomacy, economic warfare, and other similar systems. We kept ending up talking about managing communities. But at least Levels didn’t come up!
Friday Night
Went to dinner with Alistair from Worldforge. We were going to see Video Games Live, but $45 for tickets seemed steep after watching Will Wright be a crazy genius for free the day before. So we headed back to the Fairmont.
Met Tom Buscaglia, whose blog is one of my favorites. This may surprise people who read both blogs, but our conversation quickly turned to Wacky Jacky.
Then went upstairs to the Fat Man Jam. I played a few songs on guitar, saw some people dance that I never thought I’d see dance, and drank the worst sake I’ve ever had in my life. Also, at some point in here I know at least one photograph was taken that could result in someone getting fired. Good times.
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