Jump to content

  • Log In with Google      Sign In   
  • Create Account




GDC 2011: Day 3

Posted by mittens, 03 March 2011 · 721 views

Day 3 started, much like Day 2, at 5:00am, because for some reason I'm under the false assumption that I should continue waking up at my normal time all week.

That is a poor assumption.

Day 3's sessions started with the keynote from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, and was entitled "Video Games Turn 25." Largely, the session was about Iwata recounting the early days of Nintendo and attempting to promote feelings of pride and ambition in the development community through a variety of anecdotes. This part of the session was actually great to listen to, but it's when Iwata began talking about the features and promise of the Nintendo 3DS specifically that the keynote became more of a light version of Nintendo's E3 press conference (Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimes even came out at one point to talk at length about it).

What should have been the keynote was the next session, given by former Ubisoft Montreal Creative Director and now LucasArts creative Director Clint Hocking (about whose site/twitter name I had a remarkable discovery). The session, entitled "Dynamics: The State of the Art," was general enough and entertaining enough to appeal to just about anyone at GDC -- not just the game design track it was on -- and contained an abundance of useful and insightful information. Hocking, whose GDC lectures are consistently amongst the best sessions that GDC has to offer, posited that before we bother talking about what specific video games mean, we need to understand "how they mean." Hocking's point being that we need to be able to understand the most basic aspects and at the highest levels of how an interactive medium conveys meaning through play. No single part of this session was mind-blowing, but its tremendous holistic value cannot be understated.

Next up was the GDC Microtalks, with Naughty Dog lead designer Richard LeMarchand presenting all of the individual speakers (ranging from David Jaffe to Colleen Macklin to Brenda Brathwaite) in his opening microtalk. It was in this opening microtalk that LeMarchand gave the theme for the session: "How you play." Nothing in these sessions provides new information, but each lecture had a very sentimental core (except Jaffe's, which had a largely practical tone about the amount of time it takes to get into console games) with the takeaway being largely inspirational in nature.

It was around this point that I disliked that the main conference didn't have the same lunch break time instituted that all of the summits do. Not that my abilities to eat a sandwich while walking are particularly bad, but they are.

Frank Lantz's "Life and Death and Middle Pair: Go, Poker and the Sublime" was next and it was a very interesting talk to hear, as I am largely unfamiliar with Go and a pretty poor Poker player. Lantz's primary purpose was to illustrate the timeless nature and endless depth that both of these two games have and the way that they are pervasive in the mind of anyone who plays them. My favorite point was the relatedness between the notion of "expected value" and probability in Poker and how it leads people to inadvertantly come to understand the scientific method through a practical introduction to what is, essentially, bayesian theory.

"The Failure Workshop" was next and, really, the main takeaway from the whole session was to prototype early and test out ideas before rat-holing into tangential work too early on.

My favorite talk of the day came from Kent Hudson, a game designer at LucasArts and former designer at 2k Marin who did Bioshock and the in-production X-COM, entitled "Player-Driven Stories: How Do We Get There?" In the session, Hudson went over both the theory/ideas behind a more systemically-driven game design that allowed games to take a less prescripted approach to story-telling and a more involving player experience. The way to get here is to more systemically measure a player's actions and, specifically, their relationships to other entities in any given game. Through this relationship monitoring, the game can heuristically monitor a player's actions and, as necessary, react to the sum total or an individual component of all that collected data when the time is right. Hudson referenced the three tenets of self-determination theory to determine what players really need in order to reach "happiness": autonomy (referred to as "agency" in the session), relatedness, and competence. And it is through the successful recognition and embrace of these three pillars that a game can properly involve a player in its world. Hudson then took the necessary step from all of the theory into the practical world of AAA game development, by highlighting that it is necessary to rethink the way that AAA games approach content in order to properly be able to fill out a game world with content flexible enough to be able to respond to a variety of player stimulii. Hudson, specifically, referenced the removal of five major time- and money-consuming elements of content: VO, custom writing, environments, models, and animation, and ways to really "own" a style that allowed a development team to re-appropriate its budget as necessary for a game that isn't as prescripted as a lot of today's games typically are. Given that the last thing I wrote for my site was entitled "The Systemic Integrity of Expression," I agree fully.

It's somewhat sad that directly across the hall from Hudson's session, David Cage was saying things like "Game mechanics are evil. Mechanics are a limitation. We need to redefine what interacting means." Which, I mean, no.

After the day's sessions wrapped, it was time for the Independent Games Festival awards show and the Game Developer's Choice Awards show. Unlike last year, the awards show was unexpectedly entertaining and completely hilarious due to IGF host Anthony Carboni and GDCA host Tim Schafer being thoroughly amazing. It weirded me out a little that, during the Game Developers Choice Awards, so many of the categories were filled with games that I had so little love for. The closest I got to rooting for a game was when Dragon Quest IX: Sentinel of the Starry Skies and Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker were both up for a nomination (in the same mobile game category).

The day ended with some good fun at the Nidhogg tournament at the Eve Lounge and then some other miscellaneous happenings.

I would give my teeth to be in your shoes, thanks for that informative and yet informal blurb :)