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Question of the Week Responses:
The Highlights Of
Game Developers Conference 2005
The
Question of the Week returns with the replies to the question: " " As expected,
the responses were quite varied, but with two particular lectures
that stood out in the minds of our respondents: Will Wright's "The
Future of Content" lecture, which unveiled his latest work, Spore,
as well as "Burning Down the House: Game Developers Rant" where
a panel of prominent game designers aired their concerns with
the industry.
Will
Wright's Spore
The
latest project in the pipe from Will Wright, a great deal of the
replies we received were captivated by the new possibilities; the
buzzword is procedural content.
Will
Wright's lecture, alongside the Spore game announcement.
- Aleksey Kadukin, Sony Computer Entertainment America
Will
Wright's Spore talk. I found his talk of developing versatile
tools that the player will use to create their own content for
the game to have some merit. I believe games could be underdone
if not enough is done by the developers using this model to develop
a game. However if done right I think it could reduce development
time and costs. I follow various tech newsletters, and this type
of farming work out to the clients in the form of robust and easy
to use tools and platforms for the clients to build their own
solutions seems to be gaining ground in the tech world - an extension
of open source theory, in my opinion.
- John Pounders, University of North Alabama
Spore.
Whether it turns out to be a good game or not, an easy to use
3D art interface will be an important achievement.
- Brandon Van Every, Indie Game Design
Will
Wright's Spore lecture was definitely the most interesting
and exciting event at this year's GDC. It’s about damn time
someone got user generated content right!
- Brian Canary, EKG Games
Spore
by Will Wright - from a micro-organism to a galactic god - a true
"god" game.
- Peter Gault, G2 Corporation
Will
Wright's 'Future Of Content' - Procedural game content is surely
the holy grail for the ever increasingly complex task of generating
content. I'm thinking middleware game content. Oh yes…
- Jeffrey Sheen, Imperial College London
Spore.
Particularly, the fact that it was all procedural content. That
is huge!
- Jeff Weber, Compuware
Burning
Down The House
The
other big attention-getter among our responses. The rants struck
a chord with the developer community-at-large for one reason or
another:
The
game developers' rant really struck a chord with me. I discussed
it with a co-worker after GDC: "Greg Costikyan tried to make
it sound like innovation was totally dead," I said. "And
meanwhile, at the very same conference, speaking at the GDC, we
have Will Wright announcing Spore, which is fabulously innovative...
we have Satoru Iwata introducing ElectroPlankton, which
is super-innovative... and we have the creator of Katamari
Damacy, which is insane and has permanently altered my worldview.
Show me three products in any industry that are anywhere close
to the level of innovation of those three games." "Well
sure," replied my co-worker. "And notice something else:
Spore? Funded by EA. ElectroPlankton? Funded by
Nintendo. And Katamari Damacy was funded by Sony. The three
most innovative games, FUNDED BY THE THREE LARGEST PUBLISHERS.
Kind of destroys Costikyan's argument." "It undermines
what Warren Spector was saying, too, since he was making the same
point." Frankly, I'm appalled that Spector and Costikyan
would use the GDC as a platform to call the business "hopelessly
broken" and "fundamentally flawed." If a developer
has funding problems, those problems are his and his alone, and
those two came across like roadkill complaining about the traffic.
The industry has never been bigger or had a wider audience than
today, and this year's GDC proved beyond any doubt that it's never
been more innovative, either. I go the GDC to listen to the people
who are moving the industry forward - people like Will Wright
and Keita Takahashi. I don't go to hear resentful people shoot
spitballs in the eyes of the entire industry.
- Anonymous
Burning
Down the House!!!
- Anonymous
Easily
the best session at the conference was the "Developers Rant".
Some of it was shrill and it was lacking real solutions, but the
points were right on target. The true value in the industry is
the technical, creative, and quality control departments. Licenses
and suits do not make memorable games, yet where does all the
money in the industry lie? To move beyond the seemingly endless
parade of movie tie-ins, alternative funding, marketing, and distribution
methods need to be explored. The talents in the industry need
to divorce themselves from the teat of the parasites that are
quickly killing them.
- Tom Spilman, Sickhead Games, LLC
The
Developers Rant session was the best. [If I had made it to Will
Wright's session, though, I probably would have voted for that.]
- Michael Dornbrook, Harmonix Music Systems
While
I wasn't there, I did read a transcript of the "Burning Down
the House: Game Developers Rant" and it left me a little
upset. All of these developers were pretty much bashing Nintendo,
Sony and Microsoft as being the downfall of innovative titles.
They claim that, since budgets will be so large on the next generation
of consoles that the death knell of innovation is only moments
away. My question is this: What game of this generation was truly
innovative and had no predecessor. People point to games like
Donkey Konga, Rez... what else? Anyway my point
is that while these games may be incredibly innovative, I found
them to be terrible games. Games like Half Life 2, Halo
2, Doom 3, Gran Turismo 4, the list goes on…
might not be very innovative, but they were the best games to
come out in the last eight months. There is a reason they sell
so well and it’s not marketing. They are just great games.
I have a theory that if Microsoft hadn't released a single ad
for Halo 2, it would still have sold just as well. Gamers
don't buy games off ads or shelf space - they buy them based on
review sites and word of mouth from their friends. Microsoft talked
about the 'HD Era' of gaming at GDC basically saying that everything
we love about games is about to get bigger and better and Greg
Costikyan has the balls to say it made him sick to hear about
it. Microsoft is just giving gamers everything they want. It isn't
Microsoft or Sony that are driving game development costs through
the roof, it's the gamers. They expect and demand better games.
We've
all heard the statistic that 4 out of 5 games fail, and there
is a reason for that. Those games were made by people who made
what they wanted, not what gamers wanted. Brenda Laurel went on
to talk about the old white business men who run the industry,
but know nothing about it. I would say that she along with the
other panelists are the real culprits. They should stop bitching
about the publishers’ ruining creativity and do something
about it. There is no way that a studio can come up with the most
innovative game of all time and package it into a fantastic gameplay
experience, and not find a publisher for it. Warren Spector is
about the only panelist who had anything intelligent to say. I
agree that there needs to be alternate means of game distribution
other than retail. Steam is a phenomenal example of this. The
bottom line, though, is no matter how you distribute the game,
no matter how innovative the game is, no matter how much shelf
space and advertising there is, if the game doesn't pass the hardcore
gamer's critique, your game is dead in the water.
- David Owen Jr.
Other
Notable Highlights
Of
course, Spore and "Game Developers Rant" were not
the only notable responses we received, with many other items of GDC-related interest
at the forefront of people's minds:
The
most interesting talks (of the few I attended) were Kathy [Schoback]'s
talk on economics of next-gen game development, Burning Down the
House, and the Experimental Gameplay Workshop (though I missed
most of that, the Jam contributions were the best part). IGDA's
Quality of Life summit was also cool. If there was one interesting
takeaway for the whole conference for me, it was that staffing/growth/process
issues were way up on everyone's radar compared to past years.
For all the talk of next-gen consoles, the thing people seem to
be afraid of the most is how to work in larger environments with
larger teams, and Quality of Life is just a sub-issue to that.
Very surprising the amount of airtime this got.
- Kim Pallister, Intel Corp
The
Usability Testing tutorial by Microsoft, the Splinter Cell
narrative lecture by Clint Hocking, and Raph Koster's Game Atoms
lecture were the best from my designer's perspective, with lots
of takeaway lessons and ideas to try out, as well as increasing
my understanding. Will Wright's lecture on Spore was very interesting
but not really "takeaway" useful for the mortal developers
among us!
- Phil Mansell, SCEE
That
the Revolution will be backwards compatible with the GCN; that
Revolution and DS will have Free Wi-Fi Access; and the new Zelda
trailer.
- Michael Wyrzykowski
The
one from eGenesis’ Andrew Tepper on how to create the impossible
- i.e. make an MMOG [A Tale In The Desert] on a budget.
-i Anonymous
I
am certain that a lot of people will say that Microsoft’s
keynote or Will Wright's Spore presentation were the high
lights of the show, but I enjoyed the session that Nicole Lazzaro
(Xeodesign Inc.) put on, entitled "Why We Play Games: Four
Keys to More Emotion Without Story" - fun, entertaining and
thought provoking.
- L Foz, Max Gaming Technologies
Keita
Takahashi's session was amazing. One comment of his really stuck
out for me; Video games are not important. If video games were
to disappear, the world would never miss us. If people suddenly
became uninterested in games the developers, publishers, and specialized
retailers would suffer the most, but the world will keep on turning.
It was this mentality of zero self-importance that gave birth
to one of the most memorable games of all time: Katamari Damacy.
It's nice to get this breath of fresh air/dose of reality when
all we hear is that the games industry is getting bigger and more
profitable. Hopefully this allows us to strive harder to make
an impact with our audience, not just with glitz and glamour,
but with substance as well. I would like the videogame industry
to have more content that generates interest from people thirty
years from now the way music and film does. It would be nice for
our games to leave a lasting impression beyond the actual shelf-life
of a product.
- Carlo Delallana, Ubisoft
Announcements:
Spore. Lectures: The Future of Content. Honorable mentions:
Why isn't the Industry Making Interactive stories?, The Heart
of a Gamer, The Emily Dickinson License. Basically, stuff that
was about games, rather than visuals or business or HD stuff that
doesn't belong at an event called “The Game Developers Conference”.
- C F
I
think Nintendo's keynote speech was the most interesting moment
for me. Coming a day after Microsoft's keynote, it highlighted
the clear divergence between these company's platform strategies
moving forward. If you're a gamer at heart (and have the heart
of a gamer) root for Nintendo, as they seem to be more interested
in gameplay innovation than making an uber-media-micropayment
device. (HD-gaming be damned!)
- Anonymous
"Concepts
& Animating Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell: The Chaos Theory"
- Jason Parks, SCEA
Best
lecture, hands down, was [Epic designer] Cliff Bleszinski's lecture
- “Dissecting Interactive Design”. He was the best
speaker I saw at the conference! He spoke well, was funny, and
actually had interesting material to cover, rather than just demonstrating
his next product.
- Mark Waligora
The
noble but doomed revolt of the treasure ships’ galley slaves.
Hail Spartacus!
- Richard Redfield, dojobber.com
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[Article
illustration by Adam Reed.]
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Question
of the Week Responses: Highlights Of Game Developers Conference 
