Our guy in Tokyo has descended upon San Franciscoās Game Developers Conference. We asked him for a report. This is what we got.
I donāt have internet access in my hotel room. This is the year 2010, the year that Arthur C. Clarke imagined we, the human race, would be first making contact with aliens from another planet / galaxy / or dimension, and I canāt even get on the internet to fact-check the inflammatory nonsense Iām about to write.
The only way I can access the internet in this place is to sit tethered to the wall on a three-foot cable next to the television in the living room of this suite. I am staying with two friends because, hey, thatās the sort of thing I do. We have two sofas in the living room, and a king-sized bed in the bedroom. Tonight is my night on the king-sized bed. My lord, this bed is delicious. I really want to sleep in it.
Itās weird. I really canāt get in the mood for writing without some intense form of distraction. I need to be able to look up completely random shit on Wikipedia or chat with friends as I write, or I get bored and things fall apart. For the first time in a long time, I have chosen television as my distraction: Jimmy Kimmel is interviewing recent Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz.
I attended more than a dozen panels in the past two days of the 2010 Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco, California, USA. I didnāt take notes, because I thought I would be a total skeeze and use features or articles written about GDC on other websites to remind me of the things that I saw or heard at the panels I attended. Well, thatās not going to happen. All I have to go on is a stack of evaluation forms from all the talks I attended. I feel bad about not handing in any of them. I didnāt fill most of them out. The one that I did fill out in any capacity was for a talk on porting UE3 to the iPhone. I found that talk pretty helpful, considering that I might be making a UE3-based game for the iPhone at some point. I donāt want to talk too much about it because it would make me look a lot smarter or cooler than Iām used to making myself look in these dumb things I write here; I have a reputation to uphold, so letās just say that I wrote numeral sixes next to the fives in evaluation categories, circled those sixes, and then wrote, under āplease share your comments and suggestions for improvement below or on the back of this sheetā, āchips and salsa.ā
I had figured that my comment would be interpreted as āat least give up chips and salsa if weāre going to have to sit through this boring shit,ā because hey, it seems to be my nature to have my sense of humor misunderstood. Really, the message was supposed to mean āthe only way to make this talk even better would be to give us all complimentary chips and salsa, dude.ā
The highlight of attending GDC has perhaps been the part where I approached Jesse Schell, who recently gave a fantastic talk at the DICE summit, and he told me that heād read the entirety of a recent article in which I riffed on his talk. Schell gave a talk Wednesday on the subject of designing games that parents and children can play together. His was part of a series of talks on social games, though as his talk crescendoed into a brief exploration of how and why the bond between a parent and a child is the deepest any human being can know, it seemed to me that the topic could also belong to the series of talks concerning āseriousā games.
How do you design a game that prevents the spread of the HIV epidemic? This is a hugely interesting question to me. All throughout the talk, I was brainstorming ideas in a dozen directions. In the end, she didnāt address the issue. I was going to bring it up in the question and answer period. I didnāt have to. Someone else did. The official answer was that game design, obviously, is very important: so important, in fact, that theyāre letting the data determine where the game design goes.
Kristian Segerstrale of Playfish talked on Wednesday about how the price of games is moving, gradually, toward free. He touched on many topics, though one I found especially interesting was his explanation of how having a browser-based free-to-play game allows the developer to be constantly updated with such frequency that it can be said to go through a hundred āgenerationsā in the space of a year, where previous games such as EAās FIFA would have gone through twenty-one generations in seventeen years. Humans, of course, evolved from monkeys in half a million generations. What weāre seeing with games is that āgenerationsā are getting shorter, speeding their evolution. This means that changes to game design are minute, exact, complicated, and calculated.
Segerstrale alluded to āThe Rise of the Quantsā: people who collate and analyze indisputable data, and allow that data to influence the next iteration of the game design: if itās a cold, hard fact that no one uses a particular feature, for example, then they might as well cut it out.
I have come to understand that speakers at GDC arenāt expected to get up there and deliver a presentation in which they tell every important thing to everyone who would ever want to attend such a conference, or make a game, get rich, or even just appreciate the idea of game-craft. These talks are all centered on one tiny specific thing. Maybe my āproblemā with GDC is that Iām interested in too many specific things. Iām about equally interested in game design as I am in marketing (and often get destructive criticism for commenting on a gameās marketing practices within the context of my game reviews).
Why am I here at GDC 2010? As much fun as it is to write articles for this here website, half of my purpose here isnāt writing. Iām here to . . . letās not say ālearnā, letās say āinferā something. Iām trying ā half-successfully, which unfortunately isnāt successfully enough ā to establish a small game company. Here at GDC, Iām meeting people who share similar goals, and feeling my own goal change in some subtle way as I listen to successful people talk.
The other half of my reason for coming to San Francisco is that I needed a vacation. San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, and GDC was happening this week, so why not?Every time I come here, I find another two or three reasons Iād like to move here. I never end up actually moving here, though itās a nice thought.
Talks on the first two days of GDC centered on social games, serious games, and the more numbers-heavy side of things. I figured that all of these things are relevant to what I want to do in the future. Some of the panels didnāt really help me with anything, like the one about effective marketing strategies for a small studio just starting out. Part of the guyās advice was that you should go to a lot of parties and drink with a lot of people, that you should be something of an interesting presence at these parties. One of his slides was a collection of quotes from blogs about such-and-such game-developing person: āthat dude wore a kilt and a lumberjack beard,ā et cetera. The presentation went on to tell us that if weāre friendly to people we meet at parties, and if we exercise care in acting natural when we exchange business cards, itāll lead to āwarmer emailsā in the future. I guess all this stuff is correct, though itās nothing I havenāt learned before in my years of attempting to get laid. The entire thirty-minute talk could probably be summarized with the two words: āBe cool.ā
Well, I say this panel wasnāt much use to me, though in fact, maybe, it kind of was: It taught me that some people (judging by the number of opened laptops and the sound of clicking keys) really do need to be taught these lessons. Me, though, maybe I prefer trial and error. I donāt really see life as a game with an actual end goal of getting rich and retiring. Getting anywhere, for me, is almost all of the fun. Looking over the list of super-specific GDC talks, I canāt help feeling that many of these topics are ones which I personally have an idealized, pseudo-wishful picture of, and I almost (almost!) donāt want to know anything about other peopleās experiences.
I once told a philosophy PhD that I donāt read philosophy because itās like ālife spoiler.sā That was a joke. This might not be: I donāt want these fine, talented, successful people here at GDC spoiling my career for me. Oh no: I just called my four-person game development studio a ācareer.ā Itās too late to take that back, now.
Many of the talks Iāve seen at this yearās GDC have covered emerging issues that were tiny two years ago and glacier-sized right now. Many of them center on technology that is new or fresh even to the people who makes their livings using it every day. Though little of it is anything that, say, a medium-level genius couldnāt figure out in thirty seconds without even trying. Maybe thatās putting it harshly. Letās ask a husk of a question, then, to recover the momentum: What happens, really, when everyone everywhere knows everything?
A prevailing theme at social gaming talks this year is that the future is digital and we canāt do anything to stop that digital future. Sooner or later, no one will have a record collection or even an NES cartridge collection and they wonāt care. Without records or CDs or game cartridges, in a future where clothing consists entirely of monochrome āStar Trekā jumpsuits and white kung-fu slippers, where we subsist on vitamin-injected rice gruel or cotton candy, what will we own? What we will love? Et cetera. The answer is that we will own and love data (and cotton candy, and jumpsuits). Maybe weāll even make our jumpsuits out of fabric that simply canāt get dirty. Portable devices like the iPhone will then make it possible to carry everything you own everywhere you go. With āblogā becoming the default news service format, with something possibly even more fluid yet to come, weāre looking at a future where maybe everyone will just know everything about everyone and everything else at all times by way of some digital facsimile of instinct. In an age like that, how do you entertain anyone? Probably with lots of games like Peggle. (That might have been a joke.)
If youāve seen my writing on the things I donāt like about (working in) Japan, it might interest you to know that the entire reason I started typing up that scary-long rant was a discussion I had with a friend about political sound trucks in Tokyo. Iām not (just) talking about the trucks that obtain police permission to park in the middle of major pedestrian crossings and protest hot-button issues like how Jesus Christ will be back very soon or how Japan-born persons of Chinese or Korean descent should never be allowed to vote, or even run for political office, though those people are pretty terrible too.
No, the sound trucks that bother me most are the ones at election time. They drive through residential neighborhoods from six in the morning, blaring their message at airplane volume. Only they donāt actually say anything. All they do is repeat the name of the candidate. They donāt name the party, and they donāt comment on his political platform. Letās say the guyās last name is Suzuki. The sound truck would blast a recording of an old woman with a voice like sheās perma-lost on her way home from the grocery store, repeating the name āSuzukiā as though it had been the last word sheād spoken before suffering a massive, brain-damaging electric shock.
The reason for the, uhm, simplicity of these announcements is pretty easy to understand. Youāve heard of viral marketing ā this is bacterial campaigning. (Hyperbole ahead:) The majority of voters are persons over 80. They just now are starting to both lose their minds and wish theyād done more to change the world. If you look out the window at a sound truck as it coasts at sub-ice-cream-truck velocity in a tight circle around your neighborhood for three god damn hours, you will see that the volunteers seated inside, waving their hands out the window, are old, old women in bingo visors, granny glasses, and gardening gloves. The gardening gloves have always bothered me the most. The old women are there to appeal to old women. The repetition of the name is there in hopes that it will be the last name the most senile of old voters hears before stepping up to the booth on election day. Itās a low, dirty, grimy business. This kind of campaigning has been illegal in the United States since maybe the 1940s, though for noise reasons alone. It should be illegal in Japan because of how little faith it wields in humanity. Itās about a million times worse than that guy Iām following on Twitter who tweets ninety times in a half an hour six or seven times a day. Itās weird, and I donāt like it!
To think that all politicians start by being the life of the party, by getting their credentials out there in hopes of attracting warmer emails. Looking at the panels full of advice for startups at GDC, and then listening to bigshots from Facebook or Playfish talk about how they met success in this new market, feels kind of like staring at yourself in the mirror, doing your hair just right, and then proceeding to call yourself the absolute evilest names you can think of. Bigger even than Facebook.com, life is a social network; my gym is a gaming platform. Listening to awesome guys like Jason Rohrer talk about his game concerning the diamond trade in Africa doesnāt make me a better person, though maybe the game will, or maybe it wonāt. Iām here at GDC to meet people, to talk to people, to be met, to be talked to, to hear Sid Meier talk, and to maybe accidentally learn something, though I think itās safe to say, for the first time in my life, that Iām actually, literally only afraid of success, of all the things in the world someone could be afraid of.
I keep thinking about that HIV prevention education game. When asked about game design, Lynn Sullivan told those gathered that, if they have any ideas, please, let her know. This is the kind of thing that ā as a first-time attendee, anyway ā I think I like most about GDC. I now have something to think about.
I joke about a lot of things on the internet, and I say a lot of maybe-inflammatory things, though I assure you I do like the world; I like people. I wouldnāt dare joke about anything so gravely serious and worth being serious about as HIV. So if what Iām about to say sounds like a joke to you, I assure you that itās not.
Lynn Sullivan said that the goal of her game would be to decrease the median age at which children initiate sexual activity, and that so doing would decrease the possibility that said kidsā first sexual encounter was not a protected one. I think, first of all, that maybe a whole lot of kids under thirteen donāt actually have AIDS. I also think that you might not want to talk down to the kids. Why not make the game (and this is a maybe-extreme example) about having sex a lot? Maybe, like, an RPG where random encounters are with sex partners, where thereās an easy way to win: just highlight and choose āYEAHā, or thereās a slow way to win: Click āopen condomā, then āremove condomā, then āput on condomā, then āroll down condomā. Eventually, you can choose āDO ITā. Anyway, maybe one in ten random encounters has an STD. If you contract an STD, and then you find out, every sex encounter youāve had up until that point will come to your characterās house and scream at you. Itād be a thousand times worse than Mr. Resetti from Animal Crossing
It sounds like Iām joking, maybe. Iām not, really. Brainstorming is a joke-like process. One point Iād like to make ā preferably with fives of thousands of words ā is that education as such kind of creeps kids out. Jesse Schell said in his talk that parents like to teach and kids like to learn, and that despite what theyāll ever admit in a focus group, kids do want to feel emotionally more connected to their families.
I have expressed, for many years, my opinion that digital video game simulations of men stealing cars and braining prostitutes are less likely to turn children into prostitute-braining car thieves than The Legend of Zelda is likely to turn a kid into a kleptomaniac. A simulation of the real world, thanks to effects like The Uncanny Valley, is easier for children to identify as ridiculous. Something simultaneously direct and abstract can create behaviors that will eventually be impossible to quash. Remember the first time you, controlling a Link equipped with a lantern that can light torches, walked to the end of a dead-end tunnel and saw four unlit torches and a locked door, and made that wordless, logicless mental connection: āIf I light these four torches, that door will open.ā
I canāt possibly be shitting you on this: I think The Legend of Zelda made me a vegetarian. The grueling, terrifying final battle of Earthbound did more to put the fear of real-life death into me than most real-life experiences would have, only I didnāt suffer any real-life physical or emotional trauma. Then we have the elixirs in Final Fantasy VI: Super-powerful medicines that heal all of a characterās hit points and magic points. Theyāre a get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts, and you find them by vigilantly pressing the search button in front of any given clock in the game world. A player of Final Fantasy VI will hear, maybe through a grapevine of friends, that searching clocks occasionally yields these powerful items. Though I havenāt met a single human being who admits to having ever actually used them during the game, even during the aggressively challenging endgame.
What we have right there is a game enforcing a behavior that extends into the real-world: One day, in a bad spot in my life and very low on cash, I purchased a can of Coca-Cola and put it in my refrigerator with the promise to never, ever drink it. I called it āThe Emergency Coke.ā Six years later, itās still in the refrigerator.
The impression I get from a lot of the talks about āserious gamesā is that these people want to make games that are both as informative and as fun as a seventh-grade science-class slide show about types of rocks. In short, āseriousā and āsocialā are merely new knives in the pie of game format segregation.
Iād rather see more games that are like vintage episodes of āDoctor Whoā ā entertaining, suspenseful, action-packed, and also managing to slip in some morality play and nonchalant, seemingly accidental history or science lessons. Why canāt educational games be fun? Why canāt fun games be educational?
These questions are very naive, and to begin to answer them would be a harrowing process. I think the best place to start is with the lanterns in Zelda and the elixirs in Final Fantasy VI. Someone needs to research how these little logic leaps embedded in rollicking, fun experiences give eventual birth to real-world fastidious practices.
In short, Iām glad I donāt have to design that HIV prevention game ā though I promise am going to try my best to think about it for the rest of this week, and get back to you later.
