{"id":658,"date":"2008-02-28T22:44:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-28T20:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2008\/02\/28\/a-game-developers-conference-2008-postmortem\/"},"modified":"2008-02-28T22:44:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-28T20:44:00","slug":"a-game-developers-conference-2008-postmortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2008\/02\/28\/a-game-developers-conference-2008-postmortem\/","title":{"rendered":"A Game Developers Conference 2008 postmortem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdconf.com\/\">The 2008 Game Developers Conference<\/a> was a bit of a confusing experience for me. To begin with, I felt out of place. Anytime I introduced myself to someone&#8212;&#8220;I&#8217;m an interaction designer, I work freelance&#8221;&#8212;I would usually get a blank stare. (Not many independents making a living in the games industry it seems.) At a lot of the talks, I was struck by the huge gap between the practice of UX designers native to the web, and designers working in the games industry. I&#8217;m generalizing here, but I&#8217;ll give some examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Game designers still don&#8217;t strive to understand their audience and the experience they&#8217;d like to have.<\/li>\n<li>Game designers still don&#8217;t understand the significance of the web. They very rarely embrace the web way of doing things.<\/li>\n<li>Game designers quite often aren&#8217;t able to think on different levels of abstraction about their medium, art form or whatever you want to call it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If that doesn&#8217;t get me flamed, I don&#8217;t know what will.<\/p>\n<p>GDC 2008 was huge. By far the largest conference I have ever been to. I heard someone mention the number of 16.000 but I could be completely off. The program committee obviously went for quantity over quality&#8212;I attended some really great talks, but also some really bad ones. In addition it was hell to figure out where to go. In hindsight I missed out on some great sessions. Apparently everything was recorded, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdcradio.com\/\">but they need to be paid for<\/a>&#8212;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cmp.com\/\">CMP<\/a> apparently think they&#8217;re doing the games industry a service like this. I think not.<\/p>\n<p>GDC Mobile in particular was a weird, depressing affair. The mobile game industry seems to have defined itself in such a way that there is no way for it to actually succeed. The majority are still trying to deliver a console-like experience on a small screen, completely missing the potential of the medium. Sigh.<\/p>\n<p>Some themes I spotted:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Techniques for enhancing creativity:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/gameslices.wordpress.com\/\">Annakaisa Kultima<\/a>, a (game)researcher at the university of Tampere in Finland presented game-like techniques for idea generation. I&#8217;d particularly love to play around with her NVA cards. Sam Coates and Graeme Ankers of <abbr title=\"Sony Computer Entertainment Europe\">SCEE<\/abbr> showed how they&#8217;ve improved innovation and concept creation using a whole range of techniques including <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lateral_thinking\">lateral thinking<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The web way:<\/strong> There were some happy exceptions to the general ignorance of the power of the web. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.links.net\/\">Justin Hall<\/a> demoed <a href=\"http:\/\/pmog.com\/\">PMOG<\/a>&#8212;an exciting concept using the web as a gaming platform. Hopefully this will start a whole wave of &#8220;datagames&#8221;. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raphkoster.com\/\">Raph Koster<\/a> blew me away with his very techy antemortem of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metaplace.com\/\">Metaplace<\/a>&#8212;a complete reinvention of MMOGs built from the ground up both with and as web technologies.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Story, drama, narrative, blah:<\/strong> &#8220;The audience are not your mom. They don&#8217;t care about your stupid story,&#8221; said Ken Levine, writer and designer of the critically acclaimed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.2kgames.com\/bioshock\/\">BioShock<\/a>. I&#8217;m still not sure BioShock is actually as revolutionary as people make it out to be. But Levine&#8217;s approach to story in games&#8212;having multiple levels of detail that can be consumed as the player sees fit and telling the story through the environment&#8212;makes sense to me. I enjoyed Peter Molyneux&#8217;s demo of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fable2.com\/\">Fable 2<\/a> mostly because of his criticism of American prudishness. &#8220;If this were Germany I&#8217;d be naked on stage right this moment.&#8221; Molyneux attempts to create drama through simulation. Offering freedom of choice, but choice with consequences. I wonder if this is a road leading nowhere&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mobile:<\/strong> Some people attempt to play to mobile&#8217;s strengths, with great success. DC of <a href=\"http:\/\/pikkle.com\">Pikkle<\/a> in Japan showed a lot of crazy-ass Flash Lite games that are delivered over mobile web. These mobile social games completely circumvent the carriers and consequently disrupt the whole mobile market over there. Shades of <a href=\"http:\/\/playyoo.com\">Playyoo<\/a> here&#8212;although Pikkle has the benefit of 90% Flash Lite player penetration, whereas in Europe we&#8217;re apparently on 20%. Equally true to mobile&#8217;s nature but offering a completely different experience is location based gaming. Jeremy Irish talked about the origins of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocaching.com\/\">Geocaching<\/a> and showed wonderful work he is doing at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.groundspeak.com\/\">Groundspeak<\/a>. Location based games are full of emergent complexity. I enjoyed hearing that Irish tries to have players be in the world in stead of the screen when playing.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Miscellaneous:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sulka.net\/\">Sulka Haro<\/a>&#8216;s talk about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.habbo.com\/\">Habbo<\/a> was surprisingly thoughtful. Lots of good stuff on identity play and how Habbo&#8217;s lack of explicit support for it is not holding players back&#8212;on the contrary, less features seems to create more space for play. Takao Sawano of Nintendo delighted me with an in depth look at the evolution of the <a href=\"http:\/\/video.google.com\/videosearch?q=wii%20fit\">Wii Fit<\/a> controller. Secret of the big N&#8217;s success is clearly the close collaboration between its hard- and software divisions. <a href=\"http:\/\/rodvik.com\/rodgames\/\">Rod Humble<\/a> unveiled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simscarnival.com\/\">The Sims Carnival<\/a>, EA&#8217;s contribution to the continuing democratization of creative tools (again reminiscent of Playyoo). Humble proved to be a very knowledgeable not to mention funny speaker. Seeing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ralphbaer.com\/\">Ralph Baer<\/a> and Allan Alcorn play PONG on the Brown Box was awesome.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There was more&#8212;I&#8217;d love to go over all the wonderful indie games I saw at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.igf.com\/\">IGF<\/a> and elsewhere for instance&#8212;but these were by far the most enjoyable sessions for me. If you&#8217;re looking for in-depth reports you could do worse than to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/gdc2008\/\">start at Gamasutra<\/a>. For me the real challenge begins now&#8212;digesting this and making it applicable for interaction designers on the web. I have a huge backlog of smaller posts lying around that I want to get out there first though (and this one has grown far too large already). So I&#8217;ll end here.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2008 Game Developers Conference was a bit of a confusing experience for me. To begin with, I felt out of place. Anytime I introduced myself to someone&#8212;&#8220;I&#8217;m an interaction designer, I work freelance&#8221;&#8212;I would usually get a blank stare. (Not many independents making a living in the games industry it seems.) At a lot &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2008\/02\/28\/a-game-developers-conference-2008-postmortem\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A Game Developers Conference 2008 postmortem<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[625],"tags":[247,15,267,482,541,259,481,540,370],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-conferences","tag-events","tag-game-design","tag-game-developers-conference-2008","tag-game-development","tag-games","tag-gdc-2008","tag-postmortems","tag-reports"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}