Terra Nova

GDC Expo Floor

A few things I noticed wandering the expo floor.

I was surprised to hear some people say that this is a fairly decent year for hiring. I thought it was a down time for the industry, but perhaps in interactive entertainment, down just means, not growing as fast. Or, we get this impression from the problems hitting consoles and AAA companies, but perhaps they are as big a source of new employment as they had been.

The level of physical fidelity continues to surprise. Trees with leaves blowing gently in the wind, canvas straps that look so real you can almost feel the rough cloth, surround environments with wind and lighting and sound, faces ..... Human faces. No. Superhuman faces. Beyond the human. Angels and devils maybe. Spirits. I don't know.

The use of the body as a controller is still clunky. Many companies are trying and there were a few apparent successes. A smallish head mounted display that really works. But there were more things that still seemed too clunky for home use. It's getting there, however.

The Indie games were more impressive than ever. We are seeing a clear impact of the democratization of tools. Indie projects just look, sound, and feel so good. They are creative as before, but they are developing such a compelling attractiveness too.

Are you ready for movies that think

Slant Six Games will deploy a procedural cinematic engine in Microsofts Galactic Reign. The segments of film are available to the engine and it creates a linear visual narrative that depends on player actions and the game state.

Time Scales

When I was a wee lad, the turnaround time for a piece of research was 5-6 years. From the first idea to the day it appeared in a journal. We now see functional models in game analytics that address practical social science problems in a couple months. Seems fast! But isn't fast enough. Game builders are making decisions hourly as their player bases shift and roil.

I wonder if we are on the wrong track in game analytics. We are using big data sociology, economics, and public policy as our models. Maybe the right model is meteorology. The weather is a vast complex system whose properties we need to interrogate on an hourly basis. Game companies are just the first to confront the problems of providing governance on an hourly basis. Also on an individualized basis. For a whole society, whose membership constantly shifts. It is a mind boggling problem and It seems that every time analytics catches up , the time scale has shifted down an order of magnitude.

Action and Virtue

Robert George in the April edition of the magazine First Things makes a case for limited government that relies on an Aristotelian view of human flourishing. For Aristotle, he says, "flourishing consists in doing things, not just in getting things, or having desirable or pleasant experiences, or having things done for you." You have to act to be well. Active entertainment is better for people than passive entertainment.

To do things in games would probably not be accorded the same respect by Aristotle as to do them in real life, I suppose. Not at first glance anyway. On the other hand, with real life as systematized as it is, and so loaded with powerful incentives, can we truly say that the average person has significant scope of action there? Whereas game designers as I heard today are planning entire worlds that respond organically to what we do. Moreover, the most significant actions we take are and always have been social and local: spouses and children and friends.

We flourish better playing games than watching TV. But real life is better than both, because it has touch. Of course, some day the games on computers will become the game of daily life; we will one day be playing games with touch. I hope this development helps people flourish better than they do now.

Next steps for AI

Games will become more reactive to us. The industry is beginning to build systems to produce environments that react in novel ways to the user. A World
Manager that directs your experience. Entities that analyze statistics before making choices. Game objects that dynamically acquire new properties. Props that think. Even small scale developers can build these things. The tools are making it possible.

Game education is scaling rapidly

Just saw a report from RIT, UCSC, and Northeastern about their efforts to build game programs. The meta data here is astounding. Ten years ago, nobody had anything. They launched little programs over significant opposition. The demand for places however vastly exceeded supply. The programs grew and now, top level support is creating huge cross campus centers to serve playable, interactive, game media.

Scale

If you've never been to this conference or E3, the first thing that impresses you is the scale. Gigantic and global. I still have trouble grasping how big the business of designing play has become.

This talk is by the CEO of Kongregate. It's about retaining players for the long run. She reminds us that games like EverQuest are still making money after a decade. Time scales are bigger than you realize too.

From GDC

Let's all go back to 2007 when blogs were proto-tweets. This week I'll be sending stuff from the Game Developers Conference. My iPad doesn't support Typepad's nice text editing features so its just going to be plain text, no cutesy images and all that. Links? No, I can't do that either without writing <a href etc. etc. and the iPad of course buries HTML braces in its third keyboard. If youre interested in following up n something, Just Google it and you'll find it I guess. And this mode doesn't autocorrect either. Typos and bad grammar on the way.

Stop being so negative, you ninny! It's GDC, the funniest conference ever! So many arrogant old guys who never got a degree and make more money than anyone. They know what works and what won't work with players. They can tell stories, they know where the industry's bodies are buried. Then there are the hordes of indie boys and enterprenoors, with their carefully-chosen scruff, hoping against hope that their artistic talent and genius will finally be discovered. The women - both of them - are either wearing way too little and getting good money for that, or wearing a semi permanent look of disgust at being once again, fifty percent object / fifty percent person to those around them. Then there are people like me, outsider wannabes, lined up to get tshirts, lined up to get 30 seconds with that one guy from Blizzard, lined up to get a seat at the restaurant everyone goes to. O, the tag scanning that goes on! The name dropping! The project puffing!

But this happens at ever major conference. You should see the American Economic Association. Actually, no, you shouldn't. You're not ready. But the same stuff goes on, I am smarter than you, that guy looks important what does his tag say, rare girls, who is going to what restaurant with whom. It's what people do at conventions.

But the subject of an economics conference is economics fer cryin out loud, an area of thought that wandered into a cave and remains there, doing nothing. The talks - how boring! The dinners - how dry! The atmosphere - how chalky!

Not so at the GDC. It's actually pretty exciting. The social conventions of conventions, for all their soul-crushing effects, recede into the background as you experience yet another year of amazing innovation in games. Ok, so the industry is having a down year. Big deal! Is having a down year because the same changes that are killing profits in music and movies are having their inevitable effect on games. So what! Technology continues to distribute the capability to make stuff. Entertainment keeps getting better.

I'm just finishing up a book and I finally sensed a theme for it, maybe it applies here too. We are living in a time when technology is making our imagination ever more concrete. I'll try to carry that around and see how it fits at the conference.

Ta Ta!

Sent from my iPad

Conferences are boring, I want to play games

I know everyone has been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to spend money to get one of my papers. The wait is over!!!

It's this paper where I say "Instead of having talks at conferences, can we have games?" I don't know, I find talks so boring. I just get antsy. And it seems to me that the real work at conferences gets done outside the context of the talks anyway. So I had this idea that you could get rid of the talks and replace them with board games. During a board game, Player A is thinking while Players B, C, and D chat. That's where the work gets done. To publicize the work, and make it common knowledge, this conference would have a cheesy idea market and a pecha kucha at the end.

Now if someone organized a conference like this I would probably want to come. No matter the topic, you know? Hey it's a conference on abdominal secretions in mollusks, but you get to play biology-themed Eurogames for a day. Dominant Species, Evo, Pandemic. Cool! I would totally go to that.