Last Friday, I walked into the Moscone Center at four o'clock to catch my final lecture of GDC. Seeing me, one of the volunteers remarked to his buddy: "this show is over and people are still coming in." For a second, I felt like correcting him, and letting him know that in fact the conference had another hour left. Then I thought that would sound like a dog begging for scraps, whimpering that it's not technically over while there's something left on the table.
Actually, GDC isn't very much like being a dog who got to feast for a week. The end of GDC is more like the last day of school. Classes are dismissed and for the most part you won't see all your peers until after the break. In this case, however, the break lasts for 51 weeks, and nobody is all that thrilled about school ending. You hardly see anyone smashing windows and yelling that "GDC's out forever."
So it's not at all like that. Given the long break, it's more like a school reunion, at least for a couple of people for whom GDC is really just a convenient and rare pretext to get together with good friends who live all over the world. The only thing is that the demographics of a Game Developers Conference do not correspond to those of a high school but more accurately a high school computer lab. Coincidentally, right across the street from the Moscone Center there was a football convention and one day their bathrooms were out of order so some jock wandered in and met a GDC attendee by the same toilet and they were confused about who's the boss now and whose head gets flushed.
Actually, the end of GDC is more like -- fuck it: it's like a game industry conference that ended, which can be an unhappy thing after so easily becoming acclimated to that state of existence. I got so used to it, in fact, and so tired and busy, that my regular writing habits basically lapsed and I didn't end up writing as much about the conference as I hoped. The subject is extremely likely to come up again once I have the time to mentally process it, but right now I'm only looking forward to sleeping, for the first time in ten days, for more than six hours and not on an airplane.
When I wake up tomorrow, I will have begun another year of complete isolation from the game industry. Here's to normalcy. Or whatever.
March 31, 2009
March 26, 2009
Print Is Dead
"Don't you know print is dead?" This is what someone asked me in a tone that was sympathetic, patronising and uncertain of its own cleveness.
This week, Idle Thumbs, the website that I used to write for and which has since been relaunched as a podcast, published 2,000 copies of an eight-page broadsheet newspaper to hand out around GDC. The newspaper reprinted Missed Connections and Interactive Journalism, originally seen right here on Hit Self-Destruct. Seeing those stories and my byline on actual pieces of paper was a strange and anachronistic feeling.
Right now, you can't read this newspaper unless you come to the Moscone Center today or tomorrow and grab a copy that's lying on a table somewhere. In the meantime, trust me: this thing looks amazing. Producing the Idle Thumbs Journal of Games required a Herculean effort and even up close it can be easily mistaken for a legitimate newspaper.
Tangentially, I'm not really supposed to be at GDC. I don't develop games. I see my role at the Game Developers Conference to sit quietly, take notes and not get in the way. The best thing about GDC is that Clint Hocking and Jonathan Blow can have an impromptu and public dialogue about encouraging player improvisation, or that two designers who are total strangers can strike up a high-level technical conversation because they happen to be sitting next to each other at a lecture. The more time I spend here, that's what I want to see happen -- not live-twittering the exclusive first teaser trailer and release date announcement for Modern Warfare 2. I haven't seen yet what's being reported about Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy talk, but if all people got out of it was "Takahashi Announces Noby Noby Boy Multiplayer, iPhone Version" then that will be awful.
Developers talking to each other: that's what I want, but I can't be a part of it. As a member of the press -- in the loosest possible definition of the word 'press' -- I don't fit in at GDC, but this was never made completely explicit to me until I started thrusting newspapers in people's faces.
When you stand in the halls of the Moscone Center actively throwing papers around, people with bluetooth headsets and leather jackets look at you with contempt. They've just heard about Eskil Steenberg's cool tools and the lighting in Mirror's Edge and I'm so last century. Also, I'm annoying them.
I ended up sitting at the Game Design Challenge with two of my friends and about three hundred copies between us. Of all the GDC sessions, the Game Design Challenge is the closest to pure entertainment, and so is extremely well-attended. We decided to stand outside the lecture hall and as the crowd -- over two-hundred strong -- filtered out, we'd confront them all with a free newspaper. This isn't how you network.
We assigned ourselves to cover each of the three doors out of the conference. Pretty soon we were asking if someone wanted a newspaper every five seconds. A lot said no thanks or, more pleasingly, took it because it was free. Some tried to ignore us because they thought we were handing out the San Francisco Examiner. One guy accepted a copy and as he walked away I heard him exclaim "this isn't a real newspaper!" Eventually, a second session across the hall also finished and the traffic got so dense that the three of us fell back into a circle facing out at the surge and warding them off with our amusing and semi-fictional newspaper. It was a scene out of a zombie movie, except we were the print guys. We were the ones who are supposed to be dead.
I'm typing this in the GDC press room. As I get up to leave, I think I'll accidentally forget to take a newspaper with me.
This week, Idle Thumbs, the website that I used to write for and which has since been relaunched as a podcast, published 2,000 copies of an eight-page broadsheet newspaper to hand out around GDC. The newspaper reprinted Missed Connections and Interactive Journalism, originally seen right here on Hit Self-Destruct. Seeing those stories and my byline on actual pieces of paper was a strange and anachronistic feeling.
Right now, you can't read this newspaper unless you come to the Moscone Center today or tomorrow and grab a copy that's lying on a table somewhere. In the meantime, trust me: this thing looks amazing. Producing the Idle Thumbs Journal of Games required a Herculean effort and even up close it can be easily mistaken for a legitimate newspaper.
Tangentially, I'm not really supposed to be at GDC. I don't develop games. I see my role at the Game Developers Conference to sit quietly, take notes and not get in the way. The best thing about GDC is that Clint Hocking and Jonathan Blow can have an impromptu and public dialogue about encouraging player improvisation, or that two designers who are total strangers can strike up a high-level technical conversation because they happen to be sitting next to each other at a lecture. The more time I spend here, that's what I want to see happen -- not live-twittering the exclusive first teaser trailer and release date announcement for Modern Warfare 2. I haven't seen yet what's being reported about Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy talk, but if all people got out of it was "Takahashi Announces Noby Noby Boy Multiplayer, iPhone Version" then that will be awful.
Developers talking to each other: that's what I want, but I can't be a part of it. As a member of the press -- in the loosest possible definition of the word 'press' -- I don't fit in at GDC, but this was never made completely explicit to me until I started thrusting newspapers in people's faces.
When you stand in the halls of the Moscone Center actively throwing papers around, people with bluetooth headsets and leather jackets look at you with contempt. They've just heard about Eskil Steenberg's cool tools and the lighting in Mirror's Edge and I'm so last century. Also, I'm annoying them.
I ended up sitting at the Game Design Challenge with two of my friends and about three hundred copies between us. Of all the GDC sessions, the Game Design Challenge is the closest to pure entertainment, and so is extremely well-attended. We decided to stand outside the lecture hall and as the crowd -- over two-hundred strong -- filtered out, we'd confront them all with a free newspaper. This isn't how you network.
We assigned ourselves to cover each of the three doors out of the conference. Pretty soon we were asking if someone wanted a newspaper every five seconds. A lot said no thanks or, more pleasingly, took it because it was free. Some tried to ignore us because they thought we were handing out the San Francisco Examiner. One guy accepted a copy and as he walked away I heard him exclaim "this isn't a real newspaper!" Eventually, a second session across the hall also finished and the traffic got so dense that the three of us fell back into a circle facing out at the surge and warding them off with our amusing and semi-fictional newspaper. It was a scene out of a zombie movie, except we were the print guys. We were the ones who are supposed to be dead.
I'm typing this in the GDC press room. As I get up to leave, I think I'll accidentally forget to take a newspaper with me.
March 24, 2009
The Keynote
Rod Humble was once a manual labourer in the lumber yards of Britain, until a supervisor told him that if he kept at it and did a good enough job, then maybe one day he would get to work on the machines. On that day, he quit. In the following years, Rod Humble became the head of Electronic Arts' Play label, supervising franchises like The Sims and Harry Potter; the developer of art games The Marriage and Stars over Half-Moon Bay; and a man whose hometown newspaper, inferring an erroneous fact from The Marriage, printed that he was cheating on his wife.
Humble spoke at the Independent Games Summit earlier today about his perspective and lessons learned working in two commercially disparate areas of game development. When Humble ran his presentation by Jonathan Blow, the Braid designer said his talk was useless. Humble conceded it was a fair point -- his career is already so unique and unlikely that he couldn't and didn't offer much specific and practical advice. The session may have been underwhelming for indie developers who came looking for hard data about business models and team dynamics; instead, Humble spoke generally about "the indie advantage": having the creative freedom of individualism and staying true to one's dreams. He made sure to mention that if anyone in the audience thought he was full of it, that they could do better, make a better game -- then go ahead, go your own way. Much of the territory Humble covered in his 30-minute talk was encapsulated in the three-minute Fleetwood Mac hit of 1977, Go Your Own Way.
Indies, argued Humble, should be trying to carve out their own niche. As he noted, the science fiction and fantasy sections in a hypothetical video game bookstore are overflowing. The Marriage was an entry in the rarely-tackled romance genre -- which, Humble pointed out, appeals primarily to women, who fortuitously are the majority audience on the PC.
The subject matter might have contributed to The Marriage's relative popularity, but as the game is a free download, Humble clearly didn't get into indie games for the money -- and neither, he stressed, should you. He hoped that the audience were all in it for the right reasons: that they simply want to make games. How can I ever change things that I feel?
Humble endorsed another motivation as perfectly valid: you make games because you want to bring joy to others. The world is rough, he said, and there's nothing wrong with making people happy. Humble used the words "bringing joy to millions", which is true for sure in the case of The Sims, but probably less so for the indie games being made by everyone in that room. If I could, maybe I'd give you my world. How can I, when you won't take it from me?
Be prepared to fail, because indie development ''is a great way to lose money." Most times the failure won't even stop at massive personal debt -- one day your series of commercially-overlooked critical darlings might veer horribly off course. Maybe the critics hate it, maybe the message boards hate it, maybe your friends hate it, maybe your ideas aren't good anymore, maybe people say your talk is useless. Humble's favourite game designers -- Miyamoto, Molyneux, Wright -- had all at one point been written off by the industry but refused to stop making games. Humble, then, had only one piece of advice: Move on.
The takeaway:
You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way
Repeat chorus
Humble spoke at the Independent Games Summit earlier today about his perspective and lessons learned working in two commercially disparate areas of game development. When Humble ran his presentation by Jonathan Blow, the Braid designer said his talk was useless. Humble conceded it was a fair point -- his career is already so unique and unlikely that he couldn't and didn't offer much specific and practical advice. The session may have been underwhelming for indie developers who came looking for hard data about business models and team dynamics; instead, Humble spoke generally about "the indie advantage": having the creative freedom of individualism and staying true to one's dreams. He made sure to mention that if anyone in the audience thought he was full of it, that they could do better, make a better game -- then go ahead, go your own way. Much of the territory Humble covered in his 30-minute talk was encapsulated in the three-minute Fleetwood Mac hit of 1977, Go Your Own Way.
Indies, argued Humble, should be trying to carve out their own niche. As he noted, the science fiction and fantasy sections in a hypothetical video game bookstore are overflowing. The Marriage was an entry in the rarely-tackled romance genre -- which, Humble pointed out, appeals primarily to women, who fortuitously are the majority audience on the PC.
The subject matter might have contributed to The Marriage's relative popularity, but as the game is a free download, Humble clearly didn't get into indie games for the money -- and neither, he stressed, should you. He hoped that the audience were all in it for the right reasons: that they simply want to make games. How can I ever change things that I feel?
Humble endorsed another motivation as perfectly valid: you make games because you want to bring joy to others. The world is rough, he said, and there's nothing wrong with making people happy. Humble used the words "bringing joy to millions", which is true for sure in the case of The Sims, but probably less so for the indie games being made by everyone in that room. If I could, maybe I'd give you my world. How can I, when you won't take it from me?
Be prepared to fail, because indie development ''is a great way to lose money." Most times the failure won't even stop at massive personal debt -- one day your series of commercially-overlooked critical darlings might veer horribly off course. Maybe the critics hate it, maybe the message boards hate it, maybe your friends hate it, maybe your ideas aren't good anymore, maybe people say your talk is useless. Humble's favourite game designers -- Miyamoto, Molyneux, Wright -- had all at one point been written off by the industry but refused to stop making games. Humble, then, had only one piece of advice: Move on.
The takeaway:
You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way
Repeat chorus
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