Scenes from GDC

Entry #8, 12:20 p.m.: The Game Design Challenge: Harvey Smith's Peace Bomb!

This is the third year of the game design challenge at GDC. For the last two years, Will Wright has screwed everything up by participating, and therefore winning. He designed a game that told a love story two years ago, and then last year he designed a game based on the poetry of Emily Dickenson. So when the challenge for this year came up, he was going to have to design a game that might win the Nobel Peace Prize.

This simply isn't fair to the other participants, so Wright graciously bowed out this year to give someone else a chance. He did show up to wear a tiara, which he ceded by the end of the session. But the contestants enjoyed a much more level playing field without worrying about the inexorable genius of Wright mowing them down.

So with the way cleared, three men took to the stage: former Ion Stormer Harvey Smith, Unreal creator Cliff Bleszinski, and Katamari creator Keita Takahashi. They each gave a presentation, explaining the designs they'd come up with. The result was a weird and fascinating insight into how each of these guys thinks.

I don't want to diminish the power of Smith's ideas, but it's worth pointing out that he was pretty much the only guy to rise to the challenge. Bleszinksi talked more about himself than his idea, which painted the picture of a guy wrestling with the design process more than an actual design. His entry, a game called Empathy in which you have to keep your family together and alive in a war-torn impoverished country, was interesting, but hardly provocative. It sounded a bit like The Sims meets Disaster Report meets Hidden Agenda. He commented, only half seriously, that every world leader should be compelled to play this game for at least five hours before declaring war. His entry was in earnest, and Bleszinksi had obviously put a lot of thought into it, but as he confessed during the presentation, his strength is shooting up stuff and making monsters.

Keita (please forgive me if I've fouled up the convention of Japanese names, but I'm trying to refer to him formally) pretty much disregarded the challenge entirely. His presentation didn't even suggest a game design. Instead, it was like a stage presentation from Katamari Damacy, all color and artwork and charming prose bordering malaprops, sweetly naive and utterly utterly engaging. It consisted of fan love letters in crayon or video, of Keita's own wonderful doodles and simple word riffs: "Naive pure wonderful and silly love," he said, not in reference to anything so pedestrian as mere romance, but instead referring to the joy we experience with games. It was the single most affecting things I saw at GDC and -- lord know this sounds awfully silly writing it out and I don't understand why it happened -- but I teared up.

"The very existence of games is evidence of peace," he said slowly, carefully, weighing each word for the precious unknown new thing that it was. It didn't matter that he was wrong, that games are more often a commodity, a distraction, an intellectual anesthetic. What matters is that this is how his mind works and he had so thoroughly unselfishly opened it to us.

This is also what made Harvey Smith's presentation so powerful. He walked us through his rejected ideas, showing us how he tried to wrap his head around something so far-fetched and important as a game that would win the Nobel Peace Prize (to be fair, the stipulation was that the game only had to somehow relate to the Nobel Peace Prize, so among Smith's ideas was a Counter-Strike level set at the Nobel Institute). He brought up a pair of inspirational mods he's seen, one a haunting rendition of a Japanese interment camp in the US, another of a government immigration detention center in Woomera, Australia.

But the idea that he finally developed was something he called Peace Bomb! He even mocked up a box cover. It was inspired by the idea of "flash mobs" who suddenly appear to do something dramatic, and then just as suddenly disperse. They're not necessarily protests, and not always subversive. Smith cited midnight pillow fights, for example.

Drawing from this idea of strange assemblies bursting briefly from the underground, Smith supposed that Peace Bomb! would use the Nintendo DS's wi-fi technology to create and maintain a game that unites gamespace with the real world. The objective is to generate flash mobs. He called it a "minimal graphics social network game." It would involve virtual trading and might even feature some way to use the stylus to gather petitions, or maybe even include some mechanism for passing along a special stylus. Social groups would form and clump up and assemble other groups, and the ultimate objective would be for the group to manifest somewhere, sometime, in the real world. "It would move peaceful insurgencies to critical mass," he suggested.

Feasible? Absolutely not. It was a simultaneously stunning and disheartening revelation about the power of games: stunning for its promise, and disheartening for how unlikely that promise is to be fulfilled any time soon, if ever.

However, Smith's presentation of Peace Bomb! - which won the challenge and landed a tiara on Smith's head -- and Keita's lyrical lovely display of charm and innocence were unforgettable. Games only rarely and almost never have the power to make me cry or question the state of the world or even consider the human condition. But I can think of no more encouraging sign for the state of the industry than the fact that there are people working in it who can inspire these reactions.