Scenes from GDC

Entry #6, 4:46 p.m.: Yelling fire in a crowded room of game developers

Among the more memorable moments of past GDCs -- or so I've been told -- are the rant sessions. This year's session, called "Burn, baby, burn" was nothing if not memorable. In a way, the very animosity it kicked up gives lie to gadfly Chris Crawford's pronouncement that the games industry is dead.

"This panel is like a group of doctors standing around a brain dead patient talking about what they can do to restore her," said the legendary developer, whose long been on the fringes of the industry and is pushing the concept of "interactive storytelling". "But there's nothing inside but green goo. The most charitable thing I can say is 'Rest in peace'". Then he sat back, looking slightly smug and quite pleased with himself, while the audience almost literally boo'ed and hissed. During the later Q&A, a few fellows who supposed themselves young firebrands, guys far too young to have ever seen that screen of chilling text that told us there were no winners in a nuclear war, had the temerity to pretend to school Mr. Crawford.

But Mr. Crawford is dead on when he says that games aren't about people, but things. As EA's Chris Hecker later notes, games are moving into a cultural ghetto much like comic books. They are rarely capable of addressing loftier issues like the human condition, but they almost never try. They are a commodity, a form of entertainment, a business. It's telling that Seamus Blackley, the man behind Trespasser and the Xbox launch who now plays agent to game developers at CAA -- "Two years ago, I made the conscious decision to put on a suit and tie," he confess - gets up to rant that developers with ideas need to start thinking more about the business aspect of their business. Great ideas will only get you so far. "Hollywood has figured out how to build a business around great ideas," he says. "Like gay cowboys."

The session broke out into a raucous round of arguing, complete with a loudly proclaimed sense of self-importance, plenty of polite jabs, and lots of people talking over each other. To the audience's delight, the whole thing had the intimacy and immaturity of a bunch of kids staying up late and arguing in a dorm room.

The impassioned but soft-spoken Johnathan Blow hits hard when he says, "We need to speak to the human condition. We need to makes games that matter so much that we can't not play them." And he's right. And although I don't believe the industry is currently capable of that, although I fully appreciate and even partly agree with Chris Crawford's embittered eulogy, here's to hoping the industry at least tries.