Scenes from GDC

Entry #9, 4:15 p.m.: Talking about the things we don't talk about

In addition to the lectures and the panels at GDC, there are roundtable discussions. I wasn't sure what to expect, but the two I went to turned out to be lightly attended and loosely structured. Perhaps it was because they were held on the last day of the conference. Whatever the reason, it wasn't really surprising that there were only about fifteen people in Speaking Out: Exploring the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transexual) Game Development Community. After all, how large can the LGBT game development community be? But it was disheartening to see only twenty people in Women in Game Development:The Other 360 Days (the title is a reference to the rest of the year after the conference). Personally, I think one of the biggest problems with gaming is that it's made by and for boys. I wish more people would recognize that by showing up to this discussion instead of, I don't know, going to hear Richard Garriott talk about Tabula Rasa or standing around on the concourse by the cheesecake ATI poster while noodling around with their free copies of Brain Age.

Both sessions had the ebb and flow and sudden flares of any conversation in a small room where 20 people care, perhaps even overcare, about an issue. I don't mean to be patronizing, but there was something almost sweetly naive about the suggestion that if publishers bought ads in Seventeen and Cosmopolitan, maybe more women would be attracted to gaming. There was a lot of venting, a few suggestions for action, and some articulate points made by very smart people who should be heard in larger venues. Because if gaming shunts itself into the same cultural ghetto as comic books, this exclusion of women will be one of the main reasons.

The LGBT (am I really supposed to put it that way, since hardly anything was mentioned about bisexuals or transsexuals?) session was more charged. I have no idea about the delicacy of the issue for developers, so I'll refrain from naming names, but there were definitely a few "names" in this room: people who have been in the business for a long time and who offer a provocative and carefully considered position. There was a feeling among the few people at the roundtable that there should be more gay content, although there was no agreement about what that meant. Is it niche games targeted specifically at a gay audience? Or is it gay issues folded into mainstream games? And as someone pointed out, any overt gay themes would be tagged by the ESRB for "sexuality" and would get an M-rating. Which, I feel, is entirely appropriate, and would hopefully be applied to any games with overt heterosexual themes.

But the fact of the matter is that right now, games have a hard enough time getting heterosexual content right, much less addressing something as delicate as LGBT issues. But as the cross-section of people who play games increases, as phenomena like WoW and Second Life provide a context for social expression, and as developers like the people in that session explore new ways to express the themes that are important to them, that may very well change.

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.

Entry #7, 10:35 a.m.: Peter Molyneux AWOL

Peter Molyeux is giving a talk on fighting games for next generation systems. It's a wonderful bit of cognitive dissonance listening to Molyneux's laidback British too-cool applied to the photorealistic cartoon punching and kicking of a typical fighting game.

Oh, wait, no it isn't. Peter Molyneux has cancelled, as is evident by the people milling aimlessly around the door of the conference room, looking slightly shell-shocked. 'We were here to see Peter...' they seem to be thinking, 'Now what?' Also, a yellow sticker on the board that says 'Cancelled' seems to make the point pretty well.

I mill about aimlessly as well, as if I'm expecting someone is going to come out and take down the sticker any minute. But no one does any such thing. Instead, a woman comes out and says, "Peter had to cancel at the last minute."

She takes a beat.

"He had a conflict come up."

Another beat.

"He just couldn't make it."

Beat

"He's very apologetic."

I'm reminded of my favorite excuse, a trick I learned in college. If you come late into class and say 'I'm sorry I'm late but I couldn't get here on time' people will accept it as an excuse. It's really nothing more than a self-reflexive statement -- of course you're late if you can't get there on time -- but as long as you say something, anything, with the appropriate note of contrition, you can flake on anything.

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.

Entry #5, 1:06 p.m.: Nintendo: Heart Age

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata starts with a playful slight of tongue, telling the story of a corporate underdog that reinvents itself. Pepsi. It's a cute intro, and it's a telling that he can't very well do what Sony's Phil Harrison did here yesterday, striding out onto stage in front of a bunch of graphs that show the Playstation hovering unreachable above the competition. Iwata talks in language of "disrupting" rather than "leading", "dominating", or "beating". He gently mocks Nintendo's corporate structure in his careful clipped English, reading from a teleprompter and apologizing the single time he messes up.

It's also telling that Iwata has next to nothing to say about hardware, also unlike Harrison, whose keynote was interspersed with wonky tech demos and references to the Playstation 3's multiple CPUs. Iwata, on the other hand, introduces Brain Age by having G4 host Geoff Keighley, Sims developer Will Wright, and GDC director Jamil Moledina play math games against him (putting Keighley on a giant screen in front of a room full of developers to watch him repeatedly insist that six times nine is 63 is certainly one way to keep the press in its place). Iwata then announces that everyone in the audience will receive a free copy of Brain Age when they leave. His comment is followed by a good twenty seconds of sustained applause. We're all shameless.

Of course, no one is offered a free copy of Metroid Prime: Hunters, which is also demonstrated on stage by its own developers. Metroid is a sure fire thing. Iwata knows we're all going to buy that one anyway. It's Brain Age, which is the import of another one of Nintendo's successful domestic gambles, that could flop in North America. Iwata took a book about "brain training" and worked with the author to make a series of games that are supposed to gauge and improve your mental acuity. It's a sort of interactive persistent crossword puzzle/math quiz. You know how Sudoku (which is also included in Brain Age) is so popular? It's the same kind of thing. Nintendogs for people who dig brain teasers. "A treadmill for the mind," he calls it.

The announcement for Zelda DS: Phantom Hourglass was also an occasion for much enthusiasm. It's a 3D game with link apparently able to draw on maps, tracing routes for a ship or solving puzzles with a quill. Very little was said about the Revolution, although Iwata announced that some Sega Genesis and Hudson games will be playable. I have no idea what a Hudson is, but I'm looking forward to going back and seeing if N.I.G.H.T.S. is as good as I remembered.

Sitting here I understand why there are Nintendo fan boys. The company has such a distinct approach, with a playful and innocent tone that seems to inform, if not entirely subvert, its own corporate culture. Iwata says things like "If you cater to a vocal group of hardcore players, you won't grow". He criticizes the industry for focusing on big games with broad appeal to the detriment of the smaller weird stuff. "Our business is beginning to resemble a bookstore where you can only buy big sets of encyclopedias. No romances, no paperbacks."

He closes by hitting on a word I hate: "fun". But Iwata has already noted that fun means different things to different people. When he uses the word, it's not one of those lazy shortcuts reviewers use when they can't articulate something. Instead, it's Nintendo's indeterminate goal, a sort of cloud they're grabbing at, content with whatever handfuls they manage to get (I recall Miyamoto describing the art of game development as trying to make a net to catch fun.) "Our goal," says Iwata, "is that videogames are meant to be just one thing. Fun. Fun for everyone."

Entry #4, 10:15 a.m.: Remember Sammy Jenkis

As a game, Braid doesn't look like much. At first, it looks like a sort of dumpy take on Mario Brothers. The main character is a little stunted fellow who, as near as I can tell, is wearing a suit and tie. He roams around rudimentary dungeons that look like they belong on an NES. The monsters are lumpy frowny faces with bad hair. The main thing that seems to distinguish Braid from a no-budget Mario clone is a time rewind feature, but even that's nothing special these days. I mean, sheesh, even Full Auto has rewinding time.

The game is the creation of Jonathan Blow, a former writer for Game Developer magazine who has apparently rolled up his sleeves to actually get down to the business of game development rather than the business of merely writing about it like the rest of us. His creation does show a bit of promise. He explains that Braid isn't a platformer, but a puzzle game. The time rewinding is unlimited, so you don't have to do stuff like fill your dagger with sand. And there are some really nifty tricks with parallel time lines and objects that interact differently in different time frames. Too bad the guys who did Blinx didn't think of some of these.

But it's not until the very end of the presentation that I realize how special Braid actually is. Blow apologizes for spoiling the game as he shows us the last level. In it, your little stumpy hero finally catches up with the princess. She frees herself from the clutches of an ape who has abducted her. While showing us the end level, Blow plays like a sort of split screen co-op mode, like Cookies n' Cream with an AI princess on top and our suited hero below. She's running along the top of the screen, opening doors, lowering bridges over pits of spikes, and dropping platforms so he can jump higher. Finally he gets to the end of the level, where she has closed herself in her bedroom and you're on her balcony.

And then nothing happens.

Blow explains that at this point, there's nothing to do but rewind time, at which point you see the action going backwards. I'm not sure it would have been clear if Blow wasn't explaining it as he went, but the point is that you're seeing events unfold a bit differently. The princess is trying to drop platforms on you, she's raising bridges to stop you from crossing pits, and she's trying to close doors in front of you. It's a subtle recasting of everything you've just play. And when you get to the end, it's not an ape, but a knight who says he'll save her. She leaps into his arms, and he spirits her away. This was no abduction and you were no good guy. It turns out you were the antagonist all along.

It's a wonderful twist, and Blow confesses he didn't hit on it until he'd already been working on the game for a while. "Once you start playing with really far out ideas, once you start playing in that space, it's easy to find some really fertile ideas," he says. Hence Braid's place in a fascinating seminar on experimental game design.

And although it's one of the most memorable games I've seen at GDC, I have to wonder how viable it is to save a masterstroke like that until the very end. If I were playing Braid for fun, I likely wouldn't have gotten through all the levels to see this finale, which Blow confesses is the point of the game. It would have been a shame for me to miss it, but I think this points more to the nature of games than to my short attention span. In Memento, I'm okay not knowing for two hours who Sammy Jenkis is, because I know the payoff is on the way within a certain timeframe. But as a medium, games can't afford to hold back like this.

Entry #3, 2:15 p.m.: Sony -- "Take Me On"

At its best, being at GDC is like listening to the commentary track on a DVD. At its worst, it's like E3. Which is big, loud, and free of much substance at both its best and worst.

Phil Harrison's keynote speech that kicked off this Wednesday's GDC sessions was very E3. It started under the considerable shadow of Guitar Hero. While we're waiting that Franz Ferdinand song, Take Me On, came on. Most of the people in the Civic Auditorium, myself included, wouldn't know it if weren't for Guitar Hero. Just as it's getting to those cool up and down riffs part way into the song - you know: green red yellow blue yellow hold-reddddddd - they cut the music off and introduce Phil Harrison, the Sony head honcho whose job it is to impress us with the promise of the Playstation 3. And, oddly enough, as he walks out, a few notes of "Another One Bites the Dust" are played. I have no idea what that was supposed to mean.

It's a decent enough presentation. Harrison shares the stage with plenty of developers who come out to show snippets of what they're working on. David Jaffe strolls out looking like he just got out of bed. His job is to reassure us that Sony is still supporting the Playstation 2, which they clearly are. We get to see Kratoes rip the wing off a giant eagle and pluck out a cyclops' eye. But we're assured that the PS3 will be backwards compatible across the board from day one. Microsoft's sad pretensions towards backwards compatibility are an easy act to follow, and Sony is well aware that they've got an enormous userbase to keep happy.

PlayStation 3 Xbox Live

Xbox Live, on the other hand, is a tough act to follow. A lot of the talk about the Playstation 3's network capability sounds like a matter of chasing Sony trying to catch up with Microsoft. This is a developer's conference, after all, so Harrison stresses the various online revenue options. He shows an example of a driving game with a track available for a dollar and an offroad racing game with a new car available for four dollars. He stresses that those aren't actual prices, leaving us to wonder if they're doing to be lower or higher. Either way, the implications have been clear for a long time. Not only will you not be done paying for a game when you leave the store, you might not even have to go to the store to start paying. Tell your credit card: digital distribution is the future.

There's a definite effort to justify Blu-Ray technology, which is going to be a messy unpleasant battle in Hollywood. I'm sure Sony would like us on their side, so Ted Price from Insomiac is kind enough to come out and testify that it really helps to have so much extra room on the disc. He then shows us a playable bit of Insomniac's new shooter, Resistance: the Fall of Man. It's all fancy weapons, a la Ratchet & Clank, in a stylishly monochrome world. But he follows up with a gloriously colorful teaser for another Ratchet & Clank. By the time it's over, I've forgotten to be pissed off about Blu-Ray.

Sony's tech for the PS3 certainly looks good, but so what? An underwater scene of schools of fish, mud that can splash, dry, or harden, and rag doll physics on a couple of hundred rag dolls are all good and well. That stuff certainly flies at E3, so I'm sure it'll be shown again. But in the meantime, this large scale corporatespeak just feels like someone waving money and making promises. I feel like I need a shower.

Entry #2, 12:35 p.m.: Sex, Sex, Sex

Brenda Brathwaite is working on a book about sex in games. It's basically a survey of everything from Custer's Revenge to Hot Coffee, and she's even considering more thoughtful subjects like the way relationships and intimacy are addressed in games. Not that they really are, at least outside of The Sims and cheap knockoffs like Singles. But credit Brathwaite for casting her net beyond the merely salacious. In her talk at GDC, she even makes a case that Zoo Tycoon, in which happy animals breed, is arguably about sex. But no one's here to hear about the happy faces on a panda's status chart.

So Brathwaite seems inclined to amuse more than anything else. The way she sort of nudges and winks is a mild pandering delivered to an appropriately titillated audience. Not that I'm on any moral high ground. I'm here instead of at a talk on something loftier, like violence. I'd like to think it's because I'm socially conscientious, but the agenda did promise graphic content.

It turns out to be just slides from stupid fare like Virtually Jenna and a few hentai games. Brathwaite makes an excellent point that this is almost entirely straight white men making things for other straight white men (her slide of games that deliver sexual content aimed at women is blank). But the whole thing is a bit shameless. She gives Clinton and Liberman a hard time. She brings up parallels to the comics code in the 50s and the Hayes code in Hollywood in the 30s. She even seems to hint that here might be a market for more beefcake in games, as if a little something for the ladies might make this industry less about toys for boys.

After all, there isn't any sex in games in any meaningful way. There's plenty of crude and cheesecake. There's lots of pornography that pretends towards gameplay. There are strange asides like Hot Coffee. Brathwaite reminds us of the activist who paid a programmer at Maxis to sneak gay Easter Eggs into SimCopter. She brings up the Trance Vibrator for Rez and even lets someone demonstrate how he reverse engineered force feedback from an Xbox to work on a rubber phallus. I'm not sure I can use the word that it's called, but we all know what I'm talking about, right? But at this point, there's virtually no opportunity to include sex in games in the way that it's included in, say, a movie like Last Tango in Paris or a book like Lady Chatterley's Lover.

It's not until the Q&A that I appreciate Brathwaite real stand on the issue. I ask her about whether she feels the industry has any responsibility when it comes to sex in games. After nearly an hour of good-natured winking, she gets abruptly forceful and passionate. "Yes, yes it does," she says, "The responsibility falls in three laps." She mentions ratings ("We need to be very clear about what's in the box"), retailers, and parents. "I think parents is where most of the responsibility lies," she says, "I hear so many parents say they don't know much about games, about the things their kids are playing. Well, learn, dammit!" But as for developers, she thinks they've done as much as they're supposed to do and it's time for retailers, ratings, and parents to take it from there. "We have met our responsibility," she says firmly.

Entry #1, 10:59 a.m.: The Guitar Hero That Could Have Been

The 800lb gorilla, creatively if not commercially, at this year's GDC is Guitar Hero. People are talking about it in the halls of San Jose's Convention Center and from behind its podiums. It's the game that has publishers smacking their foreheads for not discovering and developers beaming with pride at what the industry is still capable of discovering. You're not likely to sit through a lecture or roundtable without hearing its name mentioned.

So the crowd is particularly ebullient when two of the guys from Harmonix introduce a seminar on experimental game design by talking about a feature that was cut from Guitar Hero shortly before it shipped. Until late in the development process, there was a solo mode. The fret buttons and the strum bar would play guitar sounds as you worked them. Actual notes and chords and such. But you could also just thrash the strum bar quickly and the game would play sampled riffs appropriate to the particular song. If you held the guitar vertically, the tilt sensor would cause it to play a distorted feedback effect. When the Harmonix guys demonstrate, the crowd goes wild. Someone even holds up a lighter.

However, the feature was cut for various reasons. It would have been hard to fit all the sampled riffs onto a PS2 disk. There was no clean way to transition in and out of solo mode. It was pretty much impossible to score it. But the main reason it wasn't included was because it just didn't sound very good. One of the developers, a musician to boot, manages to improvise to the backdrop of Sharp Dressed Man, but it's not the sort of thing you'd want to actually, you know, listen to. You can imagine the awful wail and screech of from someone who otherwise makes a great show on Easy mode.

Still, the crowd is thrilled to see what could have been, even if it is better off undone. And everyone loves a winner, particular a winner who lets us all play the rock gods we know we could have been.