RL: GDC Report Part Two

And now for the second half! Whoohoo! I did so much during these days, I thought I'd narrow it down to two significant highlights. The first being Matt Vainio of Sucker Punch's fantastic presentation on the visual effects of Infamous: Second Son.

If you can find this talk on the GDC Vault, I would really recommend looking at it if you're even remotely interested in visual effects. The overhaul Sucker Punch did on their VFX engine really shows through with the kind of work they were able to produce for this game, and to be given even the tiniest bit of insight into the creative process behind it was, to a word, fascinating.
First of all, Matt went into serious detail about the smoke effects that helped detail how the protagonist navigated the world. He explained the logic behind the smoke run and how they decided to keep all the particles from the beginning of the run to the end. Going from concept to visualization whilst keeping the basic pillars of each design was super important, Matt emphasised, but so was making sure the effects themselves made the player feel powerful. The point of the game was power! So the player should feel that.
I could get really technical into the talk, as the talk itself was really technical, but I really think Matt said it much better than I could even try to parse into understandable text. Suffice to say, I was really blown away by the new capabilities of next generation consoles! I'm excited, so you should be too!

Speaking of excited, here's my favourite bit of GDC:
The RANT APOCALYPSE.
Here's a warning, cuz this is about to get image heavy. Please forgive the terrible quality, as my hands were shaking during a lot of this.

The Game Developers Rant is a staple of any GDC: in fact, this one marked the 10th anniversary of a group of people in the game design industry being in a room and talking at a captive audience about pretty much anything that bothered them about the state of the industry in general. To say this is a popular event is an understatement: I think we had one of the larger rooms in the convention center, and it was packed.

First up was Jason Del Roca with his Top 10 Game Rants of the past 10 years. He compared the state of the industry to what it was like in 2005 and came up with these results.

Yes, academics now care about games perhaps a bit too much. Yes, now there are almost too many indie games. Yes, now the industry cares more than about teenage boys! Unfortunately, a significant amount of games are still being made by straight white men. However, games are no longer separate from the real world, thanks to mobile and handheld games and a new desire for ARGs! The States now have a black president, and games are art! Games don't tell better stories, but perhaps they don't need to (see my previous post on game narratives) and yes, still, the game design industry is terrible. Well, what can you do? We must simply press forward!

Next was Greg Costikyan to talk about how game markets are killed by greed and lack of taste. He talked about how he foretold that consoles would squeeze the creativity out of the industry, and predicted the death throes of AAA game systems. In the next few years, he averred, we would be seeing a revolution. All distribution platforms are terrible, except for Steam which is only mildly awful. Distributers suck, he said. I have no idea what you can do about it.

Then came Justin Hall to address the all important question of: how can we stay remembered? In a market absolutely saturated with media, how can you ensure that, even though your company is a bust and your games don't sell, you're still relevant? His solution is something he calls #OGDY: Open Game Data Yes, or Oh Goody. Using this hashtag and resource, he intends to make a place where game developers can share their knowledge- their source code, their player data, their business plans, so that people can learn from their successes and mistakes and continue to better the game design industry. I wasn't aware that these things were important in keeping a game developer afloat, but that just really goes to show how little I know about what goes on behind the game development process.

Ian Bogost was up next, with his fantastic sci-fi retrospective of the current state of the games industry. His talk, A Taxonomy of Extinct Terrestrial Tribes, read like an Ian M Banks novel as he picked apart our current position as only a post-societal futuristic anthropologist can. Using phrases like "governmentally sponsored global violence," and describing games as a way to "fill the time between microtransactions," Ian dug in with gusto to point out the inherent absurdities in the way free-to-play games toy with their users and how publishers, or "video game procurers," don't really care about games. It was a lot of similar information to what everyone else seemed to be angry about, but damn if it wasn't in a really nice format.

Heather Chaplin unfortunately wasn't able to make it to the rant itself, but she made an appearance from New York by way of video presentation to deliver a scathing lambast of the free-to-play games business model. She started off by describing the way that pubs would pour out the whiskey dregs from the night before into the street when gold miners would pass by in the morning. This would put the idea of whiskey in the minds of the miners so when they got off work they would head back to the pub to feed their craving. This addiction-feeding model, she said, was not unlike the way a lot of free-to-play games operate now, reeling in players with the promise of fun gameplay and getting them hooked in the system to keep paying to play. Is it a good way to run? Is this what happens when games become infinite? She cited a BF Skinner study that stated that rats would push levers thousands of times in a go to get that next shot of cocaine, and by transitive property humans could be coaxed to act in a similar manner. Game companies now operated like gambling companies, she averred, looking for 'whales' to pump for cash until it ran dry. The problem with this was that, of course, game designers were making games wherein players paid money to be less bored. As game designers ourselves, could we even find this idea to be conscionable?
Ooh boy, now there's a good question.

 

Chris Hecker then came to duct tape two other members of the panel together and continue to be angry about free-to-play and kickstarter games.

He also quoted Anne Anthropy of auntiepixelante.com fame at length, defying the 'x isn't a real game' argument, defining our need to have more representation in games, arguing for the importance of context, and the need to take a political stance when talking about video games. A lot of it was about how to critically approach a video game: we're no longer in the age in which a game can be mere fun and not viewed as a piece of art within the context of our society, and having the right tools to pick apart the meanings and intentions behind a game are crucial to ensure we keep moving forward as an industry.

Then Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris came forward to talk about a series of words that may send some people flinching: Trigger Warning. For some reason, the idea of setting up a trigger warning, a message at the beginning to a game to warn the player about its content, for a video game has become a ridiculed idea within certain circles of video game enthusiasts. When a Tumblr user politely asked Mitu to add a trigger warning to her game about misogyny within science fiction environments, there was a significant amount of backlash. Why should the game maker cater to a single players whims, the critics asked. Shouldn't the shock of the action serve to hammer home the point of the game, that there are still so many toxic aspects of character writing in video games? No, Mitu stated outright. A game should never be made at the expense of the player. Trigger warnings mitigate damage and act to make the content more inclusive for all players. Game developers should never make games that put the game before the player.

Frank Latz brings it home with his 'You're Doing It Wrong' presentation, which goes as follows:

IF:
You aren't proud of the game you're working on.
You set the difficulty to easy so you can see all the content.
There aren't any games you love.
You can't summarize your opponents position and give the best existing arguments for it.
You run on your last click.
You think everyone else is doing it wrong.
You are flat broke.
Everyone is mad at you.
YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
I can't help but feel like some of these were pointed towards specific people. But the basic gist of his talk is: Empathise! Love games, love playing them, love making them! Work to be less stupid, and not more smart.

And then came Brenda Romero, and oh boy I think I have a crush. Brenda Romero came out with this absolutely brilliant diatribe about how women are treated, even now, at a convention which is still highly populated by male-identifiers. She spat venom about how she had to deal with a man who couldn't keep a professional attitude in his pants when talking to her, and bequeathed the audience with a simple piece of advise: no one wants your cock. Don't bring that sort of thing to GDC. Treat people like the fellow game developers they are, not by what gender they identify as.

From the rant alone, I picked up these bits of advice:

Work smart. Be efficient, and minimise your damage.

Share with others! It's a small industry, so your mistakes could be someone elses' success. 

Make games for the players, and know your audience. Make games to be inclusive and for god's sake, have fun with it! It's not about the money.

From GDC, I learned:

Don't be afraid of people. It's not as hard as it seems to go up and start a conversation, but try to feel natural about it. Sometimes talking to one person will lead you in the path of others, and well... Network naturally.

Don't miss any potential opportunity! If you even have the remotest inkling that you're going to regret not doing it, do it.

Follow through with communications! If you see someone who gave you a portfolio review walking around, go up and say hi! More continued contact will make sure you remain in their sphere of knowledge.

Party hard, party smart. It's a far more natural environment to talk to and meet people, so get out there and try not to drink too much.