Here we all are at the 2nd Annual IMD GDC Dinner -- check out the rest of the pix here.
Also, if you're interested, here is the text of my "rant" at the Academic Curriculum meeting:
"The topic of my rant is ‘failure.’ Obviously, none of us likes to fail. Especially students. Students are terrified of failing. They are so afraid of failing that they often forget that university is the one place where they should fail. Where they are -- or should be -- in an environment that rewards the type of intellectual and artistic risk-taking that leads to failure 99 percent of the time. Because failure is an integral part of exploring new idea spaces.
"But anyone of you who has sat and looked into the terrified eyes of a undergraduate student who is getting a B+ for the first time in their lives understands how much pressure today’s students are under – not to succeed, not to excel, but simply not to fail. This fear drives everything they do, every choice they make, every ambition that they have. And, it drives students of game design to desire to make games that are exactly like the ones they’ve seen – but just a little different.
"If there is any creature on this earth that fears failure even more than a college student, however, it is a game executive. Game executives fear failed releases the way that students fear failing grades. Of course, this drives them to make games that are exactly like the ones they’ve already made – but just a little different.
"With so much in common it seems like a non-issue: today’s game design students are right on track to becoming the successful game developers and executives of tomorrow – making the same games, but just a little different – forever and ever.
"Well I want to propose that as game educators we need to stage an intervention. We need to stop the cycle of fear. We need to encourage more failure in our students. We need to train a generation of students who look at failure, not as something to be feared, but as an important step in the cycle of exploration, disorientation and insight that leads to understanding.
"At the research lab I direct, a group of students recently completed a fairly ambitious project that we chose to fund specifically because of the high risk of failure that it presented. In fact, during the first few months of this project, they produced a great number of astoundingly bad prototypes that failed utterly to express the potential of the idea, but that succeeded in giving them new avenues of exploration.
"During this period of ‘failure’ – what I would actually call the ‘design phase’ -- an industry exec who came through and looked at the work bemoaned the state of the project, assuming, as do many of us, that failure always leads to failure and in order to succeed in the end, you must begin with the certainty of success.
"I won’t go into how that game finally came together in the end, except to say that you can go play in the IGF student showcase, or like half a million other people, download it online.
"It’s a strange little game; a lot of people love it passionately, and I’d consider it a success. Not just because of the number of people who’ve played it, but because it broke the cycle of fear in that group of students. Now, they can go into the industry prepared to take risks, confident in their ability to manage those risks, and ready to fight for the opportunity to fail so that eventually they can succeed.
"Now, not every failure has the potential for success within it. And the real trick here is not to promote the kind of mediocrity that masquerades as full-blown failure but to challenge your students to fail brilliantly, epically even, rather than demanding that they succeed averagely. Moments of splendid failure can be amongst the most instructive in the development of a creative mind. And so I’m asking you to make sure your students fail now, fail big time, fail again and again, until they learn not to fear these failures, but to look for inspiration within them.
"Only then will we be training people who can face the big boss of the game industry with confidence in their own creative process. Because only by taking the kind of risks that potential failure implies will they succeed in defining their own measures of success."
