Tag Archives: gdc

I attended Joshua Debonis’s (Sortasoft LLC) poster-talk on Friday at GDC. It was titled “Game Design in Parallel”. Joshua’s mantra’s to always design in two….design two different versions of the same game so you can split every issue/question that comes up in two and develop it out in either of the two games. He suggests working on a board game and a digital game, but conceded that the medium doesn’t really matter as long as you were developing two different and complete(not just prototypes) games in conjunction. He went as far as suggesting that this strategy would work best for theme based ideas or topics and not so well for mechanics based games.

I think developing two games in conjunction on the same topic provides the necessary perspective shift that is often needed to contextualize ideas without really taking you out of the subject at hand. Debonis mentioned that he usually worked on the board game first, and while he waited for playtesters he worked on the digital version. I often find myself frustrated and overwhelmed at the variety of projects I work on at any given time. I like to say that I would like to ideally work on one project/game at a time, and what I mean is that I don’t want my attention/focus to shift back and forth between disparate subjects and not dwell at length in any given topic for any substantial length of time.

But, everything seems to be related to everything else some days, so it might just be that I need to work harder to select my projects so they relate to each other better…or in the least make up a narrative to make them seem part of a larger whole/narrative. YES! that’s what I’ll do! I’m looking forward to working on one project for the entirety of next year.

Or: The Value of Play, Relatively Speaking

The Game Design Challenge 2012: “Upgrade Humanity In 60 Seconds Flat”. I was expecting some wacky and fun ideas, and that’s exactly what we got. Jason Rohrer ripping up a $100 bill on camera for the sake of demonstrating his game was an interesting moment that won’t be forgotten for a while. (Though I remember a woman behind me protesting loudly against Frank Lantz’s destruction of some vintage $2 bills. No one did that for the $100 bill, funnily enough.)

Let’s talk about that game, Frog Skins.

The concept behind Frog Skins is that it is a game which tackles the issue of inflation. To summarize, the game works similarly to many trading card games. Players compare cards of differing values in an attempt to outscore their opponent. At the end of the game, the winner is the player who won the most rounds. They take the ante – in this case, all of the other player’s cards. However, the game is played entirely with legal tender. $100 scores higher than $10, and the minimum value (and safest card to play) is $1. Rohrer recognized the inherent imbalance in the system and added one more rule: you can tear a card in half and use its value twice. This doubles its value in-game, but renders it worthless in real life. (But not really, since banks will accept damaged notes as long as they can assess them as legitimate.) A similar mechanic was implemented before in Magic: the Gathering’s joke set Unglued, with the Blacker Lotus card.

Initially I was enthralled by the idea of a game that took actual currency and destroyed it for the sole purpose of play. It takes the addictiveness and gambling-like aesthetic of trading card game mechanics and introduces a sharp socioeconomic sensitivity in a fun and unique way. Furthermore, it seemed to be a clever and novel way of tackling the issue of inflation in America. (more…)

My takeaways from GDC 2012 (and a little bit of SxSW).

Sid Meier is a man for whom I have the utmost respect as a game designer, and when I saw that he had a talk on “Interesting Decisions” on the first day of the Main Conference during GDC, I felt not only a desire, but a strong obligation to attend. But something struck me during his talk: the language he was using to describe games felt somewhat antiquated. All content aside, he was characterizing his games and players as “awesome”, “epic”, “bad-ass”, and he was trying to get designers to think along these parallel lines using the aforementioned ‘interesting decisions.’

What it indicated, and why I felt it strange, was a highly insulary and limited usage of language within game-spaces. Without an expanded vocabulary, how are games able to truly grow as a medium? And it seems I wasn’t the only person at GDC with this in mind. Development, both externally and internally, surrounding the culture of language and games was my largest takeaway at GDC 2012. It’s this movement which is beginning to chip away at the social stigma of games and help propel it as a leading cultural pillar of the current century. (more…)

Laralyn McWilliams’ talk on metrics and games argued persuasively for how the latter should be informed by intelligent, measured interpretation of the former. McWilliams used her extensive experience with Free Realms, and her management of what could be mined for data and how that data would then be interpreted, to convince her audience that metrics should never be ignored, and that the designer who ignored them would be weaponless in the face of business (and ultimately, design) decisions made by non-designers. (more…)

To say I was skeptical entering Jason VandenBerghe’s talk on the psychology of play would be a bit of an understatement.  Truth be told, had I not run into a friend who knew about it, I would have attended a completely different lecture that was occurring at the same time. It wasn’t that I was uninterested in the topic of the talk, I very much was. However, when it comes to analyzing things like “play,” I’ve come to expect a whole lot of theoretical pontificating and guessing without much data that is clearly useful. Thankfully, my compatriot was able to steer me in the right direction and I sat down for what turned out to be by far my favorite and most enlightening talk of the conference.

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My inaugural trip to GDC was filled with numerous exciting and enlightening moments. The talks I attended were far beyond anything I could have expected, and left me with a renewed sense of vigor and tenacity towards for my field of study. However, one of the most rewarding experiences I had at the conference, or at least one of the most fun, came outside of the lecture hall in the form of iam8bit’s “Super Magnetic Game-O-Matic.”

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Good grief, networking is scary.

I went to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last week.  It (meaning GDC, not San Francisco) is a magical place where industry professionals go to talk shop, and where the occasional teenager hangs out in a Pikachu costume, looking confusedly at all of the people in game developer costumes.  Most notably, it’s one of the best possible places for a student with eyes on a professional game development career to start making contacts and growing up.

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One of the first talks I attended at GDC 2012 was Mare Sheppard’s “Why I Hate Women in Games Initiatives.” The title alone is obviously pretty eye catching and the talk itself hit some interesting points.  I will go ahead and say that I felt she didn’t offer much by way of solving the problems she discussed and so I ultimately left the talk feeling disgruntled rather than empowered to create change. But maybe that’s just me.  

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This was by far my favorite talk from GDC.  Joshua Sawyer was a great speaker who gave a very in-depth talk about choice architecture, using Fallout: New Vegas as his primary example.  I recommend anyone interested in dynamic story and dialogue check out the talk in the vault given the chance.

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George Fan, the creator of Plants vs. Zombies and designer at PopCap, gave an in-depth breakdown of how the tutorial of PvZ works. The brilliance of the PvZ tutorial is that it’s actually quite hard to pinpoint in the game; the beginning and ending edges of the tutorial are blurry and it’s so tightly tied into the gameplay that the player always feels like she’s playing and never like she’s listening to teacher. (more…)