Insertion and Recon

The conference started Wednesday, but I went to Malmö (roughly pronounced Marlm-soundthatdoesntexistinEnglish) on Tuesday so I wouldn’t have to rush off to check in half-way through the conference. On my way to the hostel, I realized I could pretty much walk the whole way through parks, just occasionally crossing the road to get from one park to the next. This turned out to be a good thing, because I ended up walking that route 7 times throughout Tuesday.

After I’d dumped my baggage at the hostel around noon, I grabbed some lunch and then headed back to the station to meet Ruben. I was fairly excited about this, since I’ve known Ruben online for years ever since he tested my NWN module and recruited me to play in his massive DM’d campaign. For the best DM I’ve ever had the honour of playing with, I was a little disappointed to find that he wasn’t an enormous immortal being of pure light, but he was a nice guy, so I quickly forgave him for letting down my expectations. (Dunno if Ruben would want me posting a picture of him here, so I won’t). We took a few walks around town, then split up to relax before dinner. We met up again half past 6 and quickly found a nice but affordable place to eat. Then we wandered around a bit, had some coffee, and went back to sleep.

Day 1

Wednesday morning, Ruben and I met up with Rasmus at the conference and registered. Mercifully, there was free coffee and breakfast before the first keynote. Which, incidentally, began with Jonathan Smith and a couple of other guys from Tt Games (they of LEGO Star Wars) being led on-stage by Darth Vader and a couple of Imperial Stormtroopers. The talk was interesting, if nothing special; a rundown of the company’s history, culture, and philosophy – information of no use outside the industry, but of real interest to people like me, who collect such knowledge about various companies.

The next talk I attended (alone) was a two-part rundown of how Massive Entertainment created the story and the graphics, respectively, for World in Conflict. The main thing I took away from there was that it’s completely intimidating how much work goes into a single building in a modern game. After lunch was a talk comparing character design in Eastern and Western games, which was somewhat hampered by sluggish translation. The main thing here was getting to see previously unreleased concept art from two apparently quite secret games that Rare are making! The sci-fi game looked a bit generic, but the fantasy game was extremely interesting – gothic in a Tim Burton meets American McGee’s Alice way. Can’t wait to see what it’ll be all about.

The next talk was The Birth of a Society by three high-ranking CCP people (two of which had Ph.D.’s) about economics, democracy, and emergent gameplay in EVE Online. Just like last year, I left the conference with a sense that I needed to play EVE, but as Jim Rossignol said on the next talk, EVE sometimes seems like a better game to write about than to play. The main point to take away from this presentation was definitely that single-sharded MMOG’s can build far greater worth as a network than games with multiple shards, because sharding an MMOG essentially puts a ceiling on the possible amount of connections and relationships players can form in the game.

The day’s talks were rounded off with a keynote entitled Stories about Stories, wherein Ste Curran read from a short story he’d written in 7 chapters. It was very evocative stuff about a personal experience he’d had with Singstar, and it seemed to be intended to legitimize more “casual” games as a medium to let players create their own stories (not all that surprising considering the profile of his company). Between each chapter, one of Curran’s friends came on-stage to share personal anecdotes, poems, and Jonathan Smith had even composed a song about his dislike for games with long-winded stories that take themselves far too seriously. It was hilarious – it was Jonathan Coulton-grade material.

Intermission

Dinner was interrupted by a largely annoying live broadcast of One Life Left who had been called upon to host the Nordic Game Awards – annoying because they seemed to primarily address their listeners so we who had paid ridiculous sums to attend the conference seemed to take second priority all of a sudden. The awards themselves seemed a little quaint with just three (symbolic?) awards; most hilarious was the fact that Crayon Physics was competing with Kane & Lynch and World in Conflict for the main award for Best Nordic Game.

After the show, we travelled en masse to a club in the inner city where the drinks were free for a few hours. Ruben, Rasmus, and I ended up at the same table as some pretty clever Swedish computer science students that we spent the rest of the party shouting to over the music. Ruben showed them all his Risk-in-space mobile game, Galaxy Conquest, and somehow one of them gave me a pretty handy rundown of various production models. We called it a night around 11 pm and went back to our respective hotels.

Day 2

Getting up slightly later and with no hangover because I never have those (go go super-metabolism!) I attended the first keynote by a couple of the Rock Band developers with Rasmus. Ruben was absent because he had to pick up something he called a “girlfriend” in Copenhagen, so he missed out on a live performance of Queens of the Stone Age’s highly enjoyable Go With the Flow in Rock Band and a chance to win one of 10 instrument bundles they gave away for free (alas, neither of us won anything).

Rock Band’s epicness pushed the next presentation a bit over time: Independence Day was a roundtable with notable industry figures about the histories of their respective independent companies. The stories told were remarkably different with John Chasey’s Finblade being a smaller mobile game studio, Hilmar Pétursson’s CCP being probably the biggest studio in Scandinavia thanks to running EVE Online, and Tameem Antoniades’ Ninja Theory being an honest-to-god independent AAA game studio (apparently they do exist! The legends were true after all). The main lesson I took away from that talk was: Be prepared to go bankrupt once or twice and work for free for months at a time until you finish your first game.

Lunch on day two offered the only hint of fanboyism I allowed myself to exhibit at the conference, as I sat next to Rossignol while he seemed to be interviewing Hilmar Pétursson (presumably about EVE). I wouldn’t honestly call myself a fan of Jim Rossignol because it’s just plain weird to be a fan of a journalist, but I have read a lot of his writing for a while, and I always enjoy his words, so it was neat to see him in person.

After lunch, it turned out I was spending the whole day in Scania, the biggest hall, because the final talk of the conference, Disruptive Design, had been moved in there from the second largest hall, no doubt as a result of the realization that everybody was attending it. Another roundtable presenting four drastically different approaches to its subjects, first that of Harmonix with their disruptive strategy of designing games based on obscure or custom peripherals, then that of Team Silent’s more emotionally disruptive horror games followed by Ninja Theory’s incredibly disruptive experiences with changing a whole game based on the whims of a single big-name mo-cap actor, and finished off with the Team Ico’s fantastically artful games – again a more emotional approach to this elusive “disruptive design”.

Exfiltration

As the disruptive design session ended, we decided to ditch the Northern Lights roundtable on the topic of “What makes Nordic game developers unique in a competitive global games industry?” as we remember it from last year being quite the mutual backslapping session. Ruben went back to attend to that girlfriend of his and Rasmus and I caught the train back to Denmark, deftly beating the crowd. A very interesting trip with lots of new intellectual input. Overall it was Malmö and meeting Ruben that made the greatest impression though, as I felt the conference was slightly too focused on networking and recruiting this year, more than the presentations – not very useful for me, as I have an education to finish before I move to Iceland or something crazy like that.

So I ease the pain by reading all these great reports from the GDC, checking out the dev blogs regularly, finding videos of the presentations on RPS and elsewhere, and generally being a little OCD about it all. But that just makes it worse.

Never-the-less, here are two pretty awesome pieces of GDC I’ve managed to pick up over the last couple of days. First is a very very funny rant by Jane McGonigal titled Reality is Broken. I heartily recommend getting the slides too. If anybody knows where I can find a video of this rant or any of the other rants, I would be much obliged.

The second bit is Gamasutra’s summary of the Game Design Challenge, where I definitely think they picked the right winner. Any game design that can be sold with the phrase “the game that puts the fun back into fungicide” gets a star in my book!

I’m taking recommendations for other goodies I may have missed.

I attended the following presentations Wednesday:

9:30 – 10:15
T. L. Taylor
Keynote entitled: From Box to World and Back Again: How People Transform the Games They Play

Summary: This talk will explore the ways players act as lively co-creators of the online games they play, shaping game culture in powerful ways.

My notes: Although MMOG’s are not my favourite category of games, Taylor had a lot of interesting things to say about online game culture in general, and her presentation served perfectly as an intro to Sotamaa’s:

10:30 – 11:15
Olli Sotamaa
Lecture entitled: Building on Player Creativity: Exploring Game Modifications and Modder Networks

Summary: The presentation examines the motivations and organization of mod makers. The benefits and downsides of modifications from the perspective of game developers are also discussed.

My notes: This talk was basically about me. There was nothing in here that I didn’t already know, but it was sort of nice to have it structured and conveyed in an academic fashion.

11:30 – 12:15
Simon Niedenthal
Lecture entitled: Novem Corda: Understanding Communities of Creative Practice in Game Design

Summary: We have developed an interactive tool called Novem Corda, which supports our inquiries into how digital artists think about, and communicate qualities of simulated illumination in the game design process.

My notes: Niedenthal has conducted a cross-disciplinary study of light in games, and he had some really interesting things to say about that.

13:15 – 14:00
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson
Keynote entitled: The Tao of Virtual World Societies

Summary: CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson looks to the East for inspiration in achieving a balance between the development team’s vision and the community’s desires.

My notes: This talk made me want to instantly pick up a subscription to EVE Online. Then I remembered the ludicrous death penalties and thought better of it.

14:15 – 15:00
Bart Simon
Lecture entitled: Against Immersion: Towards a Theory of Gaming as Interactive Performance

Summary: This paper against the utility of the concept of immersion for thinking about the idea of critical or reflexive gameplay.

My notes: Bart Simon is a very angry man. A very angry man.

15:15 – 16:00
Alessandro Canossa
Lecture entitled: Towards a Theory of the Player: Designing for Experience

Summary: After sketching a model describing the cognitive and physiological processes involved in the “player-avatar-game world” relationship, Alessandro intends to show how all player-types coexist within the implied player. Designers can increase the emotional and experiential impact of games by planning a “flow” path for each one of the player-types during the concept phase.

My notes: This stuff was directly applicable both in game analysis and in reducing the early iteration phase of a game development cycle. I gotta get my hands on his Ph.D.

16:15 – 17:00
Marek Walton
Lecture entitled: Beyond Storytelling: MMOs and the Role of Writers

Summary: MMOs require different skills from writers. Marek explores where the role’s reduced, where it’s increased, and where it’s an evolution of their development function.

My notes: I want to work for The Mustard Corp.

My plan for Tuesday is to attend the following presentations:

[Edit 05-19-07] Added my notes and some photos.

9:30 – 10:15
Paulina Bozek
Keynote entitled: “My Everything” – From Play Lists to Profiles and Virtual Worlds. Mass Customization: The Explosion of Choice and Creativity

Summary: Personalization and the power of choice have become a sweeping trend across media and entertainment industries. New game platforms and online distribution are poised to enable this new age of mass customization and player participation. As game creators, what can we do to embrace this?

My notes: Can’t say I’m a great fan of SingStar, but Paulina has personality, and what she had to say on Mass Customization was pretty damn interesting. It’s the future, don’t you know? Oh, and Barbie frickin’ scares me :S

10:30 – 11:15
Magy Seif El-Nasr
Lecture entitled: Game Modding as a Gateway to Computing and Media Literacy: A Myth or Reality

Summary: There has been a current increase in the number of game environments or engines that allow users to customize their gaming experiences by building and expanding the games’ content, design, and behaviour. In the recent years, there is a move towards using these game engines in computer science, architecture, history, and media studies classes. However, there has been little research on measuring the learning outcomes through the use of these engines. In this talk, Magy will discuss results of studies conducted to evaluate the use of game modding to promote learning of programming, design, mathematics, and visual design concepts.

My notes: I took 2 pages of notes on this. She basically went over her results from several years of using game modding in extra-curricular high school classes and senior level college courses, and she even went over 4 specific engines (including my favourite, Unreal) listing their pros and cons as education tools.

11:30 – 12:15
Jesper Juul
Lecture entitled: Seeing the Game in a New Light: Content in the Player’s Mind

Summary: Players have little knowledge of the resources that go into developing games; they buy games based on the experience and content they believe a game provides. Using concrete examples, Jesper will examine some traditional methods for creating game content with little effort (especially changing level layouts), and link this to studies of how challenge can make players feel that a game has more to offer. In a nutshell: a simple theory of how players estimate the amount of content in a given game.

My notes: Juul’s presentation was clearly targetted at developers, which was both sensible and interesting. Very practically applicable stuff, but the most interesting part was definitely the conclusions from his studies of difficulty in casual games.

13:15 – 14:00
Adrian Hon
Lecture entitled: Alternate Reality Games Are for Everyone

Summary: Alternate Reality Games have enjoyed critical success, but have not yet broken into the mainstream. What sort of innovations will happen this year to expand the audience, and make ARGs even more fun?

My notes: This was mostly a history of ARG’s and an overview of his own ARG PerplexCity. He packed the speak with crazy anecdotes from the games, which was highly entertaining. Exciting category, this ARG stuff. Not my style though (right now).

14:15 – 15:00
I haven’t decided yet! It’s killing me, there are two really interesting presentations in this slot:
Masaya Matsuura: When You Catch the Blinking of Sunlight: The Inspiration of Music on Game Development and Its Advancement into the Future and
Aki Järvinen: Communities of Nurturing: How to Design Empathy?

My notes: I ended up going to Matsuura’s talk. His English was horrible and he was reading from his laptop; I didn’t understand half of what he said. He did, however, end the presentation with a small performance, singing a duet with an Aibo dog. It was extremely unexpected and really just… crazy. Hilariously crazy though. Rasmus got it on video, awesome stuff.

15:15 – 16:00
Joonmo Kwon
Keynote entitled: Asian Online Game Market and NEXON’s Strategy

Summary:
1) Online game market status in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China and SE Asia
2) Major games of NEXON
3) NEXON Corporation
4) Diversified Business Strategy of NEXON Corporation

My notes: This sounded like it’d be pretty boring, but was actually really enlightening. The man is CEO of a company with 16 published online games and around 320 million subscribers! Madness!

16:15 – 17:00
Daniel Paladin
Lecture entitled: Sidescrollers from Start to Finish: Art & Game Design Approaches Intertwined

Summary: Dan describes his approach in creating art assets, as well as the game design elements that affect it directly in his sidescroller work.

My notes: Paladin is basically doing what I’m doing – creating games online with a team that’s very geographically scattered – only in a different genre, and he’s making money off of it. I wanted to ask him how he coordinates it afterwards, but I didn’t get around to it.

And then there’s the Nordic Development Support Grants Ceremony at 17:15, followed by dinner. It will be a long but frickin’ epic day. My only regret is that we didn’t manage to book a room in time, so we need to skip Tuesday’s party to catch the train home, and we need to get up extremely early on Wednesday to take the train to Malmö again. Thank God it’s relatively close to Copenhagen (about 40 minutes by train).