Game Luminaries Chat at GDC

GameDaily BIZ, the news wing of GameDaily, has been running a transcript of a 90-minute GDC session that featured an informal conversation between six of the video game industry’s most interesting minds:

• Phil Harrison
• Raph Koster
• Peter Molyneux
• David Perry
• Chris Taylor
• Neil Young

The group's discussion ranges all over the place, from what “next generation” means to how the gaming industry may have missed the boat with the mobile platform.

Read the entire transcript at these links:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

GDC 2008: That's a wrap

Well, the 2008 edition of the Game Developers Conference has come to an end, and I'm signing off from San Francisco. I'll be hanging about for a couple of days to enjoy this beautiful city before heading back to Vancouver to start getting up to speed on what's coming out from the local video game developers this year.

I hope you appreciated, if not enjoyed, my coverage of this year's conference. Feel free to loiter around the comments to provide me with feedback or to discuss anything that came out of the seminars.

GDC 2008: Portal post-mortem

One of the interesting things to do with video-game development is to look back at those games that succeeded, deconstructing them in an attempt to figure out what the designers threw into the crucible that made the project a success.

We can do the same with failures, but that’s too depressing. Much more fun to focus on the positive.

It’s somehow fitting that my final GDC 2008 session was an opportunity to hear the creators of Portal, the best game of 2007, talk about what went into its creation.

As with so many of the seminars this year, the room was packed full, with interested attendees swirled around the outside of the room.

Portal was a sleeper hit. It leveraged the fact that it was packaged with the Xbox 360 Orange Box edition of Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode 2 games to became a veritable pop culture phenomenon.

From the popularity of the companion cube to the mainstream airplay of the game’s closing theme song, “Still Alive” (written by musician Jonathan Coulton), by the end of 2007, Portal was everywhere you looked.

In the GDC session, level designer and team lead Kim Swift and writer Erik Wolpaw talked about how they were able to create a narrative in a game with only two characters and one-sided dialogue.

Portal was developed by a team of anywhere between five and ten people, and Swift and Wolpaw both agreed that the story from the game wouldn’t go very far on its own, nor would the gameplay be much when separated from the story. “It would be a race to see which would fail first on their own,” said Swift.

The thing that really seemed to drive Portal to be what it became, they both said, were the constraints. Restricted time, people, and resources forced them to come up with creative solutions to problems.

Wolpaw outlined the philosophy upon which Portal’s narrative was based. “Games tell two stories,” he said. The first is the story story that is told with cutscenes and dialogue, and the second is the gameplay story, which is the story told by what the player does.

Swift and Wolpaw also stressed the importance of playtesting to Portal’s final cut. Bringing in gamers to try the game and provide feedback was something they did early on, and Swift said it was invaluable to refining the game as it was developed..

When asked how they planned to overcome the challenge of not having the same constraints in developing Portal 2, assuming that a greater budget will be afforded to them, Wolpaw joked, “I’m content to bask in the moment without people bugging me about the next one.”

We do know, however, that there will be more Portal coming. Valve has promised. I can hardly wait.

GDC 2008: Featuring Fable 2

Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux has a storied life in video game development. His video game, Fable, was a next-gen game before next-gen consoles existed, and made inroads into the idea that the decisions and choices players made could have an impact on the story that was being told to them.

While Molyneux wasn’t able to get Fable to do everything he had hoped, he’s been talking up the sequel for a while, and claiming that it would be able to do some of the things - and more - that he wasn’t able to do with the first game. In part because he is well aware that gamers were disappointed that Fable wasn’t able to do all it claimed to.

Today, as GDC was winding down, Molyneux packed a ballroom with about 750 people who wanted to hear him explain the main features of Fable II.

The talk was originally titled as “The big three features revealed” but Molyneux’s title card for his presentation was amended to read “Three big features revealed / Actually its [sic] four now.”

Quite simply, the big features that will be in Fable II are:

• drama: consequences to player action and behaviour
• combat: simple, one-button combat that anyone can play and enjoy
• co-op: participate in other people’s games as a henchman to gain experience, gold, and renown that you can then apply to your game

The one interesting tidbit that Molyneux left us with is that about six hours into Fable II, “you will walk into the room and someone will ask you to do something, and you’ll have to sacrifice something so precious to you as a gamer that you’ll put down the controller and think about it.”

He did not, however, reveal the fourth feature before his time ran out.

Fable II is scheduled for release this year, and will be available exclusively on Xbox 360.

GDC 2008: Game designers rant

Perhaps the most interesting and thought-provoking session at the Game Developers Conference is the annual rant. Each year, a group of people who work in game development get together and spout off about a particular them.

This year’s theme was the state of game design, and it was a solid hour of passion as the panelists took their eight minutes of time to bear their soul about the topic.

Clint Hocking - who it may seem like I am stalking this year, but I’m not. Not really - went on about how the problem in the video game industry is not creative stagnation, but a lack of courage to create games that challenge people.

Jane McGonigal implored designers to start making the real world as wonderful as they make virtual worlds.

Jenova Chen thinks that mature games need to be made for the crop of aging gamers, and he’s not talking about sex and violence.

Daniel James believes that the virtual can shape the real.

The best rant - or at least the most intriguing - came from Jonathan Mak. He had everybody in the room, some 600 people, standing up and batting balloons around the room to a pop guitar soundtrack playing over the PA. I’m not sure what his point was, but it was a dramatic - and fun - expression for everyone.

GDC 2008: New ways of telling a story

The first Far Cry, developed by Crytek, was a breathtaking display of technical ability and photorealistic graphics. It was published by Ubisoft, which then snapped up the franchise.

I expect Far Cry 2 to be far superior to the first game because of the people involved. Clint Hocking is the creative director on the project, and Patrick Redding is the narrative designer. These two guys think about the creation of video games four levels above what I’m capable of.

In a presentation this morning, Redding explained that their objective, with Far Cry 2, is to create an open world game in which players have the freedom to explore all spaces in the game, whether they are virtual spaces, systems, or the realm of humanity. It sounds like big-brain stuff and it is, but what it amounts to is that these guys are going to make meaning for a player come through in the mechanics of the game.

The idea here is that as human beings we impart story onto events and we imbue character into animated objects such as people and even animals. The Far Cry 2 team intends to let those characteristics work to their benefit.

So rather than tell a linear story, Redding said, they’ve taken a story and broken it into smaller chunks that can then be presented to the player in any order. In the literary world this is called a “shuffle text,” and what it gives an audience is the opportunity to get the same information in any order, and still be able to get meaning out of the experience.

It also means that every experience will be different, depending on the order in which you are presented with the chunks of story, and the meaning you impart onto the events and the characters.

And you’ll still get to shoot guns and blow stuff up.

GDC 2008: Will Wright in person

Will Wright has been conspicuously absent from the media spotlight in the past couple of years. A media comrade and I were speculating as to exactly why this might be happening while we waited for Wright to come on stage last night. We decided we didn't know why he's been so hermit-like.

Electronic Arts, the publisher of Wright’s games, staged this exclusive party at a San Francisco nightclub as a chance to get everyone together for a party, duh, but also to give Wright a chance to do a public event. He did not disappoint.

In his 40-minute talk, Wright ranged from Star Wars to James Bond to Gilligan’s Island to Godzilla to Walt Disney. His central theme was talking about “worlds,” his word for franchise or brand or entertainment property.

In the middle of it all was a “Russian Space Minute” in which Wright told us the incredible story of a failed Soviet rocket launch.

What Wright did not talk about, though, was Spore, except to mention it as an example of something he had worked on.

At the end of his entertaining ramble, what Wright left us with is that “the value of worlds and play experiences is they help us refine our world view.”

For Wright, the best worlds (and therefore the best stories) can be deconstructed. In this way, they lead to play. The example Wright gave was the thought experiment in which you wonder which would win a battle between the Death Star, a Cylon Battlestar, and a Borg cube.

The other side of this is that the best play is generative, and therefore leads to a myriad of stories that can be told.

Bringing this all together means that worlds/story leads to play, which leads to worlds and story, in this precious and neverending cycle.

Spore, by the way, will be available for PC, Mac, and Nintendo DS on September 7.

GDC 2008: Partaking of Prototype

Vancouver’s Radical Entertainment is working on a new video game that promises to reinvent open-world or sandbox games.

Producer Tim Bennison and lead designer Eric Holmes (pictured here at the promotional party for Prototype on Thursday night) took an hour to show off not only the key features of their new game, but also give attendees a glimpse at how they’ve gone about creating a completely new intellectual property.

Prototype is set in New York, and Holmes has made the city a character of sorts. This is a New York that we will all recognize, and Holmes said it was important for this story to be grounded and real. “There’s something disturbing about setting it in a real setting,” he explained. “It’s real but fantastic at the same time.”

Bennison talked about how so many games these days are doing a good job of making the same games better or by giving us more of what we’ve already seen. He’s trying to get his Prototype team to give gamers more and better.

You’ll be playing as Alex Mercer, a man with no memories but the incredible ability to be able to shape-shift and to absorb biomass, including people. As Alex absorbs people he gains all their memories and skills, as well as the ability to mimic the appearance of that person.

Did I mention that New York has been infected with a virus? Bad news.

Alex - and you - learn the story by absorbing the memories of people who have knowledge of your past. At the same time, you’ll be roaming through a New York that is familiar and horrific at the same time.

GDC 2008: All about immersion

Clint Hocking is one of the best speakers to present at GDC. For (I think) every year in the past seven he’s had something interesting to talk about. And his style of speaking is dynamic, funny, and fascinating.

In the past year, it seems, Hocking’s been thinking about what is required for a game player to feel immersed in the experience. Referencing the seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck, the games Trespasser and Guitar Hero, and lots of original Star Trek references, Hocking zipped through a look at how to classify immersion, and how to think about enhancing it for gamers.

Hocking differentiates between “sensual immersion,” which he likens to the emotional and affective sensation of being surrounded by an environment. This kind of immersion is typified by films, in which we can all get lost, and it was attempted by the developers of Trespasser, a video game that claimed it was going to be the most immersive game ever, and was based on the Jurassic Park films.

The other type of immersion, for Hocking, is “rational immersion,” which refers to the fugue state we enter when we are trying to learn a new task, or are making our brain work hard. This kind of immersion is exemplified by chess, for example, or by learning to be a Guitar Hero.

Hocking believes that getting both forms of immersion to work together is critical, because that will be the moment at which “games will be to film what film today is to radio.”

If you ever have the privilege of attending GDC, make sure you keep a spot open for a Hocking presentation. He’s one of the best shows in town.

GDC 2008: Why you should learn mathematics

Because Ray Kurzweil says that we’ve been drawing linear graphs when all along we should have been drawing logarithmic graphs and he’s right.

GDC 2008: Constructing the environments for Halo 3

Mike Zak has a BFA from UVic, and has been working on Halo environments since he joined Bungie halfway through the production of Halo 2. He was the environmental art lead for Halo 3, and in a session this morning, described how he and the team of artists with which he works came up with the breathtaking worlds.

Zak used one specific mission as a case study for his talk: The Storm. This mission happens fairly early in the game, and starts with Master Chief being told he needs to prevent the Covenant from activating the Ark. The mission ends when the Ark is activated, the portal opens, the Covenant escapes, and the Flood-infested ship crashes to Earth.

Besides showing off incredible concept art and preproduction sketches, Zak walked through an interesting breakdown of the level and articulated a few things he and his team were looking at when creating the environments.

“The Hook” refers to having a strong layout concept that makes the space unique, but is also easy for a player to see and navigate, while suggesting to them a tactic they might use.

“Scale” refers to getting an early sense of the size of things, which helps determine how large the space for the level needs to be. The sense of capacity, then, will help determine budget and AI requirements for building the level.

“Combat elements,” or “encounter design for laymen,” refers to the need to build a space with fronts (including safe territories for retreat), layers (in terms of basements and balconies), and blinds (for both AI and players to exploit, and includes cover).

Finally, “movement elements,” refers to how the player can traverse the space, including shortcuts, one-way paths, and ninja paths (in which the player has a distinct advantage).

I interviewed Zak for a Georgia Straight cover feature on Halo 3 last fall. This morning he told me that he’s sketching for a new project, but could not reveal a hint of what it was. Sorry.

GDC 2008: How to write and design epic games

Ken Rolston’s career as a game designer started with pencil and paper role-playing games such as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and RuneQuest. He transitioned into video games and was the lead designer on Morrowind and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

After retiring (for “About a week,” joked Mark Nelson), Rolston returned to the video game industry to work with Big Huge Games. Appropriate, then, that his presentation at GDC 2008 was about how to write and design “vast narratives.”

Rolston was joined by Mark Nelson, who’s been working with Rolston since Morrowind, and who is now the lead narrative designer on an as-yet-unnamed role-playing game for Big Huge Games.

They talked about the tension between them as each believes that different aspects of story are most important. Rolston believes in setting, tone, and theme, while Nelson stakes his philosophy on story and character.

In the end, the two of them admitted that all components of story are important, but what differs is when those elements are most important to the development of a game.

Setting and theme, which - once established - are static, should be put in place early on in the process, and character and story, which are dynamic and can change more quickly, become important later in development.

What they both agree on, though, is that vast narratives, like Morrowind and Oblivion, are interesting despite the challenges they create.

I’m curious to know what their next big huge game is going to be.

GDC 2008: A note on the game of the year award

Last week, in my “Trigger Happy” column in the Georgia Straight, I wrote about how I believed that Super Mario Galaxy, while a very playable game, did not deserve a nomination for game of the year, and that Mass Effect was spurned by being left off the list of game of the year noms.

Tonight during the Game Developers Choice Awards, the five game of the year nominees - BioShock, Portal, Call of Duty 4, Super Mario Galaxy, and Rock Band - were announced throughout the evening. Then, at the end of the show, just before the winner was about to be announced, short clips of each of the nominees were played.

But here’s the thing. A clip of Mass Effect was played in place of Call of Duty 4.

Make of it what you will.

GDC 2008: GDC award night

Award night at the Game Developers Conference is a slick and quick affair (thankfully, given that most of us have been on our feet for 12 hours by the time the awards happen). A whole whack of prizes get handed out in a scant two hours. You know what really stands out when you watch a video game award show? Short acceptance speeches. No big egos here, just big talent.

Game Developers Choice Awards

The video game industry relishes these awards, because the winners are decided by those who work in the business. Winning a GDC Award is getting a pat on the back from the entire industry. It amounts to having all the other game designers say, “I loved playing your game.”

You can get the complete list of nominees here, but here are the games and developers that took home Choice Awards this year:

Best Game Design
Portal
developed and published by Valve

Best Debut Game
Crackdown
developed by Realtime Worlds, published by Microsoft Game Studios

Best Audio
BioShock
developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, published by 2K Games

Best Downloadable Game
flOw
developed by thatgamecompany, published by Sony Computer Entertainment

Best Technology
Crysis
developed by Crytek, published by Electronic Arts

Innovation Award
Portal
developed and published by Valve

Best Visual Arts
BioShock
developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, published by 2K Games

Best Handheld Game
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
developed and published by Nintendo

Best Writing
BioShock
developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, published by 2K Games

Game of the Year
Portal
developed and published by Valve
(pictured above are the developers and publisher, from left to right: Realm Lovejoy, Kim Swift, Gabe Newell, and Eric Wolpaw)

Lifetime Achievement Award
Sid Meier

Pioneer Award
Ralph Baer
This guy is the father of video gaming. He got a deserved standing ovation.

Ambassador Award
Jason Della Rocca

Independent genius

The GDC Awards are always prefaced by the Independent Games Festival Awards, which recognize independent game development. One of last year’s big winners was Toronto’s Jon Mak, creator of Everyday Shooter, now available as a PlayStation Network game for the PS3.

This year, the awards went to:

Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Crayon Physics Deluxe
developed by Kloonigames

Best Web Browser Game
Iron Dukes
developed by One Ton Ghost

Technical Excellence
World of Goo
developed by 2D Boy

Design Innovation Award
World of Goo
developed by 2D Boy

Excellence in Visual Art
Fez
developed by Kokoromi

Excellence in Audio
Audiosurf
developed by Invisible Handlebar

Audience Award
Audiosurf
developed by Invisible Handlebar

Best Student Game
Synaesthete
developed by Rolling Without Slipping, DigiPen Institute

Note, too, that you can still play most of the indie games for free over here.

The new Gleemax Awards for Strategic Gameplay were handed out by Gleemax, the new online gamer community started by Wizards of the Coast. Cash prizes went to:
bronze: Quadradius
silver: Skyrites
grand prize: Desktop Tower Defense

GDC 2008: Stories best played

Richard Rouse is tired of people saying that video games are not a good medium for telling stories. He believes that “best game storytelling can stand up to storytelling in any other medium.”

Rouse, of Paranoid Productions, invited Valve’s Marc Laidlaw, Blue Fang’s Steve Meretzky, and Big Huge Games’ Ken Rolston to talk about what is the best storytelling in video games.

Each panelist chose two games that they felt demonstrated how video game storytelling is worthy of attention.

Their list includes:

• Loom (1990)
• Thief (1998)
• Torment (1999)
• BioShock (2006)
• Fool’s Errand (1987)
• Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
• Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney (2001 in Japan, 2005 in North America)
• Ico (2001)

In deliberating what games should be on the list, the panelists talked about a bunch of other titles they recommend looking at. Rouse said he planned on putting that list online sometime this weekend.

GDC 2008: Help wanted

The annual Game Developer Conference is really about the business of making video games, as opposed to being about the games themselves.

For example, during my walk through the North Hall at San Francisco’s Moscone Conference Center, where the event is held, there are displays for technology firms promoting their middleware software and hardware developers showing off the technology that can make playing games a better experience.

There are also numerous country pavilions encouraging coverage of the developers in their area as well as trying to drum up business to be sent their way. “Come develop games in Germany! Look at the great games coming from Norway!”

More important to the video game industry, though, are the number of post-secondary education institutions that are present here. DeVry and the Art Institutes are here, as is Vancouver Film School.

In speaking with the game developers, the one thing they all have in common - aside from wanting to have a hit game - is they all are in dire need of staff. If you have any inclination to work in the industry, to get a job making video games, get that application in now.

They need you.

GDC 2008: Deconstructing BioShock

Ken Levine, from 2K Games Irrational studio in Boston, has a reputation for being a bit brusque. He’s a man of clearly formed opinions, and he isn’t timid about sharing those ideas. Nor does he have any patience for those who may not share his viewpoint, it seems.

In demoing BioShock at E3 last year, Levine was quick, short, and blunt. He seemed like he needed to be somewhere else. It turns out, he did, because, he admitted during his presentation, they were making changes to BioShock right up until the last minute.

His talk, bright and early at 9 a.m. on the first day of the conference, was entitled, “Storytelling in Bioshock: How to empower gamers to care about your stupid story.” He was scheduled in one of the larger conference rooms, and despite the early hour, a nearly 1,000 people had crammed in the room to hear what he had to say.

“I pissed off some people on this project,” Levine admitted, “because my story came very late.” Levine likens the writing of a video game to any other process that goes into development, and he thinks that the development cycle needs to accommodate last-minute changes to the story in the same way a decision may be made at the last-minute to change a spawn point.

Levine also talked about how the thing that made BioShock such a great storytelling game was the fact that he had stripped out all the storytelling from the game, and instead used the gameplay to develop a narrative. “As time went on,” he explained, “we made our story simpler.”

It’s counterintuitive, because you’d expect the story in a game to get bigger over time, but Levine said that BioShock didn’t find itself until he had initiated the “Great Character Massacre of 2006” and gotten rid of any extraneous characters.

What’s important, said Levine, is to remember “Storytelling 101”: “Who are your main characters and what do they want?”

It’s a subtle, but important distinction, differentiating between story and narrative, and for Levine, the best narrator in a video game is the world. “The thing we render best in video games is the world,” he said. “The benefits of graphics have enabled us to create detailed worlds,” that can then take the responsibility for telling the story.

Maybe Levine isn’t the horror we’ve heard about, and is simply misunderstood. Maybe not.

GDC 2008: At the beginning

Well, after a six-hour delay, I finally rolled into San Francisco late last night. It's raining with apocalyptic fervor here, which reminds me fondly of Vancouver in February. Not that I was coming to San Francisco to be reminded of home, but ...

I've now settled in at the Press Room provided here at GDC, and in about two minutes will be heading off to attend a talk given by Ken Levine, the brains behind Bioshock.

I'll be back a little later to let you know what interesting things he has to say. Tonight, the GDC Awards get handed out. I'll be there, and I'll let you know how that goes, too.

Let me know if there's anything you want me to try and get the inside scoop on.

GDC 2008

I'm heading to San Francisco tomorrow for the annual Game Developers Conference. While some channels of the conference - mobile and serious games - are already underway, I focus my energies on the last part of the week, when commercial video game developers get together and talk about just what goes into making the games we love to play.

I'll be blogging from the show over the next few days, so stay tuned and check back regularly for exclusive news and reports from GDC 2008.

I'll be attending the GDC Awards on Wednesday night, and the Ray Kurzweil keynote speech on Thursday (the title of his talk? "The Next 20 Years of Gaming"), and I've got invites to a private party with Will Wright and the big Prototype bash.

Should be fun.

Nominees for Game Developers Choice Awards

The nominees for the Game Developers Choice Awards were announced this morning.

BioShock and Portal lead the pack, each with five nominations, including Game of the Year.

I'm very pleased to see Mass Effect (Game Design, Writing, Audio, Innovation) and Everyday Shooter (Best Debut, Best Downloadable), two of my favourites of 2007, getting some recognition.

Notable titles missing from this list? Surprisingly, not much. Maybe Heavenly Sword (pictured here) for Visual Art. Maybe Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for Game Design. Looks like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune claimed the Sony Computer Entertainment quota.

And Vampire Rain. Kidding. I kid.

Mass Effect deserved a Game of the Year nomination, though. Certainly over Super Mario Galaxy, which was fine for what it was: a rehash of the franchise.

Anyone out there note any other glaring omissions?

Here's the complete list of categories and nominees, which will be handed out at GDC 2008 in San Francisco on Wednesday, February 20:

Best Game Design
BioShock
Call of Duty 4
Mass Effect
Portal
Super Mario Galaxy

Best Visual Art
Assassin's Creed
Team Fortress 2
Crysis
BioShock
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Best Technology
Halo 3
Crysis
Call of Duty 4
Portal
Assassin's Creed

Best Writing
Portal
God of War II
Mass Effect
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
BioShock

Best Audio
Call of Duty 4
Everyday Shooter
BioShock
God of War II
Mass Effect

Best Debut
Crackdown (Realtime Worlds)
flOw (ThatGameCompany)
The Witcher (CD Projekt)
Everyday Shooter (Queasy Games)
Aquaria (Bit Blot)

Innovation
Rock Band
Portal
flOw
Peggle
Mass Effect

Best Handheld Game
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Phase
Contra 4
Peggle (for iPod)

Best Downloadable Game
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Everyday Shooter
Peggle
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (XBLA version)
Flow

Game of the Year
BioShock
Call of Duty 4
Portal
Rock Band
Super Mario Galaxy