Start Press: The 2010 Game Developers Conference

Hordes of game-industry developers and journalists converged in San Francisco this week for the 2010 Game Developers Conference. Tuesday was the first proper day of the conference, and I’m already dizzy with new perspectives on the artform I love most. Floating between the various game summits in the Moscone Center will do that to you. This year’s conference included summits for areas such as artificial intelligence, international game development, mobile devices, indie games, social & online games and serious games. There was even an entire summit devoted to people who are developing games for the iPhone.

I particularly enjoyed the Serious Games Summit keynote delivered by Soren Johnson from EA Maxis, the studio that developed Will Wright’s Spore. He built a compelling case for why a videogame’s theme doesn’t necessarily indicate its meaning. Just because a game appears in a particular setting or involves certain characters doesn’t automatically mean that’s what the game is about. He argued that, just because Spore involves single-cell organisms and prehistoric tide pools and survival of the fittest, doesn’t mean it’s a game about evolution. He argued that, at its core, the game was really about creativity. Spore’s robust creature creator underlined this point (in his opinion, World of Warcraft is more fundamentally about Darwin’s theory, even though its theme is Tolkienesque).

Here are some other examples Johnson provided during his talk of game themes/mechanics diverging in interesting ways:

- Super Mario Brothers is about timing, not plumbing
- Peggle is about chaos theory, not unicorns
- Battlefield 2 and Left 4 Dead are about teamwork, not modern warfare and zombies, respectively
- Gears of War is about taking cover, not aliens
- StarCraft is about class assymetry (think rock, paper, scissors), not intergalactic warfare
- Civilization is about being a god-king, not world history

Johnson argued that, just as art matters when the experience enlightens us, a game’s theme matters far more if the mechanic enlightens us about it.

From there I headed over to the social & online games summit to hear a panel of game-industry veterans—including Farmville designer Brian Reynolds, who started his career in earnest working on Sid Meier’s Civilization series—have gravitated toward the world of casual, mass-mass market social gaming. Every member of the panel agreed that casual games built on social networking sites like Facebook offer huge, untapped potential in terms of generating new game experiences for players. One of the panelists claimed that, working in the social-online games space hearkens back to the golden age of game development in the ’80s when you could try any idea, no matter how crazy, and see if it had potential. They rued the ways in which contemporary game development—$30 million development budgets, lowest-common denominator imperatives, teams with hundreds of people—have created a more tenuous feeling of connection between game designers and the projects on which they’re working. Since casual social games have infinitely smaller monetary risk, there’s far more leeway to explore new ideas and styles of play.

Once that summit concluded, I ran over to the Independent Games Summit to hear John Graham from Wolfire Games talk about effective marketing methods for indie game developers.

Then I bounced back over to the Serious Games Summit to hear Allan McCullough discuss his educational game Sydney Safe-Seeker, which helps train children in how to recognize and deal with sexual predators. As young players progress through the game, encountering suspect characters along the way, the game compiles data on which of the 10 general categories of ploys used by sexual predators the player is most susceptible to. That information is available for parents to view so they can more effectively train their children to steer clear of dangerous situations or individuals.

After that talk concluded, I finished up the day at the AI Games Summit for a series of talks on AI methods of assisting interactive storytelling. The content was highly technical and a lot of it sailed over my head, but it was fascinating to get an insight into how developers are solving the problem of rigid player-NPC interactions and pursuing a future where conversations develop in a far more natural, organic fashion. Emily Short used the term “lawnmower conversations” to describe the pitfall of dialogue trees in which the player is forced to systematically exhaust all the branches of conversation like a person mowing a lawn one row at a time until all the ground is covered. She demonstrated a couple recent projects—Alabaster and Glass, both of which bend familiar fairytales in weird new directions—that employ forms of interactive dialogue where the stream of conversation morphs with refreshing pliability.

Jason Killingsworth is Paste’s games editor. He is based in Dublin, Ireland, and writes about music, film, tech and games for a variety of outlets. You can reach him online at jason [at] pastemagazine.com.