Month: March 2005

Will Wright’s talk proved to be impossible to get into. The queue was going in rounds all over the building. (And later, it turned out that EA forbid showing the video of that talk. Really creating friends, that company.) Instead, I joined Staffan in Katie Salen’s roundtable on the education of game designer. Talking about the core of these emerging degrees we did found that there is quite an overlap with what I call game studies. The common vocabulary, ability to analyse games, research skills, and an understanding of both the games’ history and the design processes involved. Katie emphasised that a course in level design or one in interaction design might be crucial for an undergraduate, four year degree building up solid designer skills. Diversity and team-based learning and working strategies are something that is important, too. It might also be good (cautious) idea to have game design as a minor at the undergraduate level, like someone at the roundtable said. A solid major in some useful related fields could be a good idea before embarking on a master’s degree, or directly on an industry career. The acute challenge will nevertheless be creating the core game studies curriculum, to serve these different vocational – or not – new degrees.

My second roundtable on the identity of game studies was better in terms of coherence and constructiveness of discussion, but (or perhaps because of) there was no many people. The field of game studies will take off in numerous places rather soon, there is no question about it. Dedicated games departments will be a few, but games will be researched and taught from multiple angles in departments that otherwise centre on media, communication, software engineering or art.

We missed the James Cameron IMAX movie I had been wishing to see all week. Instead we got together with Sten Selander and other Swedish games guys and walked all the way to Height-Ashbury area. A trendy little restaurant titled “rlm” proved to be good, but also rather expensive. My credit card bills for the last month will kill me…

While driving away from S.F., I thought how to summarise my GDC’05 experience. I missed probably the best presentation of the show (Wright), and spent far too much time with my laptop dealing with work issues – but GDC was worth it anyways, and I am glad I made it. Getting into touch not only with the industry issues, but also with the bunch of academic colleagues who are finding game design relevant is important for our work in GameLab, too.

Heading back to Finland, I first ended up to the Chicago airport, which seems to beat my previous record holders (Heathrow and JFK) in misleading, missing or faulty guidance information. It has also ridiculous queues. Too little personnel doing the security checks for entire international terminal. Some really do know how to mess things up. United Airlines did not give us any food during the entire 4.5 hour flight from S.F., so I was hungry, tired and pissed off by the time I had navigated through this particular airport hell.

Cold and snowy, Chicago was already a step closer to home. There is something in the frozen earth: it affects people, their minds – in our case, probably also the national character. Cold is something you can rely on.

The precise, spacey systematic of Stockholm Arlanda airport was almost like being home. They even managed to keep track of my luggage, as I noticed when in Helsinki. Cup of hot chocolate, a two-hour bus trip to Tampere. Then a taxi. When at home, I calculated having spent a straight 20 hours on the road. Shower feels good.

In Thursday, I took a quick dip into the panel about the state of the mobile games industry. It was sort of enlightening, particularly about the US situation. Greg Ballard was speculating about the future, and it seems that there are contradictory expectations: both those of consolidation and more predictable “quality of product”, and those of a revolutionary novelty, success story to wake people up to the full potential of mobile games. The general scepticism towards multiplayer mobile games was also interesting to hear.

The panel was also advertising the (free) 2005 Mobile Games White Paper:

http://www.igda.org/online/

My drowsiness may also in part be due to the indie game and Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony last night. Cheerfully like a nerdie, subcultural version of Oscars, this event is fun to follow. Half-Life 2 took the main prize, no surprise there. Best, and most rambling talk was that of Richard Bartle, who was given the “first penguin” recognition. – I would recommend taking a look at the indie game finalists, many of them are really breaking away from standard genres:

http://www.gamespot.com/igf or http://games.download.com

I have not heard the actual numbers, but the crowds here are almost too much. Getting a seat at the grand ballroom during the keynotes means getting in line (or mass of people) about half-an-hour before the scheduled time. Otherwise, you are standing somewhere, or trying to find a spot at the floor to sit down. There is probably an upper limit to how large a conference can get before becoming dysfunctional, and GDC is currently approaching that line.

The keynote “Heart of a Gamer” by Nintendo’s President, Satoru Iwata was not as suave as MS’s Allardt’s, but a sympathetic one. Emotion is the bottom-line for measuring of game’s success. Challenge & reward is the core mechanic for balancing a game design. And ideas, creativity was the third element Iwata-san emphasised. Growth of the business was also in the agenda: 18 billion dollar market from US and Europe alone, US market up 8 % last year. Concern for the narrowing of vision seemed genuine. Innovation, intuition, inviting and interface were the 4 “i’s” Satoru Iwata hailed as the Nintendo criteria for their software. Criteria seem a bit overlapping, though. Rest of the talk was dedicated to a look at Nintendo DS software. The “Nintendogs” puppy trainer was a charming one, and strengthened my belief in the role of sound is the next key interaction modality to take off.

John Underkoffler (ex-MIT researcher) spoke about science literacy and its relation to entertainment. As the science consultant for Minority Report, he was actually really interesting to listen to. The primacy and spread of display into all kinds of surfaces was part of this particular vision of future – which was, btw, fundamentally a dystopia like Underkoffler reminded us. After showing off a bunch of really interesting projects, and perhaps the most powerful gesture controlled interface I’ve ever seen. And also giving really tempting advance press to some small-budget SF-film, which name I unfortunately do not remember any more.

Peter Molyneux was not so convincing in his first talk I heard, about the future of game design, as it proved to be mostly dedicated to technology demos which was not exactly what the title promised. The second one was a Fable postmortem, which was more interesting in its starting point as backwards reflection and analysis. Fable started as a battling-mage multiplayer PC game called “Wishworld” in 1998. The RPG-style idea of morphing character, hero & world (for a console) emerged in 1999 re-design. This became the “Project Ego” in 2000: player was supposed to “become” the hero, actions changing every element of the game. In 2002 there was showing off the prototype technology. In 2003 name was changed into Fable, and the original release date was starting to lag. Molyneux, standing next to a Microsoft guy (Josh?), was all friends about the joint cutting-down and redesign process – except for the multiplayer, cutting of which (at the last moment) still really seemed to irk Molyneux. He also made new promises about the PC version of Fable, currently in the works.

My own roundtable, “Looking for the Hard Core of Game Studies” had a bumpy start, as there was no projector (despite me repeatedly asking for that) and I tried to circulate some printouts of my PowerPoint presentation. The discussion was interesting, even if the polarisation between “industry-useful” trade skills and “useless” humanistic theorization emerged rather strongly. But there was also much fruitful boundary-crossing between the extremes. One hour was of course ridiculously short time for the topic.

Same could have been said about the last session of Thursday I participated in; the academia-industry relations panel consisted of behavioural researchers, educators and an economist (Castronova), and raised several good points. Had a couple of beers with some of this (Terra Nova – DiGRA) bunch later.

I finally sat also through Jim Gee’s presentation, rather than getting to the hotel: it was nice, as much about seeing him advancing through the first steps in Ninja Gaijin and Animal Crossing, as about games as a method for learning. It was entertaining, and maybe even inspiring as a way to do a classroom experience. How bout playing together – playing analytically, discussing after playing?

I also listened to Douglas Lowenstein (ESA president) talk about games spreading into American society. Also in this speech I was puzzled by the ways how ‘serious games’ as a concept was used, somehow as the synonym for ‘non-commercial’, or ‘academic’. Talk was at its most illustrative about the concerns and politics of the American society. IGDA may have “international” in its title, but Lowenstein’s talk well demonstrated the US-centric mindset and world-view that dominated the Serious Games Summit. There is nothing bad with that, I suppose. It is only that the perspective in Europe at least is a bit different.

On my third day, I sat through talk by Masaya Maatsuura (hyping the net distribution, social networks, http://www.recommuni.jp). Next one was keynote by Microsoft’s J Allard. First hyping “hi-definition living room”, then personalization and then the “transformation” into new “HD era” where games are the centre. Hi-def connectivity is all about that kind of experiences future games can provide, Allard was claiming. On-demand gaming? In the movie part of this high-production-value presentation, it was fun to see guys of Remedy from Helsinki next to James Cameron and others to join this happy message of connected, HD Era. Samsung and Alienware were also among those riding the same wave of hardware, software and service upgrades. In his message to developers, Allard referred to the pressures of contemporary and future “super-productions”, and marketed XNA Studio as an team and workflow integration solution. Next XBox was hyped, too, as well as its next generation interface. Micro-transactions for personalized content was one feature promised. The session ended as 1000 Samsung HD TVs were handed out to the audience. Wow. No luck this time, though.

After that, it was refreshing to get into the Emily Dickinson License/Game Design Challenge. Fun, yet illustrative, the session actually proved how much you have to understand about target system (the poetry of ED) to create a game out of it. Clint Hocking, Peter Molyneux and Will Wright had approached the challenge with both respect for the powers of poetry, as well as with almost total irreverence. Will probably won due to the speed and number of his jokes, mainly.

Peter Molyneux spoke about the next generation of game design, starting from point that seems the total opposite of serious games talks during the first two days: when games become mass market, people do not want to “learn” and do tutorials – they want to get to the “experience” immediately. His “morphable gameplay” seems to be the idea I have called “multimodal” one: having several distinctly different player roles supported. “The Room” technology demonstration was actually the most interesting part of the presentation with its dreamy, surreal realities.

Raph Koster had already started his talk on “grammar of gameplay” when I was visiting the academics group gathering at the IGDA booth. Ludeme, or game mechanic is based on ‘verbs’, he told us. He is aiming for formal notation system (like Björk & Holopainen with their game design patterns, and several other people with their formal systems) which is somewhere between flow-charts and musical notation. I was not completely sure his terminology/typology was totally clear, though. Verb, ability, tool: these all have uses in Raph’s system, but perhaps overlapping ones? “Content is statistical variance.” He sure can come up with snappy phrases, That is a skill, too. He also seems to be thinking a lot about logical links and loops. As repetition has clear role in gameplay he might be at something here.

Oh well. I find myself still rather jetlagged, it really takes time to adapt to this time difference! Also, my server ended off-line again – it seems that there is something wrong with my net connection back in Finland. Thanks Laura for fixing it up!

Second day of GDC, I mostly missed everything. Getting up early, we had a phone meeting arranged on a joint Finnish-Swedish research project we have been planning with Interactive Institute. Then I spent some time planning an Academy of Finland project with couple of Finnish universities on agency in digitalizing cultures. Most of the time, I have been watching my Outlook crash (did that perhaps ten times in a row), missing the network connection, losing power, trying to access power source to reload batteries of a phone or computer, trying to move files, convert files from format to another etc. When I tried to hear Ted Castronova’s talk, it had been swapped with Ben Sawyer’s one, and had already taken place in morning. So missed that, too. Ended up to audience for a panel on serious games which Henry Jenkins was heading. I suppose it was interesting and relevant one in this context, but I realized I was becoming bored and impatient; to have the US defence budget as the seemingly sole and main source for academic research funding just seems so perverse for an European. Sorry, cannot help it.

Back into hotel, to load the batteries of the laptop, this time. And I thought I had an extra, long-life battery.

Rather than following a track of days, I try to follow some lines of thought, this time. Lets see how it will work out.

The time difference into California is 10 hours, and I have been spending most of the trans-Atlantic flight and the first night here in San Francisco reading. Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson, a gift by friend that seems oddly appropriate for my current condition. As the literary fashion has had it during recent years, this is also a novel about cryptography and hunt after codes, but it is also a novel about jetlags, advertisement industry, search for significant connections (or illusions of such), about the structures of meaning in general.

Brain is the place for meaning, but it is not the only one. Brain is also about chemistry, the rhythms, ebbs and flows that is the way your body swims in the flows of the world. It is hard to discern some inherent meaning in all of this ‘stuff’ we are surrounded by, perhaps even in human relationships, but is the chemistry is right, profound things can happen. Meaning can take place; feeling and sense, depth and beauty can enter the game of relations, equations, structures of the incomprehensible real.

GDC will take this year place in the Moscone Convention Centre, next to the Sony Metreon Centre of San Francisco. During my first night’s walk there with my half-drunk, jetlagged brain, I got in images of game stores, restaurants, a Sony Style store, a movie multiplex. All these images like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that do not really connect. I am considering of finding a drugstore and some melatonin tomorrow.

I just want to say something about the world of mobile data. It sucks. The Wi-Fi systems I’ve installed in my home have got their ups and downs (currently the network does not work, again), but it is nothing compared to the situation on the road. When travelling, I pocket two Nokia mobile phones and my laptop has integrated Bluetooth and WLAN card, plus a brand-new Vodafone 3G data card, but I am still mostly unable to get into the net. The settings, the drivers, the jungle of roaming and (re)configuring: reality mostly means staring at the hourglass counting your moments away. There has been a decade to put this right, but clearly it has not been enough.

San Francisco has its distinct identity, which suddenly reminds me of Kuala Lumpur. Also here, the cultural melange, the irreducible contrast. High-rising financial district in contrast to the Chinatown, and the slums starting just off the shopping centres at the Market street. Also the combinations of Asian cultures feel familiar; the Chinese, the Indian, Thai – not only the restaurants, but also the people on the street have familiar faces. Trying to find a place to have burritos and a beer as a lunch, I end up after long walk to eat red Thai curry, cooked a Mexican-Chinese staff.

The first lecture I participated was Raph Kosters recap of his “A Theory of Fun” in GDC’s Serious Games Summit. I am not going to blog these things with any detail, since I know there is going to be several better reports out there (and since I have the habit of losing myself into my own thoughts and missing the key points of speakers in any case). Raph argued that games are a form of cognitive training, and therefore fundamental for our survival, even. The parts about our proclivity into pattern recognition led me thinking about Gibson’s novel and my own puzzlement over our life as meaning-making organisms. He is also talking about the representative “layer” of games as “dressing”. However, what is surface and what is depth is actually negotiable, as far as I can see. Our minds are capable of taking in multiple structures as foundation for meaning-making. And there are cultural reasons why certain people are inclined to find their meaning in interaction or problem-solving, and others in storylines, characterisation or in unravelling the thematic depth, or “message” of particular cultural texts.

The second talk I heard was by Ian Bogost on advergaming. Most of the media seems to be about advertisement these days, and there are people who claim that advertising is more interesting than the “main content” in most channels. Personally, I am sort of divided. I would use most means of filtering ads away from the programmes I am recording and viewing, for example. On the other hand, some ads are small works of art on their own right, and it would be fine if there would be an “all-ads” channel (or, more likely, a download site) where you could have a look of ads, as much as your heart desires. Keeping track of the consumer society in a controlled way. Rhetoric, persuasion, influence and “message” certainly all relate to the general meaningfulness of communicative action. But especially with covert commercial messages or purposes motivating more and more of our public spaces, it tends to rob something away from the value of attached experiences, I think. Like use of classical tunes in TV ads; suddenly you cannot listen to your favourite composer any more without enforced associations into commercial products invading your consciousness.

I am not probably in the focus audience for advergaming, or even for “serious games” in general (I value games too much in themselves, rather than as tools for some ulterior motives), but both Ian and Raph had fun and informative talks. Still, I might skip the afternoon sessions. I need to work on my GDC roundtable and couple of other work things I carried with me from Finland.