I got a floor pass to the Game Developers Conference in San Jose last Thursday, courtesy of my old publisher (of Infinity and the Mind) Klaus Peters, who, with his wife Alice, publishes an interesting line of math, graphics, and game-related books.
I didn’t run into anyone else I knew, and felt a bit lonely and out of the loop. Zillions of young game-biz guys there, only a few women.
Some of the ultra-geeks had balloon bee-hive hats.
Coming at games as a computer scientist, I get excited about the graphics — this is a demo of the Playstation 3, with flexing teapotaedrons.
The hardware is also very cool, like this water cooled, mirror-cased job.
But the uses these tools are put to always seem so tawdry and dull.
And playing them looks so geeky. I always find the most interesting games to be those in the Independent Games Festival. You can download a lot of these for free.
These two guys are colorful Finns, the talkative guy on the right being named Pekko Koskinen. They entered an Unreal mod called “Dragonfly Variations.” Pekko’s real passion is for three-paragraph head-games on the back of his business card. He told me that one of the greatest Finnish novels is Volter Kilpi’s Alastalon Salissa, sadly untranslated.
These fellows were competing in the Independent Games Festifal too, they had a nice single-button game called Strange Attractors. You turn the force of gravity on and off in an Asteroids-like setting, that’s all. It’s intriguing. They reminded me of the very best students I used to teach in my Game Programming course at SJSU.
Driving home, stopped at a traffic light, I saw a beautiful tree. In some oblique fashion, I'm sure that today I saw something I can use in Postsingular. I'm still wrestling with determining the nature of the metanovel…
March 24th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
sometimes when i get a bad head i ckick on yer blog & when i see some of the words in association with the pictures i smile & almost snort in a giggling sort of wave – thanx fer the sanity
March 24th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
If you want see the better side of the GDC, watch the video of Will Wright’s keynote. It’s about procedurally generated content! It’s a long talk, but worth it.
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-262774490184348066&q=spore
March 27th, 2006 at 11:48 am
I think that particular Will Wright talk (the one Jon linked to) is actually from last year. Still, it contains several interesting issues: Algorithmic generation, such as the elements of Spore featured in the talk, should make an interesting splash once it hits the larger circles of game development.
As Will mentions in the talk, this style of programming has been a fairly big presence in the demo-field – but for some reason it has not been generally applied in gaming. It certainly won’t “solve everything” (although I expect that we will hear this type of hype once Spore comes out), but it will add some significant possibilities for development – perhaps even giving birth to game types that could not be made without it (here’s hoping).
From my point of view, this year’s GDC was a somewhat cynical affair – the industrial nature of the game industry was the most palpable thing I was left with… the word “industry” seems to have painted itself on the back of my mind with giant, blinkety-blink, neon letters. Without the Independent Games Festival you would not find much heart on the Expo floor (hearts that have been shot to pieces or torn out from their owner’s chests don’t count).
It was nice to meet Rudy, though. I did not recognize him by face, and with my semi-rebellious airs against the industrial spirit I had decided that I would not check the name tags first, so that I could better take people as personalities, not vessels of past merit. So for most of our conversation, all I knew was that I was having an enjoyable conversation with a seemingly perceptive, humble-mannered and generally pleasant guy with an ambience of a kind of impish intellect… from who knows where. It was only when he mentioned that he knew Anselm Hollo, a Finnish poet and a teacher of creative writing, that my curiosity got the best of me.
Thanks for the kind words, Rudy, and cheers to you for mentioning my slightly unusual mini-rpgs (the last name is actually Koskinen, though – but the Finnish words tend to be rather alien in structure to English speakers, so the misspelling is understandable). I met throngs of people in GDC – but if I would count only the interesting meetings, one hand might suffice, two at most. Still, you would easily fit among them.
March 27th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Just to clarify, we’re not actually students. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and a job at a brewery. The student showcase and the IGF are two different entities, though the placement at the GDC could easily have caused some confusion.
Eric Walker
Ominous Development
(makers of Strange Attractors)