Bamboo Cyberdream

One more GDC post, a quick roundup of the remaining talks which I found significant and some other general folderol.

Writer’s Roundtable

Every year I attend GDC, I go to the Writer’s Roundtable at least one of the days. Every year I walk away disappointed. I think this year I realized why — it’s because it’s the Writer’s Roundtable, rather than the Writing Roundtable. I’d love to have a greater focus on the craft, but it seems like just a lot of whinging about the plight of writers in the games industry. Questions like “how do you unify tone across seven writers” are just met with blank stares when most people are struggling to get their studios to hire one full-time writer.

<shrug> I’d love this session to be more relevant, but I don’t know how to accomplish that. Getting people to listen to each other and stay more on topic would be a start.

(Also: writers complain that they’re not respected in every creative industry. Not unique to game writers. Try talking to screenwriters sometime about “possessive credits.”)

Permadeath

The Game Design Challenge this year was an odd one for me, the first time I’ve felt truly at odds with the prevailing opinion of the crowd. While I appreciated how he was able to infuse the scenario with humor, Jenova Chen’s Facebook game built around real people’s deaths really struck me as distasteful and borderline offensive. Assigning numeric value to human life (even as part of a game to help memorialize those lives) is just something I find inherently slimy, and I grew increasingly uncomfortable as he went on.

I thought Kim Swift, on the other hand, presented a thoughtful, reasoned game that had the potential to actually do some good. A prescription game to help people come to terms with their impending death and put positive energy into the world is the kind of thing we could use more of. All games teach, whether we want them to or not, and the lessons she proposed are some of the most important we can learn as humans. Should make us all think about what lessons our own games are teaching. I had some design quibbles, but she was tackling an incredibly hard subject as a solo designer, so I didn’t mind it.

The crowd, however, seemed to have the exact opposite reaction to the one I did — humor wins the day, as usual. That’s OK. Kim Swift, I salute you, and you win the official Shane Liesegang Game Design Challenge Award.

Overhead SMASH

My old creative director from EALA, Randy Smith, gave a talk about how he founded and runs Tiger Style. It could essentially be called “how to run a studio without becoming a business douchebag.” I’m not looking to start my own studio (at least not in the foreseeable future), but it seemed like there were lots of indie aspirationals in the audience who were inspired. As always, Randy gave an engaging, understandable, practical talk — the kind of nuts-and-bolts affair that I think GDC should do more often.

Building Open Worlds

Nate Fox, from Sucker Punch (a studio on which I have an eternal crush), gave a superlative talk on how they built their open world city for inFAMOUS. It was just chock-full of little pragmatic nuggets of useful techniques. Sightlines, weenies (the Disney kind, not the hot dogs or the dirty kind), hex-grids, border alignment, etc. Made some good points about cutting corners on the in-between stuff so they can spend more time on “evil lairs,” or the parts that the players remember and care about more. Probably the most useful session I attended this year.

(My notes say “slides available on the internet,” but I can’t seem to find them now, which makes me sad.)

Train

Brenda Brathwaite’s talk has been well covered elsewhere so I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say, I was shocked by how emotionally affected I was — I think due to Brenda’s honesty in portraying and discussing her own emotional journey while creating it.

She repeated the assertion that “games don’t have to be fun” that I’ve heard before, citing Schindler’s List as an example from another medium. I agree with the assertion, and that’s obviously a great movie, but I also wonder how that fits in with the different place games occupy in our culture. Everyone in our society watches movies. Everyone. To be considered a literate adult citizen, you are simply expected to have seen movies like Schindler’s List. If you are involved in filmmaking, you would be actively shunned for not having seen it.

Games don’t occupy that same station — even among game developers, I don’t think there are games you are expected to have played. (Sure, we all assume you know Tetris, Civilization, Super Mario Bros., etc., but they’re more as a foundation to the medium than as “something you simply must experience.” [I would say Heavy Rain comes close to that category, but obviously it falls short of Schindler’s List in execution. {No shame in that.}])

I wonder if we can do non-fun games without having that sense of compulsory consumption. Or rather, if they would gain as wide consumption as non-fun works do in other media.

(Definitely don’t think we should stop trying to make non-fun, serious, affecting work — just wondering if it’s futile to try and get them to a wider audience. To her credit, Brenda Brathwaite is unconcerned with audience size for these particular games, and so my bringing this up is a bit of an unfair tangent.)

In any event, her talk is the kind that makes you look at your own work and wonder if you could elevate it to a more substantial level.

Gender Breakdown

One final observation. We hear constantly about the gender breakdown in the industry, how more women developers would be good for the industry. I agree with this wholeheartedly; more perspectives will help up make better games. The boys’ club is a self-reinforcing environment, and breaking down those walls will help us create more relevant art.

I noticed that there was a pretty high number of female conference associates at GDC, though. CAs, to my understanding, are predominantly aspiring developers, though there are some full-timers among them as well. On the other hand, the non-yellow shirts at the conference were the expected ratio of men to women (about 20:1) for a games conference.

This is clearly not scientific data in the slightest, but it would seem to indicate that there are a healthy number of women who would like to work in the industry, but they don’t seem to make it in. Why is there such a disparity of gender ratio between aspiring game developers and actual game developers? I’m not sure we can use the “girls don’t want in to our industry” excuse anymore (and it was always pretty weak). Now we need to figure out why that next step is missing.

There are lots of potentially confounding variables here: CA selection could be weighted towards women; professional women may be less likely to attend GDC than their male counterparts; etc. In any case, it makes you wonder.

I think this is one of the biggest problems facing our industry. I often wonder if, 20 years from now, games are like movies (everyone participates) or like comic books (small but devoted fanbase). If we stay predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly immature, the answer is obvious.

Apologies

Once more, I’ve got to clarify something from my first GDC post. I’ve updated the original article, but wanted to apologize for not giving credit for the initial idea of post-rant group confession to Darren Torpey. We had a good discussion at GDC that was the impetus for that post, and I was remiss to have not given him a shout-out.

I’ve got several things to say about GDC 2010, which was, I think, one of the better GDCs I’ve attended. I usually go chronologically, but in this case I need to get something off my chest.

Every year I attend the rant. I find it simultaneously rousing and infuriating, and here’s why.

The rant does an excellent job at bringing up important issues. Chris Hecker admonishing game jammers to try and explore depth over speed. Paul Bettner sharing the very personal story of how crunch destroyed his love for games and ultimately, his studio. Heather Chaplin calling us all out for being immature man-children. Nichol Bradford issuing a call for game developers to do more to encourage math and science education. Et cetera.

But here’s what bothers me. Every year, we listen to the rants. We applaud wildly at their populist assertions and give standing ovations to their celebrations of the yet-unrealized potential of the medium.

Then we all go back to our jobs and don’t change a damned thing.

The rants are just pure catharsis without actually encouraging action. We listen, we debate, we argue over their merits, we deliver mini-rants against them, we blog about how right they are, and we noticeably modify our respect meters for the developers giving them.

But we don’t change ourselves.

All the steering committees, whitepapers, and surveys in the world won’t make as much of a difference as individuals making changes in the choices they make in their daily lives.

So I propose the following.

Next year, after the rant session, while all the impassioned speeches are still fresh in your post-catharsis mind, go out with some fellow developers. Have a few drinks. (This proposal is made easier because it’s leveraging something we all do anyway.)




And then confess your sins.




Determine which of the rants most applies to you. Of which crime against games are you most guilty. Then offer a suggestion for how you, YOU PERSONALLY can work to not commit that sin in the coming year. This is not the time for “the industry needs more women developers” but rather the time for “I will consider gendered perspectives of my own work and strive to make my games less sexually biased and demeaning.”

Then, the following year, meet up with those same developer friends at GDC. Recall your post-rant discussions of a year earlier, and share how you have atoned for your sins. If you have failed to do so, feel no shame, for these are difficult matters. But share the difficulty of your efforts so that we can all become more aware of just how large these mountains are.

If anything, it will keep the important elements of the rants alive longer than it takes for their effects to stop rippling through the blogosphere.

There’s nothing stopping you, of course, from doing this right now. No need to wait until next year’s rant — do the same exercise. You’ll have less time for atonement since GDC falls earlier in 2011.

Which just means you’d better get cracking. Let’s fix our industry.

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I am an enormous cad for, in the initial version of this post, failing to credit Darren Torpey for the original idea of post-rant get-togethers, to which I added the next-year-followup. He is much smarter and better looking than I am, both of which I forgot in the alcohol-fueled haze in which I initially wrested these thoughts into written form.