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.

I realized today that since 1998 I’ve learned at least one new programming language every year. I consider myself as “knowing” a language if either of the following is true:

1. I used it to complete a non-trivial project
2. I spent the majority of my day in it for over a year

1. Means I have to have actually gotten into the guts of it and made it work for me. For example, while I had toyed with Python several times while in grad school, it wasn’t until I integrated it into Angel that that I could really say I knew it, thus it gets a date of 2008.

2. allows me to include languages I learned for games that haven’t shipped. :-)

Last week I was invited to speak at the UVa Scholars’ Lab on, more or less, the topic of my choice. I was thrilled to get asked to speak at my alma mater, but picking a topic was tricky.

It had to be something:

• broad enough to appeal to digital humanities scholars who may not necessarily follow games
• engaging enough to interest people who do follow games and would likely end up coming to the talk because they saw “game designer” on the poster
• unrelated enough to my work at Bethesda that I could talk about it without tipping our hand as to our current project

(A long post; mostly a brain dump of my experience at a conference last weekend.)

This past weekend my friend Benji and I made the long trek from the Capital Wasteland up to Boston for a new-ish un-conference called GameLoop. Apart from seriously misunderestimating the amount of traffic that would slow us down, the trip itself was uneventful. I did score a gold medal in the “going through a toll booth without having to come to stop” game, though, which was a great moment of victory.

As for the event itself — it was terribly cool. Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan made the thing happen by sheer force of will, and I heartily applaud them for it. They more than doubled the attendance from last year, and based on what I saw, I imagine it will continue to grow for some time to come.

I’ve been trying to break down exactly what I value in games. What I find fun, what kinds of games I’m drawn to. It’s a hard thing to quantify exactly what makes a game good, especially trying to determine a trend across all the games I’ve liked. So I’m making this page as a kind of analysis and breakdown of the games that have been strong, memorable parts of my life.