GDC was a couple of weeks ago already. Life’s been hoppin! But somehow I can’t seem to write any other posts until I acknowledge the fact that I was in fact there and talk a little about it.
Personally, I had a really awesome and productive GDC. I went to a couple talks about money. I talked to all my favorite awesome advice people. I met many very cool new folks, and reconnected with some people I haven’t seen for awhile. Some very cool potential businessy things came out of it. None of which I’m ready to talk about until I get a better sense of what is actually going to happen. So let’s move on.
One thing I found really intriguing about this year’s conference was the diverse international presence. At least on the Expo floor. There were booths from all kinds of countries, telling you why you should start a studio in the Netherlands, attend a conference in Dubai, or relocate to Canada. Especially Canada. Our Northern neighbors took up the whole left-most row of the floor. They demoed games and talked about how awesome Canada was for developers. They even brought along their Olympic Mascots. Some neat projects were on display. There was a great Facebook arcadey Pirate game, and a hillariously Candadian (and very fun) curling game for the Wii (I’ll try to dig up the links for these later). One of the neatest and most ambitious looking however was a game called BotColony from a company called Northside. Check out this demo video to get an idea of what this natural language, AI driven adventure game is capable of.
I cannot write a post-GDC post without mention of my good buddy Chaim Gingold’s talk, The Human Play Machine. It was amazing and very inspiring. I only took this very short video clip because I wanted to pay attention to the talk and not taping. Chaim discussed the ways in which we, as human play machines, are wired and built for play and what this means to people who make things for humans to play with. It was philosophical but very salient and directly applicable to my life as a game developer. My favorite part of the talk however was the last five to ten minutes which was Chaim’s addendum of sorts. In it he turned his attention to the question: Why do we do this? Why do we make make games at all? Is there good in what we do? Chaim had a couple answers to this question but here’s my favorite: Science has shown us that when we are at play, its one of the few times when our brains truly feel joyful. Therefore, if all we are doing by giving people fun and engaging things to play with is to “improve the global happiness quotient”, then we are providing the world with an incalculably positive service. I left this talk feeling awesome. Thanks Chaim!
You can see his slides and notes here.
Well that’s it for this year’s GDC wrap up. See you again next year! (Hopefully before that though…)