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I think this was my seventh visit to the US for a games event, but nothing could have prepared me for this year’s edition of GDC. Even though I am still in a post-conference high (I’m typing this up at Portland airport, waiting for my connecting flight), I can safely say that GDC 2007 and its extracurricular activities made for some of the best days of the year (maybe more), both from a personal and professional point of view.

One part of it was the overall positive vibe at the conference. Three or four years ago, various next-generation icebergs of development pain and licensed genericity were still ominously looming on the horizon as the game industry Titanic ploughed through the waters of icy death. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad. But it seemed almost everyone was complaining about broken developer-publisher relations, rising development costs and declining creativity. The Godfather: The Game took 400 people to make, which is a fact that must have been repeated at least 400 times. But things turned out alright. We’re on a more pleasant cruise now. Some of the same concerns are still valid and still exist, but this year saw a healthy dose of positivity, inspiration and common sense.

This year’s Game Developers Conference was also good for me simply because I’ve made many industry friends over the years, and my network seems to have reached critical mass. At GDC 2004 I had no parties, at GDC 2006 I had two parties, and this year I had more parties than I had evenings. It was great to hang out with so many friends and meet so many new people as well. The social element was completely exhausting and, fortunately, a lot of fun. I also no longer felt like the lone Dutchman in America, as many direct and indirect colleagues from the the Netherlands flew over thanks to the new Benelux Game Initiative booth. (Side-note: why does everyone have to plan their parties on Thursday? I went to three of them on Thursday, but there were three others I wanted to go to. Can we please spread them out a little?!)

I didn’t dedicate myself exclusively to attending sessions this year, but I still spent a good 60-70% in the classrooms. The sessions confirmed many hunches and ideas that I already had, while also giving me entirely new perspectives on projects I am working on.

My personal favorite by far was Clint Hocking’s beautiful and thought-provoking talk on exploration. Clint established a clear distinction between spatial exploration (exploring and mapping out a game’s geography in your head) and systems exploration (poking around the gameplay’s possibility space). He then suggested a third type, namely self-exploration (the player reflecting on the decisions made in the game, seperate from the desire to optimize within the systems). The concept is tough to explain, and I’m completely using my own words here, but maybe you can get the gist of it from Clint’s slides and the accompanying paper. The slides approached Will Wright levels of awesome, and I had a lot of fun discussing the ideas (and even moreso, the intentions behind Clint’s talk) with Jake and Steve afterwards.

Another powerhouse came courtesy of Damion Schubert, who lectured on writing game design documents, a topic that’s long been strangely absent from game development gatherings. There’s a common saying in the industry that “no one reads design documents”, which is sadly often true, but Damion argued that it’s simply because they tend to be horribly written. He initially focused on how to write clearly and concisely, then talked about how to structure a design document so that team members of every discipline will be able to use it effectively. While I’m already good at removing clutter and making every word count, his ideas on document structure have inspired me to tinker with Word templates as soon as I get back to the office. Damion’s blog has the presentation slides. They shouldn’t be too difficult to understand without the accompanying talk.

The browser games roundtables were another highlight for me. Roundtables are always great since they put you in a room with 30+ other people who are working on exactly the same things as you are, or have expertise in related areas (at the browser game roundtable there were two guys from Mozilla - nice!). While insightful, I noticed that most developers of browser games are using the web as a delivery mechanism for self-contained Flash games, and not so many are thinking of the web as a platform with its own unique advantages. I have further thoughts on this topic and will probably blog about them soon.

A few slow sessions aside, I enjoyed the two-day Independent Games Summit. The indies really seem to have established a strong identity and purpose for themselves, probably as the result of new distribution channels and their commercial opportunities. While there’s many takeaways to be had from the premiere edition of the summit, my main impression was that indies are now trying to avoid innovation for innovation’s sake, instead wanting to bring creativity, personality or ‘heart’ to their games. Many speakers including Jenova Chen (fl0w and Cloud) and Jon Mak (Everyday Shooter) expressed how they didn’t want to chase completely wild concepts, but want to go deeper into the core of their games. Simon Carless also noted that the Ecco the Dolphin-esque Aquaria (one of the most nominated games in the IGF awards) is notable not for some crazy innovation, but for simply being really creative and well-made. I think these are signs of a maturing industry.

The indies’ entrepeneurship and willingness to wing it is also encouraging. One of the guys from The Behemoth showed the marketing and merchandising for Alien Hominid they’d done. Instead of farming these things out, they cut out the middlemen and did it themselves. For instance, they acquired the machinery needed to make pin buttons and vinyl figurines by talking directly to the companies that make them. It’s nice what you can do simply by doing it.

Which brings me to XNA. Not being an extremely technical guy, the initial announcement of the XNA platform a few years ago didn’t really do much for me. But now that I’ve seen what can be done with XNA Game Creators Studio, I want to learn it and use it. I saw a press presentation by, amongst others, Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games, in which they explained how they created an XBLA game with XNA in ridiculously little time. I will post an article on this at ShackNews (I couldn’t resist doing some journalism at GDC on the side) but suffice to say that XNA is extremely interesting both as a prototyping tool and as a full-on development environment. Microsoft will be announcing their plans for the YouTube-like community arcade for XNA games later in the year. Kudos to Microsoft for helping to democratize game development tools — I get the sense that this could be the first step of a true revolution.

Oddly enough Sony had a more interesting keynote this year than Nintendo. I’ll write up thoughts on Playstation Home and LittleBigPlanet in a seperate post.

Finally, the Game Developer’s Choice awards were quite entertaining in both scripted and unscripted ways. Main host Tim Schafer was expectedly funny. There was also a marriage proposal, a joke marriage proposal, a Miyamoto cameo in a Mega64 video, a great acceptance speech by Greg Costikyan, and much more I can’t remember. The standing ovations for Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and Shigeru Miyamoto who received the First Penguin and Lifetime Achievement awards respectively were totally goosebump-worthy. GameSpot has the video of the whole ceremony somewhere.

Those are just some of my impressions of GDC. This post could be three times as long, but I’ve got to stop somewhere. I followed some great sessions, had some great parties (mad props to Daniel James and Three Rings in particular), got some business done (pitched a project to some investors) and on top of that, I really enjoyed being able to explore San Francisco properly for the first time (nothing beats getting a picture taken in front of the actual Full House house).

Stay tuned. More to come.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Game Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.