Raph's Website » GDC08 is over

GDC08 is over

February 23rd, 2008 (Visited 1412 times) Tags: game grammar, gdc, jonathan blow

Highlights for me:

“You’d have to go to Poland to get this dish anywhere else.” — comments around the table as we ordered the “Polish sausage, Hunan style” at Henry Hunan’s on Natoma St.
Seeing the line to see a Final Fantasy talk go on and on and on and on.
Ray Kurzweil’s talk. You go in expecting him to be a wild crazy guy telling us to upload our brains to the computer. Then he comes off very engineery, showing graph after graph. Then he pulls some magic out of his pocket (cell phone that reads to the blind, or real-time voice translation), casually mentions that you’ll live forever if you get to 2015, then goes back to graphs, graphs, graphs…
Having 3/4 of the world’s game grammarians around one table at the Marriott’s bar. Andrew McLennan, where were you? I joked to Jon Blow that if he dislikes game grammar so much, that was his chance for one well-placed hand grenade…
Pleo! It took approximately thirty seconds before I was suckered into talking to it.
Guitar Rising. Think Guitar Hero, with a real guitar and real tablature.
Watching Dan Arey, Robin Hunicke, and Louis Castle doing Rock Band.
Keep an eye out for the new game from Gonzalo Frasca’s studio…

Ah, there’s more. But I have to catch a plane home, thank goodness.

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Guitar Wizard said on February 23rd, 2008 at 9:28 am:

Guitar Wizard. Think Guitar Rising, with unlimited songs.

Vargen said on February 23rd, 2008 at 10:07 am:

Raph, you’re a guitarist. Is the Guitar Rising interface real tablature? I thought the point of tablature was that it was basically a 2-dimensional diagram of where your fingers go on the frets and strings, and leaves out precise timing altogether. Guitar Rising looks like it takes the “fret axis” and uses that for precise timing, and collapses the fret information into a number within the scrolling dots.

I know that there is another form of tablature notation that does use numbers for the frets, but that seems to me to be better suited to conserving paper than it is to the kind of sight reading that these games require.

I’m still a student when it comes to design, and I’ve never played guitar, but it seems to me that rather than trying to mimic Guitar Hero so closely they might have better results with taking the shrinking circles from Elite Beat Agents and putting them over an image of the guitar’s neck.

Vargen said on February 23rd, 2008 at 10:14 am:

Guitar Wizard’s another interesting attempt at the interface.

One of the big challenges with the guitar is how to take the 3 dimensions of fret position, string, and time and map them clearly onto the screen’s 2 dimensional display. That’s what makes it so much fun to think about though.

Raph said on February 23rd, 2008 at 10:36 am:

Pretty much all guitar tablature shows the fret number. Some forms of tab use the spacing to indicate timing, others (ones not done in ASCII) can show note stems to indicate note length. I think you are thinking of chord diagrams, not tab.

So yes, the Guitar Rising UI was very tablature-like. Basically, a lot like scrolling guitar tab.

The Guitar Wizard UI doesn’t look at all like tablature — based on what I saw in the video, I think I like the Guitar Rising UI a bit better, though it’s far cruder. On the other hand, you can’t load arbitrary songs into Guitar Rising.

Morgan Ramsay said on February 23rd, 2008 at 11:24 am:

Eh, Guitar Rising is too gimmicky; although, the business model is technically “better” because there are certainly millions more people out there with electric guitars than with toy keyboard-guitars a la Guitar Hero.

If you could create your own tracks and share them online, Rising might be more interesting. Games like Rising have been around a long time, only in the form of educational software. I still have a copy of PlayPro Interactive Guitar from 1998, which also included many more styles than simply rock. I’d love to share my Celtic music through a game like Rising though. ;p

Hey Raph, imagine putting your music for download on Xbox Live as games!

Prokofy Neva said on February 23rd, 2008 at 1:04 pm:

>You go in expecting him to be a wild crazy guy telling us to upload our brains to the computer.

My Lord, Raph, go back to your initial instinct, please. The Soviet always used to push a lot of science to get you to believe in their death cult, too. I have one word for you: Lysenko. Ray’s brain uploading is like putting Lenin in his tomb on Red Square.

Don’t you worry about who gets to decide whose brain will be uploaded? Don’t you worry about how, well, fresh, those brains will stay uploaded? Don’t you worry about what our planet will become with a lot of wired lunch meat coded by a few cultists and extremists to feed them intelligent artifice and artificial intelligence?

len said on February 23rd, 2008 at 2:12 pm:

The problem about putting anything out there for general uploading is that will happen. I found one site that is selling one of my demos without permission, and a YouTube video using one of my songs without permission or credit.

The web steals, Morgan. Lots of money are made off of that theft and the coming recourse will be vigilante code.

Rats!

Morgan Ramsay said on February 23rd, 2008 at 2:23 pm:

Prokofy Neva wrote:

Don’t you worry about what our planet will become with a lot of wired lunch meat coded by a few cultists and extremists to feed them intelligent artifice and artificial intelligence?

Here’s some more resources to fuel your alarmism: http://www.transhumanism.org, http://www.transhumanism.eu, http://www.singinst.org, http://www.sl4.org, http://www.extropy.org, and http://www.crnano.org.

StGabe said on February 23rd, 2008 at 5:45 pm:

My highlight from the MMO-related stuff was the talk by CCP’s economist for EVE. They’ve already done a good job of putting their economic philosophy and stats out there but he did a fantastic job of talking about how to structure and create VW economies that effect the gameplay you want.

I just missed you after your talk on Friday. The Q&A dragged on after the session and I had to jet before I could introduce myself. Maybe next year you can meet the grump contrarian that is StGabe.

I did happen to spend dinner with Sean Riley on Thursday night (through a mutual acquaintance) and got to argue some of the same stuff I’ve argued on here by proxy. Overall I was encouraged by the talk on MetaPlace. While I may disagree about where the market is headed (i.e. I think you’re too hard on Neil Stephenson, his scenario is actually somewhat plausible as a polished, mature-market solution for VR virtual world and doesn’t rule out non-spatial information inputs and layouts existing in parallel) I do think that a common web-based infrastructure for VW’s looks pretty valuable in the near term. A question I was going to ask is, “will there be a white label solution for a company that wants to use that infrastructure but wants 100% brand ownership of the site?”

Anyway, wasn’t sure where to put this comment so there you go.

Michael Chui said on February 24th, 2008 at 12:44 am:

Don’t you worry

The dude abides.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_Mechanicus

Raph said on February 24th, 2008 at 11:03 am:

StGabe: you should have pushed your way through the crowd. Glad you got to meet Sean though!

I AM a bit too hard on Stephenson. I think that some form of what he describes may well emerge — it just won’t be universal and unique, which seems to be the main thing people take from his book.

As far as white labelling — you can put the client anywhere, we’re happy to have it unbranded for a quid pro quo. It still has to exist on the network, though — we’re unbending about that.

GDC08 is over

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