GDC 07: Where Game Meets the Web
I have put up the slides (warning, tons of images!) and the original PPT file (51MB Zip) of my lecture at GDC this year. Those of you who are Web 2.0 geeks will likely find nothing much that is interesting here, honestly — but those of you who are straight up game geeks may find it enlightening.
That talk was the best one of my whole conference. When you suggested that designers should have at least some layering of charlatanry and pretension, I cackled. I guess its all about constraints.
On friday I gave $20 to Sausha Lowell, the virtuoso hobo outside the west hall. I wouldn’t have given it to him if it weren’t for your rating hiw of his content. He graduated with a degree in philosophy and wants to write a book. I told him to get himself a free gmail account at the library and then mail sections of it to his account – free storage.
What was cool about the talk, overall, was that it made me feel like humanity could transform into something good and sustainable, but it also made me feel like I could make some mad money in the near future.
Excellent. And I disagree with you about this not being interesting to Web 2.0 geeks. One of the most interesting things about current development on the web is where we are able to blur the lines between play, social and work.
We can’t in every case, but we can in more places now than we used to several years ago. This presentation is directly relevant to anybody who’s making anything that appeals to more than one person working on his or her own.
Ah, well, I have a whole separate talk that is basically about web meeting game, e.g. from the other direction. Lots of lessons for web geeks to learn from games, methinks. Expect to hear from on that at both ETech and Web 2.0 Expo.
Very cool. Makes me wish I could afford to go to things like Etech and Web 2.0 Expo. Looking forward to seeing the presentation online. 🙂
I think the Web folks have already learned a lot from the game folks: look at Google Image Labeler and Amazon Askville. Or the change of heart on the part of the usability gurus a while back, when they realized that aesthetics could contribute to functionality rather than always obscuring it.
Anyway, it was a great talk, although I almost made a run for it at the beginning when you suggested that we all bolt for the Three Rings session. Glad I stayed.
Awesome talk, whats funny is the older guy sitting next to me visibly winced when you said (paraphrase) “If you havent read this book, (The Long Tail) then you are a dinosaur.”
After the talk I spoke to him (he was in marketing) briefly. We spoke about the long tail, he thought it was a “hard economics read” and I assured him it was very assessable to non-econ geeks.
Notable Quoteable: “Bits are Dead” good stuff….
I’m such a dipshit for missing this talk. Thanks for the Kongregate plug!
There are many, many arguments against that statement on many, many levels.
Dinosaurs dominated terrestial ecosystems for 160 million years. Dinosaurs constantly evolved over the course of 160 million years. I don’t think the term dinosaur when used to mean “not up-to-date” is collectively fair to, well, dinosaurs.
I think the more appropriate statement would be, “If you’re not constantly learning, staying on top of the curve, and testing your limits, your professional value is increasingly diminished.”
I think one thing missed by the gamer side is exactly what you point out above, Raph. You really are telling game developers they need to learn something from the web 2.0 crowd. Especially when you see a comment like this:
Frankly, though, a lot of the web 2.0 crowd could learn alot from the web 2.0 crowd… did that make sense? Doesn’t matter, that’s a different post.
You recap web 2.0 design concepts wonderfully and let people draw their own conclusions as to how to implement them in modern game systems. Will a lot of people hear? Let’s look at one of the 800 lb gorilla’s out there.
Sony had two big annoucements at GDC: Home and LittleBigPlanet.
Home tries to get it, but, I fear, is going to miss the mark. Its just like Kaneva and SecondLife-lite. While there is an attempt at UGC, its in a nice sterile sandbox and eventually everyone will be more or less alike.
LittleBigPlanet embraces the UGC concept. Use our platform to create levels and uploaded them to the servers and resell them to the user base. Ratings, Rankings, and Reputation. Game as a platform. They got it all.
Now which one was by the big corporate giant and which the small, lithe, developer? I’m not sure Sony knows what it’s got it’s hands on, but they better be nice to an innovator like this one. They see where the industry is going.
Good information Raph. I enjoyed going through the slides.
I think the ZIP is fixed. Anyone wanna try it?
This, along with the other two sessions you were involved in at GDC, were absolutely great. It was actually rather revolutionary for me in particular. I hadn’t spent that much time looking into Web 2.0 seriously. While I had followed it lightly, and I have taken advantage of what it provides, I hadn’t ever really connected it with game development.
I’ll be avoiding that mistaken in the future.
I’m rather interested in just how many sessions I went to that covered topics along these lines as well. It definitely seems to be creeping up into a few different corners of the industry. I’m happy I decided to go to this one as opposed to the other session I was eying at the same time.
Just two sessions before Raph’s I was in the “State of Indie games” roundtable session, and sadly, it appeared no one but me actually understood anything about the current trends in the web.
The discussion turned towards the “gatekeepers” of console content, AKA Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. I tried to explain to the people in the session that these companies understand The Long Tail and realize that it actually does not make sense for them to keep games off of their system (as long as they get a cut of the profit). That long-term they’re working on ways to get more games onto their platforms, and eventually let anyone release a game (getting a cut of the sale, of course). Like I said, no one who spoke up understood this and insisted that the consoles will forever be an exclusive group because they don’t want to see a “crash” again. I wish everyone in that session could have seen Raph’s session.
That being said, the Long Tail really only applies to aggregators. It doesn’t change things too much if you’re a content producer. I don’t believe Raph is advocating that the games industry stop producing content in favor of aggregating it; only that there’s some advantages to being an aggregator. There’s more ranting where that came from.
Lavoro eccellente! ..ringraziamenti per le informazioni..realmente lo apprezzo: D