In the ongoing project to get up all the old talks I’ve given that aren’t on here yet, here’s another oldie: this is the talk I gave at ChinaJoy back in 2004. It’s mostly just a recap of the history of online gaming. You can read it here.
Everyone doesn’t really want games that appeal to women. Everyone really just wants women to play their games. Otherwise, wouldn’t everyone be specifically looking to hire females to be on the design team, or to take more chances when it comes to design? — Xanthippe, on f13.net.
Once upon a time there was a world where half of the population couldn’t see the color blue. Painters got very frustrated when people kept asking them to paint their house the color of the sky, or of water, because they couldn’t see blue, most of them, and they didn’t know what was being asked for.
The painter’s union started having seminars on blue. “Sort of greenish, but with less yellow in it.”
The painter trade association was very surprised when something sort of purplish sold very well, and immediately started measuring the red quotient in it.
A lot of fans of painting said that it didn’t matter, because blue was sissy anyway, and not real painting.
But the people who could see blue kept insisting that blue was all around them, if only they would look and see.
So a few of the painter companies tried hiring some of the folks who could see blue. They quickly complained that other workers were painting over their blue all the time, because they couldn’t see it. “Outline it in yellow?” they were told. Or, “Are you sure there’s really blue out there? Because we see no evidence of it, and market research says that there aren’t any blue paintings that sell.” A lot of them never got hired, because it was figured that if they were crazy enough to want to paint with blue, they’d probably make bad employees.
A lot of the folks who could see blue ended up doing other things with paint instead–calligraphy, or graphic design. Nobody really noticed that they used blue like crazy, so it was only the painting industry that had a limited market.
Eventually, though, it was noticed that over time, everyone gets to see blue–the folks who didn’t see it tended to start seeing it as they got older. But then they had trouble working in the painting industry too, because they were too old, and their paintings didn’t have enough red and yellow in them, and were “too subdued for the market.”
In the end, the anti-blue brigades even got the industry to the point where the top sellers were only certain shades of yellow and red and green.
The conclusion, of course, was inevitable. Painting was probably inherently incompatible with blue. There was never a market for blue. Those blue-seers who worked with paints adapted in order to make a living.
And that’s why in that world there tend to be very few seascapes or pictures of puffy clouds.
I have placed the slides for my keynote up on the website (finally). Apologies for the delay.
Click here to read it.
I’m working on getting some of the stuff that hasn’t been on the site put up in the next few days. As part of converting over the KGC talk (still coming shortly) I also came across this opinion piece, which appeared in Game Informer a while back. So it’s now on the site in the Gaming/Essays section.
Anyone remember what cyberspace looked like a decade ago? There we were, all fresh arrivals in the Metaverse, dreaming of Snow Crash’s virtual bars and William Gibson’s skies like televisions on dead channels. We wondered if the Holodeck would require one of those newfangled 3d hardware video cards or not. If we were really old-school sci-fi fans, maybe we thought about Bradbury’s Veldt or Vernor Vinge’s “True Names.”
Back then, we dreamed about dynamic worlds that we could morph on the fly with a thought (or at least a twitch of a mouse). We had a lot of grand visions about really realistic NPCs that would move about the world like the ones in Ultima VII did. We thought maybe the orcs would be invading virtual towns because they wanted to, not because there were spawn points set up by the city gates.
These days, after suffering through Lawnmower Man and Disclosure, maybe our dreams are a bit less lofty…
Read the whole thing if you want.
I also went ahead and linked my GDC 2004 talk A Grammar of Gameplay and my Training Fall 2005 keynote Why Games Matter from the Gaming/Essays page as well as The Love Story Challenge and a talk I gave at a local IGDA chapter meeting, both from 2004.
This was my favorite talk at AGC, and Bob has posted it on the PlayOn blog.
