Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • Whither Online?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    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.

  • KGC is over…

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    I didn’t get to take notes today because I was doing so much–first my keynote, then a keynote from the head of Nexon (Gordon Walton took notes, but I don’t know if he wants me to post them on here or not!), then a joint Q&A with him; then a panel on bringing Korean games to America, then the closing panel with a whole bunch of folks, then the Indie Game Awards ceremony and closing party…

    Things that strike me as very similar in the industry here and there:

    • Everyone wants to know about how to break into markets in other countries
    • Everyone is worried about training the next generation of developers, wondering about what the right curriculum is
    • There’s cultural and social concerns about games everywhere: distracting from school, RMT, addiction, etc.
    • Everyone wants more diversity among the game development community
    • Everyone wants games that appeal to women
    • Everyone thinks the games are getting too expensive to make

    I have more thoughts, but I’m beat. I will put up my slides for the keynote once I make them work as static images–they’re full of animations right now.