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.
The article includes some choice quotes from what my partner John Donham called my “Khrushchev moments”. 🙂
Any notion of control we have is an illusion… managing is a generous word for what we do with communities. I prefer to call it community relations, because it’s a lot more like a relationship, occasionally an abusive one… it’s about acknowledging that the control is in their hands in the first place.
Here I am in Austin now, right across the street from the Convention Center where the mob scene that is SXSW plays out. I am totally exhausted. I went over to registration, and they were out of the badge holders so they could give me the right badge. They said they could give me one of the other sorts, but I wouldn’t have access to any parties tonight. I doubt I will be conscious for more than another two hours, so I just told them I’d come by in the morning for the real badge…
Besides, I feel guilty about not having posted the slides for the Game Meets Web talk yet. So I should stay in and do that!
In the meantime, my thoughts on GDC are as follows:
This was one of my favorite GDC sessions ever. It was, alas, a little sparsely attended compared to some of the other sessions I was in — maybe 50 people. But it was so worth it.
There were four of us on the panel: myself, Rod Humble, Chaim Gingold, and Jon Blow. And basically, everyone came in with a laptop, our games were installed on everyone’s machines, and then we played the game for a half hour while the games were talked about.
And the result, IMHO, was a sort of master class in game design. It was fantastic.
Game Studies Download
Jane McGonigal, Ian Bogost, Mia Consalvo
Criteria: relevance to devs. Novelty, weird questions. Surprising insights.
Common theme: examine how games work and how they work on the players, relationship between design and how players react.
This is not a prescription of eternal truth, just inspiration. Research evolves.
Last year’s top ten list was very popular, 10k downloads. Feedback that there was a desire for a broader palette of sorts of studies. OK, here we go:
Read More “GDC 07: Game Studies Download”
