GDC: The Top Ten Peter Molyneux Quotes

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by [name redacted]

Although the concept got an enthusiastic approval, the officially published article was toned down a bit. Fair enough. But there’s no holding back Peter Molyneux. So here this is.

On Friday, the syrupy and gracious Mr. Molyneux held a session to show off his half-complete mega-opus, Fable 2. There are, however, a few problems in covering the session, in that a valiant effort in spin control has stifled what Molyneux can actually discuss. Most of what he was left to reveal, therefore, had already been revealed at an earlier keynote. The rest of the material was generally familiar from a much smaller press gathering a year ago, at which Molyneux personally served cookies to all interested parties. Which was… mostly this writer.

Nevertheless, in lieu of actual information, one can always rely on Molyneux himself as a topic of interest. Let us, then, revisit the session and stroke our chins to the form, if not the content, of Molyneux’s message. Since most of these quotes are more fun out-of-context, the explanations have all been spoiler-tagged. Highlight to reveal.

Busy busy busy

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So for the last two months I’ve been under a boulder, localizing a sort of insane Russian RPG. It’s taking way longer than it should, for a bunch of reasons (most of them out of my hands, for once!), and it’s kind of driving me batty. As if that’s not enough, last week I had GDC to contend with! So that put back the work another week, while I saddled up the BART and began to regularly drink coffee for the first time in my life, just to keep myself moving.

Most of the fruits of my labor, for what they’re worth, are now up. Pay especial attention to the content of the last one. (That’s the animation panel.) There’s a real howler coming up; I’ll amend this post when it goes live.

There was also a session on using games as tools for meditation, that I just didn’t have the time to write up. I’ll go into more detail if anyone is really curious. I thought there was some neat stuff in there, even if three-quarters of the session was an infomercial for a new agey revival of early ’90s-style multimedia starring Deepak Chopra & Company.

EDIT: I just noticed that someone switched around a few things in the animation article, such that it’s not completely accurate. (I also notice a lot of grammatial errors; this is what happens on an instananeous deadline.) Early on, the hour-long program they were discussing was literally just all the cutscenes from one game or another, edited together. They example they used was Prince of Persia: The Two Whatevers. The third game, you know, that’s got both the good and the evil Prince in it. (Or the sixth game, if you include the originals, plus that weird 3D thing for the Dreamcast.) Hi ho!

EDIT 2: All fixed! Well. As far as information goes. It could still use a copy edit.

EDIT 3: See above!

The Future of Animation is Games (No, Really!)

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by [name redacted]

Bill Kroyer of Blockade Entertainment and Mark DeAngelis, VP of programming and development for Voom Networks HD, sat around on Thursday and talked about their vision for the future of machinima: namely, mainstream broadcast animation.

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Nintendo Reveals Wii Pay-For-Online Play, WiiWare Compression

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by [name redacted]

In a curiously confidential session, Nintendo Network Administration Group Group Manager Takashi Aoyama spoke at length on the thought process behind the Wii’s online offerings.

Amongst his anecdotes were a story of how WiiConnect24 came out of early dial-up concerns, during planning stages around 2000 for a GameCube network. (Maybe if users could download content overnight, that would alleviate some of the cost and delay — except, wait! This is dialup!)

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Emotiv Knows What You’re Thinking

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by [name redacted]

The svelte Emotiv headset uses an array of sixteen EEG sensors to detect electrical impulses in the scalp. These signals are then interpreted by a suite of tools, each with its own range of applications.

The “Expressiv” application identifies and interprets facial expressions; one of Wixson’s associates demonstrated winking, blinking, and an unnerving grin, each of which was replicated on a rough facial model. Another application, called “Affectiv”, recognizes emotional states.

The most substantial and interesting application is the most active one, “Cognitiv”, which “classifies conscious active intent”. That is to say, it interprets what the wearer wants to do, allowing a player to execute specific commands and actions through thought alone.

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The Media Myth Of The Casual Gamer

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by [name redacted]

Gabe Zichermann of rmbr.com spoke with ebullience and verve of the chutzpah that has to some extent defined the casual game industry since Bejeweled sprung from the void in 2001. Zichermann implied that, on a level, the whole idea of a casual gamer is more of a “media meme” than anything real. He attributes the myth of casual game market to a mixture of somewhat mundane factors.

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Filling the Void Between Casual And Mainstream Games

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by [name redacted]

Last Day of Work’s Arthur K Humphrey spoke extensively, if rapidly, of what he sees as the false and destructive conceptual divide between casual and mainstream games. Casual games are supposed to be accessible, and mainstream games are supposed to be deep. Games that are deep yet accessible are thrust into one or the other camp largely on the basis of their presentation.

Humphrey’s solution, in part: “in-between” games. His definition is “a game that takes the depth and qualities of a core game and brings it into a place where casual gamers can appreciate it.”

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Baer, Alcorn Talk ‘Brown Box’ Beginnings, Industry Birth

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by [name redacted]

Baer started off by leaping back to the late ‘30s, the time before “electronics” was a noun. Back then, it was all about radio. Radio enthusiasts were radio hobbyists, and radios were simpler to build than a model Gundam. They were also a cultural phenomenon. Baer showed off an advertisement that read “Big Money in Radio – become a Radio Serviceman!” “Hey,” the young Baer realized. “I think this could be me.” So he spent the next few years dangling off roofs, installing wires through people’s windows.

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GameLab’s Zimmerman Says Casual Games are Dead (Sort Of)

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by [name redacted]

You can’t make money making casual games, Zimmerman said. It’s a broken business model for developers, with low royalties, a ton of middlemen, a high turnover of software, a hugely saturated market, and ever-increasing production values, therefore production cost. Finally, now that the casual industry is no longer just a little club in a back room, the “big boys” like EA have shouldered their way in, driving independent developers ever more to the periphery.

On the creative end, “Casual games began with a promise.” They were meant to be a meritocracy, Zimmerman said; smaller in scope, and therefore more conducive to experimentation than big-budget mainstream games. Instead, the field has “almost become a parody of itself… The degree of shameless clones seems, to my eye, to be more prevalent than other sectors of the game industry… I’m not seeing that innovation is rewarded.”

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The Changing Face of Casual Games

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by [name redacted]

The prime message for the Casual Games Summit this year is that the casual game market is expanding so much, trickling over into so many demographics, that the old, rather lazy ways of thinking about the format and its audience have begun to stifle the potential of casual games, and turn them into a bit of a mockery of themselves.

The target audience, declared Microsoft Casual Games’ Chris Early, is no longer the stereotypical soccer mom. “Everyone’s playing casual games now, and they’re playing them in places we never thought they’d play them before.” Everyone who works with a computer is now either a customer or a customer in the making. So the big new question is, “who are you going to design your game for?”

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The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalism

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by [name redacted]

Back in 2001, Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota started to think about tossing together journalists with game designers and theorists to discuss ways in which the medium’s give-and-take trial-and-error self-motivated approach to learning could be academically applied to the process of news-gathering. The timing was unfortunate, however, coming just after the dot-com implosion.

A few years later she pulled together a more academic discussion group on the matter, yet quickly became frustrated with the substitution of chin-stroking for practical application of any of their ideas. Whenever she suggested developing an actual teaching tool, everyone backed away, afraid how it would reflect on his tenure to be actively involved with anything using the word “game”.

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Video Games To Build And Retain A TV Audience

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by [name redacted]

In describing his recent game based on Discovery Channel Canada’s Race to Mars TV serial, Virtual Heroes‘ Randy Brown admitted that people often question how his project was a “serious game”. As an audience member asked toward the end of the session, what makes a community-fostering game more serious than a traditional licensed game? The general answer is that whereas, say, EA’s Lord of the Rings games are just designed to entertain, the games in this session are meant to further understanding of and enthusiasm for the associated subject, through providing the audience a realistic or “synergistic” experience – a slower, quieter exploration of the concepts at hand than would be feasible in a dramatic context.

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Sawyer, Smith On Serious Gaming For Life

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by [name redacted]

As a specific concept, serious games have been drifting around the design sphere since at least the turn of the millennium. Yet for all the hype, and all of the yearly GDC conferences on the subject, the theory has had some trouble gaining traction as more than an academic or industrial curiosity.

According to Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill and Peter Smith of the University of Central Florida, some of the problem in the serious games movement is a general haziness as to exactly what serious games are, and are for.

Sawyer and Smith observe that the traditional view of serious games is vague exactly because of its specificity. “Often when we see people talk about serious games, we see them talking about them in a sort of narrow way,” Peter Smith mused.

Yet, at the same time, “Everyone has their own name for what serious games should be called. When they’re using these terms, they’re still talking about serious games… It’s not that these words are wrong. It’s just, they’re trying to categorize things. And there’s nothing categorical about any of these names.”

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