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“What’s Next?” Panel

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by [name redacted]

Following the theme of the 2006 conference, a panel of five industry veterans (of various levels of celebrity and influence) gathered to discuss “what’s next” for the game industry, what with the pending change of hardware generations, the new and changing attitudes about game design to come about in the last twelve months or so, and serious concerns about the stability and structure of the game industry as it is now.

Gathered for this occasion were EALA VP of creative development Louis Castle, NanaOn-sha president Masaya Matsuura, Midway art director Cyrus Lum, Cerny Games founder Mark Cerny, and the inimitable Dave Perry, formerly (and presumably eventually again) of Shiny Entertainment.

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An Existential Panel

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by [name redacted]

The panel stretched its joints by working out if there was any consensus as to how the balance of power is situated in the casual game universe. The thread of design was established to start at the developer and run through to the consumer in the following pattern:

Developer -> Publisher -> Distributor -> Retailer -> Customer

The implication seemed to be that the developer and the consumer should be the parties with the greatest degree of control, as they’re ultimately the parties that are communicating. Joel Brodie indeed opined that consumers are the ultimate controlling force; they buy what they want, and they don’t buy what they don’t want. Dave Williams figured the balance was pretty even among all parties. Mr. Gwertzman was certain that publishers and portals are the “God” in the equation, while Nixon and Welch agreed that retailers are the major factor in what gets seen and purchased, therefore what developments receive support.

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An Introduction to Casual Games

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by [name redacted]

All day Tuesday, a board of twenty industry insiders swapped off on a series of panels dealing with the current state of the casual game industry. To start the proceedings, a selection of five speakers from a variegated spectrum of backgrounds outlined the basic nature of casual games, as they are today.

Unlike past years, the idea this time was to present an overall “übertheme”, broken down into digestible segments. That theme, roughly hewn, was a comparison of casual games now to where the industry was three years ago. On that note, since 2003, the industry has gone from about fifty million dollars in revenue, nearly all of which came from Internet downloads, to five times that sum in downloads alone; meanwhile, other revenue streams have become more important then before. There are now two annual conferences, dedicated to casual games. And even just as far as GDC representation, casual games have gone from a handful of sessions to over twenty related sessions, including this full-day tutorial.

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The Future of Mobile Gaming and its Enemies

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by [name redacted]

EA Mobile senior VP (and former JAMDAT CEO) Mitch Lasky kicked off his keynote at the GDC Mobile segment of Game Developers Conference 2006 with an extended spiel about his history with JAMDAT Mobile, the changing fabric of the industry, and what he sees as the biggest obstacles (and avenues) to future growth and maturation.

According to Lasky, one of the biggest forces for change has been his own company, JAMDAT — and in its current form, as the mobile division of Electronic Arts, Lasky sees it as perhaps the most important force for future change.

Lasky explained how Jamdat went, as he put it, from a value of zero to $684,000,000 in six years. When they began, they were a team of six people; previous to the EA merger two months back, JAMDAT was already the biggest mobile publisher. To contrast, The amount EA paid for JAMDAT is five times greater than Maxis fetched, making it the biggest EA transaction to date.

Of course with this kind of growth, it is only natural for other developers to go public in search of similar success. Lasky suggested the search was ultimately futile, as at the time JAMDAT went public it was “fundamentally different.”

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Telltale Games: Bringing Great Stories to Life

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by [name redacted]

Reflecting back a year, Conners recounted the fan reaction at the last Wondercon, when he first announced Bone. People were upset; everyone who responded assumed Telltale would make it into “a crazy action game”. Conners said, in retrospect, that was a natural assumption. When you look at what’s out there now, that’s the image that video games tend to carry – in particular games based on licensed properties. Nevertheless, what’s important, is to match match your gameplay with the kind of story you want to portray.

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Worlds Are Colliding!: The Convergence of Film and Games

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by [name redacted]

This year’s final IGDA San Francisco/Bay Area Chapter meeting – held Tuesday, the sixth of December at the Sony Metreon’s Action Theater in San Francisco – featured three representatives from Industrial Light + Magic and two from LucasArts. The assembled personages spent an hour discussing how, thanks to their new joint facility in San Francisco’s Presidio district, they can share resources more easily than before.

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Taming The Dragon: Next-Generation Asset Creation for PS3

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by [name redacted]

Fundamentally, this was another opportunity to explain the value of digital maquettes and to demonstrate the rendering software Worch is most fond of. This seemed to go over fairly well, as Worch’s tools are powerful (and indeed elicited constant gasps of admiration from the audience) and he has a number of sound arguments for at least considering maquettes as an alternative modeling technique.

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Advertising in Games West

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by [name redacted]

The first Advertising in Games West conference was held on Thursday, July 28th at 600 Townsend Street, near the Sega building in San Francisco, and consisted of six panels, a keynote, two breaks, and a lunch, all on the subject of how to intelligently twine the worlds of game development and consumer advertising. Each of the first four panels contained more or less the same points and information; the last two, which dealt with the design and publishing ends of the argument, were a little more varied and informative.

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Smart Marketing – How an Intelligent Approach to Research Can Boost Your Bottom Line

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by [name redacted]

The idea behind Creative Domain Executive VP of Marketing Craig Relyea’s panel at this year’s E3 was to explore and maybe debunk what he described as misconceptions about “strategic information gathering”; marketing speak for focus groups, surveys, and other consumer data-raking. His thesis was that current videogame marketing “relies too much on gut instinct,” a tendency that, from his perspective, has “slowed the industry’s progress in becoming a dominant medium.” He fears that “we’re becoming smothered by over-dependancy on analysis”, resulting in a trap where, unless it is an extension of an established brand, nothing new gets made.

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What Makes Music for Games “Music for Games”?

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by [name redacted]

One of the final panels this year discussed the nature of game music; video games, being their own mode of expression with their own demands, require a different scoring approach from other forms. Over the years, this has resulted in game music becoming something of its own super genre; as different as one game score might be from the next, nearly all are linked by some quality that makes their sound and purpose unique to videogames. In this panel, a sequence of five game music professionals explores the nature of this distinction, each in their own way.

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Global Mobile Games: New Business Models, Hit Games, and Mobile People from Around the Planet

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by [name redacted]

Current rumbling in the design community suggests that mobile games have yet to find their real application, and most games for the platform are just ports of established console or handheld ideas; they aren’t really based on the intrinsic character of the mobile platform. Taking in mind the control problems, the group began to discuss new ways the platform provided to interface with a game. Perhaps the camera could be used to sense rotation, so the user could swing the phone like a golf club. Some phones have rotation, stroke, and squeeze sensors that could be put to use.

Someone then observed that a game that requires a camera would have trouble getting “live;” not all phones have cameras. The only way to get carriers to support a game is if you design it for the lowest common denominator, technologically. Bringing carriers into the conversation set off a chorus of groans. Someone noted that carriers do not, really, understand content, and wondered whether not going straight to a carrier – rather, developing for a publisher that was in a position to negotiate with carriers – would give developers more freedom to push the envelope; to develop less “safe” games.

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Audio Production for Halo 2

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by [name redacted]

“The main Bungie approach to games,” O’Donnell said, “is this is entertainment. When someone sits down, you want to keep him entertained the whole time.” This starts from the moment the console is powered up; over the corporate logos, a custom piece by Steve Vai leads into the game’s opening theme. “The music at the beginning of the game,” O’Donnell continued, “is the overture.” It establishes a theme, to be used throughout the game. From the title screen, O’Donnell pressed “start;” as the game loaded, a motivated piece of music began to play against the Halo 2 logo.

O’Donnell explained he never wants to see the word “Loading”: It’s not entertaining. You always want the player to feel like something exciting is about to happen. “I never want an excuse for someone to get up and leave the game, if possible.” The key to that is flow. O’Donnell prefers to think of audio as a cohesive whole; he would rather not have any one piece stand out.

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Real-time 3D Movies in Resident Evil 4

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by [name redacted]

One of the final lectures on Thursday was from Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, lead designer on Capcom’s Resident Evil 4. One of many distinctions in this game over previous entries in the series is an absence of prerendered cutscenes; any cutscenes present are rendered in-engine, and sometimes include QTE segments (as popularized in Shenmue ). At other times, the player must tap the Action button to make Leon run faster. Overall, the experience is a more dynamic one than in the past.

The reason for this, Hirabayashi said, speaking quickly through translation, is that he feels a videogame is a package as a whole; although pre-rendered movies are pretty, they passive, and pull the player out of the game. At least real-time movies are not as distracting, as the game remains consistent. Furthermore, when you change things during development, it often means you have to go back and re-render your cinematics to match again; this takes time and resources that could be better used elsewhere. Real-time cinematics remove that problem.

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Normal and Displacement Map, Sitting in a Tree

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by [name redacted]

Factor 5 designer Matthias Worch began Wednesday morning with a brief lecture on asset creation for next-generation games; his focus was on the distinctions between full-on digital and maquette models, as newer technology has come to make older techniques seem attractive. Before Worch began, however, he already had two problems. One was that, as his next-gen projects have yet to even be announced, he was unable to use his own material in the demonstration. The other problem was that his lecture began twenty-five minutes later than scheduled; to well use what time he had, Worch skipped straight to the demonstration.

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Labor Relations 101

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by [name redacted]

After the McConnell lecture on quality of life, Gina Neff, from UC San Diego, took the podium to address the audience on the growing question of unionization in the videogame industry. Rather than push any one answer, Neff’s goal was to clear some misconceptions about unions, and to offer a palette of options, to get the audience thinking about what the industry really needs, perhaps to craft its own solution.

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