iDevGames

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Game Developer’s Conference

Work as a Conference Associate

Once again, after a one year hiatus, I volunteered as a Conference Associate for the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). Being a Conference Associate (CS) is a great way to go to the conference for free. First, for 20 hours of work, you get the equivalent of a Giga Pass (a $1700 value). The work can be hard, but its usually fun. The first two days were the tutorials. Having an interest in the academic side of things I went to see (and work at) the IGDA Academic Summit.

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IGDA

Academia and Entertainment

The IGDA’s education committee is trying to do for games what the SIGGRAPH education committee does for computer graphics: establish ties between academia and real world practitioners, establish a core curriculum of study that touches on all facets of the games industry (developing, critical review, etc.) The second day of the tutorial had a few schools give an example of their curricula already in place. Digipen showed what they are doing (a “real world” boot-camp for training developers), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University showed how they are involving their students in real development. Headed by Gino Yu, this program aims to give students the real world skills to come out writing games. MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (not to be confused with MIT’s Media Lab) program, headed by Henry Jenkins, is looking at games as a creative endeavor. Their program seems to be rooted firmly between philosophy and creation. It looks like a compelling program. Georgia Tech’s Masters in Information Design and Technology (a fancy way of talking about games and related media) is a real research institution giving students a real chance to explore what is a game.

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Digipen

They, like the MIT program, are very interested in both sides of the equation: the philosophical “what is fun?” side as well as the raw “how do I create a game?” side. Cornell’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) was very exciting. Randy Pausch and Don Marinelli co-direct the center, and their differing personalities define the program. Don is the geeky programmer type, Randy is an out their tie-dye wearing artist type. Together they have created a masters program that really pushes students to examine the creative use of technology. Their core courses consist of: An improv acting class (makes sense as improv is the first real interactive entertainment) an art class for incoming programmers and a programming class for incoming artists. The last “classroom” course required concentrate on business. Then, they work on solo and group projects; as they create some amazing things (including an interactive music LBE for San Francisco’s Exploratorium). One of the themes of the summit was: “Employers want specialists that also know everything” and tried to focus the efforts of any games development curriculum on the fact that just a CS degree won’t do it, nor will an art degree or business degree. The standout game developers may specialize in one area, but have great insight into all other areas of game development.

GDC Sessions

Thursday started the “Classic” GDC, with hour long sessions on all aspects of game development. There are five track:

• Programming
• Audio
• Visual Arts
• Game Design

• Business/legal

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Maya Booth

Photo courtesy of the Game Developer’s Conference

When I wasn’t working, I tried to go to either Game Design or AI focused sessions. The AI sessions were uniformly interesting and relevant. The Halo AI team explained how they made their agents seem so real (they cheated!) Basically, the enemies had a state machine with only two states: attack and defend. The AI then used markers in the terrain to determine where to go. (i.e. a rock would say “Hide behind me”) or an enclosed space would say “throw a grenade in here” which allowed for seeming intelligent behavior to be embedded right into the level design. Also, the AI roundtable (always a popular event) had the AI teams from Halo, Thief and Deus Ex, Black & White, Dungeon Siege and many others (famous and not so famous) discussing the state of AI in games today as well as offering hints and tips. I also attended the roundtable on scripting languages. And I was surprised that nearly everyone wrote a new scripting language that was domain specific. Very few used off the shelf languages like Small¹, Lua, Java or Lisp. There was also a spirited discussion of whom the language should be targeted at: designers or programmers. There was a very vocal camp that said “Artists can’t program, they don’t like it and shouldn’t be made to do it” there was another, less vocal, group that declared that artists can do things programmers wouldn’t think of. And then there was the minority (me included) that decided it was up to individual teams to select what was appropriate—a spirited and informative session.

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Rendware

The Conference Expo

The Conference Expo also started on Thursday. The theme for this year’s conference expo should have been “MiddleWare.” Renderware, Intrinsic Alchemy and NxN all had monstrous booths and lots of schwag. nVidia and ATI were each trying to outdo the other. I asked both about the status of cool extensions like vertex shaders and pixel/fragment shaders for the Mac. nVidia was nice enough to answer that they were waiting for Apple, the ATI guy couldn’t care less about me once I mentioned Macintosh. I also queried both on 3dLabs’ white paper on OpenGL 2.0. nVidia said that standardizing the interface to programmable hardware would be good, ATI said that DirectX and OpenGL extensions should be good enough. ATI also said that they would follow the OpenGL 2.0 standard once it was finalize (ATI is a member of the OpenGL ARB) Microsoft was swinging the whole of it’s marketing weight behind the Xbox. They sponsored parties almost every night, their booth was more exclusive than a trendy New York nightclub. And every available inch of wall space around the convention had Xbox logos on them. Microsoft schwag was mostly cheapo stuff this year: pens, mints, t-shirts; but there was tons of it. On the other end of the spectrum—Apple.

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Xbox

Apple — MIA

Because of Macworld Tokyo, Apple had no presence at the show. No booth at the Expo, no sponsored sessions touting the Mac as a gaming platform. In fact, on the expo floor there were exactly two Macs! A flat-panel iMac hidden in a corner of nVidia’s booth and one monster tower doing demos at the Maya booth. No Macs at the ATI booth, no Macs at the Metrowerks booth (in fact they didn’t have anyone at the Metrowerks booth that knew anything about the Mac side of things) However, it is definitely worth noting that there were many TiBooks at the academic summit. All the academics had a TiBook (geeky and artist types alike) I spoke with John Sonstein from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and he said that when Mac OS X came out “it was a no brainer, I have everything I need—Unix, a very productive environment, and it runs great on this laptop” Randy Pausch reiterated saying,“I’m so glad to have a computer I can really use.” Hopefully this bodes well for Mac Games in the future.

Hobnobbing

The real reason to go the GDC is for the networking. I had conversations with Will Wright, Warren Spector, Todd Hollenshead, Dave Wessman, Jason Della Roca as well as many very bright individuals. Also, when working a session, you have to introduce yourself to the speakers and make sure everything is good for them. Again, you can use this opportunity to begin a dialogue. For example, on the first day when we were all stuffing bags for conference attendees I stood near two women talking about what they did. It turns out that one is a musician looking to sell her art and the other is a distributor looking for new musicians.

2nd Annual Game Developers Choice Awards

• Game of the Year — Grand Theft Auto III (DMA Design/Rockstar Games)
• Rookie Studio of the Year — Bohemia Interactive Studio for Operation Flashpoint
• Original Game Character of the Year — Daxter from Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
• Excellence in Audio — Marty O’Donnell & team for sound effects in Halo: Combat Evolved
• Excellence in Game Design — GTA3 team for game play in Grand Theft Auto III
• Excellence in Level Design — Fumito Ueda & team for level design in Ico
• Excellence in Programming — Richard Evans for artificial intelligence in Black & White
• Excellence in Visual Arts — Fumito Ueda & team for art direction in Ico

• Game Innovation Spotlights — Black & White (Lionhead Studios), Grand Theft Auto III (DMA Design/Rockstar Games), Ico (Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc.), Majestic (Electronic Arts), Rez (United Game Artists)

Three special honors, selected by the Game Developers Choice Awards advisory board, were presented at the awards ceremony:

• Lifetime Achievement Award — Yuji Naka, president and CEO of Sega’s Sonic Team, for the innovative and award-winning work he has produced during his career, including the creation of Sega Hedgehog.
• First Penguin Award — Hubert Chardot, for his risk-taking work on Alone in the Dark, a game that started the “survival-horror” genre.

• IGDA Award for Community Contribution — Jeff Lander, for his writings on game development, community building efforts and student outreach.

¹ An embedded scripting language now called Pawn.

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