GDC 2012

Post date: Mar 13, 2012 10:22:48 AM

This past GDC was probably my most efficient use of time that I have ever employed in the six years I have attended GDC. I am not sure if it was the best use of my time, but I don't think I could have fit in any other activities and be as alert.  I went to over 18 sessions, 1 breakfast meeting, 2 evening events but I had little time to work or walk the Expo Floor let alone the Career Pavilion. Weeks prior to the show I gathered materials and helped to facilitate the creation of the show reel that Jamie edited together for Ringling College Art and Design first ever GDC booth.  I also gathered images for booth panels and printed out examples of student  work to share with new connections and old colleagues at the show.

Below is a list of Sessions I attended:

I took notes for most of the sessions listed above,  some settings were physically difficult to write in but I had battery power to write for all sessions so there was no reason I couldn't capture notes beyond being uncomfortable.  My favorite sessions were Richard Lemrchand's talk on "Attention" and Stone Librande's talk on Designing Games.  Stone Librande is my latest addition to most favorite speaker list, very well organized, well thought out presentation, generous with sharing his thinking and someone I want to hear speak again.

Richard Lemrchand's talk "Attention" was very good but a little scattered and the talk on playtesting was very limited but as advertised. (Richard's presentation made more cohesive sense the second time I reviewed his presentation for the preparation of this report). 

My least favorite talks were the first two which I chose after finding out at the last minute the talk I wanted to attend was cancelled.  The talk on FX for Gears was not very insightful and highlighted to my eyes how insulated that development studio has become.  The other talk on making somone's game was patronizing rant to anyone who has any amount of game experience, Laralynn McWilliams is now on my least favorite speaker list.

My biggest takeaways from the conference were the ideas that “attention can be a resource” and “modeling experiences only as complex as they need to be.”  In addition to these “philosophical“ game design ideas I was also able to secure Greg Mitchell, Cinematic Director at Epic Games, to provide critique for senior thesis projects and be Game Art and Design’s  juror at Best of Ringling (both have happened already).  Greg is an industry expert and students should feel blessed to have such strong definitive voice providing feedback on their work and judging which project was the best this year. I hope we continue to maintain Greg’s participation in the Game Art program at Ringling College., maybe get his advice on prepro pitches.

Below I will highlight the talks that I found most interesting and then try to tie these insights into activities that could support the Ringling College of Art and Design Community.

In Stone Librande’s talk “Designing Games for Game Designers” he outlined how he teaches his Game Design 101 class that he has been teaching at Cogswell Polytechnical University.  In addition to his full-time job as Creative Director at Maxis, Stone has been teaching game design courses for over 10 years.  In the course he students learn each component of a model of a game that he has been developing over the years.  These components are fundamentals of game design that are true for every game, from hide-and-seek to chess, and from basketball to my favorite “Bomberman”.  In his class he teaches each of these components separately just like how many of the mobile game talks I went to describe how they introduce and train the player to new game mechanics.   He isolates each component into a “hands on” experience he presents to the students as experiments in game design over the 15 week course.  Stone presentation was steep with practical hands on knowledge and hard won wisdom earned over many years of reflection and being a true scholar practitioner.  I am definitely a new found fan of his work.

Many of the subsequent mobile talks I attended repeated the idea of introducing new concepts or in the case of a game a new mechanic to educate players, instead of students, one element at a time.  The idea of training players on game mechanics in isolation was discussed in the following casual game presentations I attended; How I got my Mom to play Plants vs. Zombies as well as Level Design Case Studies: Trainyard and Cut the Rope.  Teaching fundamentals in isolation before putting them all together is relevant to designing a class or a game.

Below is a link to his presentation and the "hands on" games he presented  that we could use as examples to help teach our community about game design.

http://stonetronix.com/gdc-2012/

Here is a link to a free video of Stone's talk from GDC 2011:which covered games he has developed with his kids.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014381/15-Games-in-15

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The second most impactful talk I attended was Richard Lemarchand's presentation on "Design Attention, Not Immersion."  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfOUhwhdUV0

At the start Richard discussed his dislike for a couple of words that are used all the time to describe video games, immersion and immersive.  He suggested that these words can lead to false ideas of what make a game great.  He supported this suggestion by quote by referencing the ‘The Immersive Fallacy’ in the book Rules of Play.  In which the authors of this book say:

that there’s an idea, prevalent among game designers and media theorists, that “the pleasure of a media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant into an illusory, simulated reality … (one) so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.” 

The authors go on to claim that this idea is a mistake.   The danger of immersive fallacy is that it can misinterpret what makes games compelling experience and lead to poor design choices.

So if immersion can lead to false conclusions to what make a game a compelling experience, Richard suggests we should look at attention, specifically “getting attention” and “ holding attention.”  

At this moment the presentation hits me like a ton of bricks.  As an instructor this is a subject I am often lamenting to myself on how I can make my classes more engaging.  I can totally agree with the notion a good instructor "gets and holds" the attention of their students.   As a game designer, this instantly extrapolated into my current theory about makes a good game, a game that you think about when you are actively playing it and when you are not, the times when you are thinking or scheming what actions you plan to take the next time you play.  After this statement, Richard talked at greater length about the challenges of grabbing and holding players attention specifically bottlenecking, splitting, fatigue and the two primary forms of attention; reflexive and executive (voluntary).

For more on techniques for grabbing and holding attention Richard's presentation can be found here.