I’m conflating the Thursday and Friday of GDC because I’ve been doing this for what feels like forever.

What rocked:
Exploration: From Systems to Spaces to Self - Clint Hocking talked about notions of exploration, and how they pertain to game design. Not only was his talk exhaustively researched, but it was also incredibly well-constructed, funny, and invaluable to my work. The exploration and discovery of a system by a player is one of my favorite aspects of digital game design, and hearing Clint focus on it with such enthusiasm really made me feel confident in my approach. Clint even posted the slides and transcript from his talk! What a guy!

Writing Great Design Documents - It was the last session of the conference, but that didn’t stop Damion Schubert from giving a great talk to a FULL audience (they were actually turning people away at the door!). Possibly the most practical talk I attended all week, Damion emphasized the importance of design documents, and reminded all the designers who they were writing their docs for (hint: the coders), and to keep that in mind when deciding which details to include. And he posted his slides, too! How awesome’s that?

What was really great:
The Metagame: A Battle of Videogame Smarts - I already talked about this, but it was a great session with a lot of my favorite people in the industry.

Small Changes, Big Results: Redefining a PC Franchise for Nintendo Wii - Probably the hardest choice I made during the conference, as this talk was held at the same time as Goichi Suda’s “Punk’s Not Dead,” Chaim Gingold’s “SPORE’s Magic Crayons,” and the “Pitch your Game Idea” session. Nevertheless, Robin Hunicke’s breakdown of how to properly adapt a franchise for a new console was fantastic. Robin all but ignores the Wii Remote as she discusses how best to fit a familiar franchise to a new console and a new market, keeping a keen eye on the smallest details while never losing sight of the big picture.
Sadly, no slides from Robin. :(

The Game Design Challenge: The Needle and Thread Interface - I’ve wanted to go to one of Eric’s game design challenges for years, and was happy to finally make it to one. It would’ve been worth it for Alexey Pajitnov alone, but Harvey Smith and David Jaffe both gave great presentations as well.

What was so-so:
GameBoss: Simplified Online Game Creator - I caught an early-morning session on GameBrix, a collaborative online platform for designing and developing small digital games. Unfortunately, the company didn’t seem sure of the target demographic for the program; its relative simplicity was certainly accessible by any age, but the bright colors and cute games developed seemed skewed toward a pre-teen age group. Still, I’d be grateful for any program that allowed me to build simple games or prototypes, and the open-platform, flash-based approach of GameBrix was a definite sell for me. I’m looking forward to trying out the closed beta whenever they get around to it.

Reflections of Zelda - Eiji Aonuma’s talk on the development of the last several Zelda games didn’t really wow me. I was expecting more details of the design process, rather than developmental issues like whether players like the “toon-shaded” look. He also seemed to be contradicting himself, blaming the poor reception of Wind Waker on its cutesy style, yet then creating Phantom Hourglass which shares the same look. He also asserted that Four Swords Adventures did poorly because it was too difficult to understand, and yet is now integrating a multiplayer mode of Phantom Hourglass so disconnected from traditional Zelda gameplay that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what to do. Still, Aonuma’s slides were cute, and his presentation was very clean.

What disappointed me:
The Nintendo Keynote: A Creative Vision - Yes, it’s true. Miyamoto’s keynote was nothing special, at least in my opinion. I understand that the man couldn’t reveal anything new, but he could’ve at least talked more about his creative process, and maybe revealed some non-stock-threatening insights into his design process and his experiences at Nintendo over the years. Instead, he talked about gaging successful gameplay on whether or not his wife likes it, and about how he tried for years to implement some form of Mii’s into Nintendo products.

On top of that, his presentation was sloppy. All the slides were loaded onto a Wii’s photo channel, but the system wasn’t meant for that kind of presentation. Miyamoto had to constantly resize images to make them fit on the projector, and the flashing cameras from the crowd caused his Wii remote cursor to go crazy (he actually had to hold a finger over the remote sensor while talking). Contrast this with Phil Harrison’s presentation, which was loaded into the photo gallery of a PS3. He simply walked around the stage with a sixaxis, depressing one of the shoulder buttons to advance the slides. Every slide fit perfectly, and there was practically no way of knowing it was being run off a PS3 (except for the controller in Phil’s hand). He even had the PS3 review the “photos” at the end of his presentation, going into a unique autoplay mode with each slide falling onto a table as a polaroid. It just looked great.

And that was GDC. Back to game design, I promise.

I wanted to take an opportunity on Joystiq to talk about the IGDA student scholarship experience, and chose my column to be the vehicle. Apparently it’s long and “rambling,” so I included some advice for future applicants at the end of the feature. You know, as a reward for enduring.

To be fair, I need to cut back on my word counts. It’s not even verbose; it’s just full of things. Joystiq’s clearly not the venue for lengthy columns, and I need to keep that in mind from now on.

Harvey Pekar doesn’t draw, he just writes. That’s why he needed Robert Crumb, Alison Bechdel, Chester Brown, David Collier, Gary Dumm, Frank Stack, Drew Friedman, Dean Haspiel, Val Mayerik, Josh Neufeld, Brian Bram, Spain Rodriguez, Joe Sacco, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, Ed Piskor, and many others to illustrate American Splendor. It’s collaboration, and I’m in love with the idea of it.

I’m a designer. I don’t code. I don’t have the head for the numbers, for the logic of it. Collaboration with a wide array of technically-oriented individuals would be a unique way of surmounting this problem, reaching out to programmers with design documents in hand, offering to work closely with them on the development of something really great (or so I’d hope). I’d be a serial collaborator – now there’s something to put on my business card!

But would serial collaborations be fruitful in game development? Could the styles of the coders be seen in the final products? Would the games I designed with various programmers all feel different?

More importantly, would anyone even agree to do it?

In a haze of clicking around, I stumbled across Khoi Vinh’s web site, and his post on a talk given recently at SXSW in Texas. The focus of the talk was the use of grids in visual design. I started reading it without realizing that Khoi’s the guy responsible for this recent redesign. That just made me read closer.

His post (which was so good I’m linking to it twice) talks about a theoretical redesign of yahoo.com using grids, and he includes the slides from his SXSW presentation on the topic. A lot of what he talks about is working within certain constraints, such as an average display resolution, and the various ad units which have to be taken into consideration in the design. He says the following:

Ad units complicate things, but they’re actually very helpful because they serve as fixed constraints.

Constraints are the mother of design invention.

How awesome is that?! His slides were awe-inspiring, and have already taken root in my brain. I love when stuff does that.

I started with this brilliant idea to get a full week’s worth of blogging out of the events that transpired during GDC, and all the smart things I was thinking when I attended the best sessions… but it’s been a full week and only two posts, so obviously that’s not happening. To reiterate an earlier sentiment, there are simply not enough hours in a day.

Here’s a condensed and somewhat typical recap of the Wednesday of GDC 07:

9:00am - Eric Zimmerman led the Game Publishers Rant, which has become somewhat infamous for Chris Hecker’s harsh words for fan-favorite Wii (short version: it’s underpowered and that affects what developers can do with it). Less widely mentioned is Nicole Bradford’s passionate tirade about the important role the game industry can play in education in America, and Lee Jacobson’s horror stories about the shit that studios pull, and urging developers to not “pull that shit.”

10:30am - Phil Harrison’s keynote revealed the Second Life-esque Playstation Home, and the cooperative physics-based platformer LittleBigPlanet. Home seems a bit too much for me. It’s essentially a user-interface melted into an attractive virtual world, and I don’t know how people are going to feel about walking x meters to their “achievements” instead of just drilling down in a menu for them. As for LittleBigPlanet, it looks fun, but I’m not buying a system for it.

2:30pm - I caught about half of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions, since I had to leave to check out Lasse’s talk. It’s a shame the timing didn’t work out better, because everything shown was incredible. Particularly great was Petri Purho’s work. Petri’s been developing short-cycle games, and showed off several of the games he’s developed so far. There was a definite increase in the quality of each game, both graphic-wise and design-wise, and it was evident that his process was definitely paying off. As always, I’m envious of people with code and design flexibility. That’s why I’m going to try and learn Flash for the umpteenth time. At least it’s something (and platform-independent, no less!).

6:30pm - I enjoyed attending the International Game Festival / Game Developers Choice Awards, in part because it felt a bit like the Oscars of games. Tim Schaefer was a great host, and the whole show had a sort of “looseness in rigidity feel” that gave you the impression that someone wanted to take it seriously, they just weren’t present. In a way, the IGF awards were far more important than the Game Developers Choice Awards, and I’d love to be a part of them someday.

9:00pm - Tacos and Margaritas. Damn it was a long day. More later. Soon later, not late later.

At GDC this year, I was one of 25 individuals accepted to attend the conference as IGDA student scholars, an honor which included a free pass to the event, pairing with an industry mentor, and a full day of orientation and studio tours. This was last Tuesday.

The student scholars were a mixture of various backgrounds and disciplines. Some of them were undergrads (like me), but others were graduate students, and the group ranged widely in age. The disciplines and interests of the students varied widely as well, with artists, designers, coders, and audiophiles all equally represented.

Darius Kazemi met up with us before lunch and went over some networking basics. I asked him if it was creepy to introduce myself to people, having recognized them from Flickr photos or their blog. Other people inquired about business card etiquette, asking for jobs (Darius says: “you don’t”), and other minutiae of the networking scene that we’re all just now starting to learn. I’ve been reading Darius’s site for some time now, so it was great to meet him in person.

My time with my industry mentor was somewhat limited due to our busy schedules, which was unfortunate. I was paired with Lasse Seppänen, a production lead at Remedy Entertainment. At the moment, Lasse is hard at work heading the team for Alan Wake, a psychological thriller with an unannounced launch date for Xbox 360 and Windows Vista. The best talk we had was by far the most straightforward, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Moscone West, eating lunch while Lasse explained the steps he took to end up at Remedy, and his transition from designer to production lead. What’s still amazing to me is that he spent years in mobile game development, and yet was able to make a quick and easy transition over to production lead on a major console and computer title.

Lasse was incredibly nice, and eager introduce me to his friends and colleagues. In a way, it was also comforting to learn that someone who has achieved so much success in the industry could have started out the same way as I — with the realization that no other profession could bring them as much pleasure as developing games. Lasse threw caution to the wind and dedicated his time and energy solely to games, early on in his career. I can see myself making a similar leap of faith sometime in the near future, and it was a point I felt we could both relate to.

Of course, one of the benefits to being a student scholar was having an opportunity to attend the conference. I’ll continue posting throughout the next week or so, covering highlights from GDC, as well as some of the smaller things that got my gears turning. This is taking longer than expected. So much for short posts.