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.