Author: Scott

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.

There are not enough hours in a day. More on this later.

I’ll start off my week of late-blogging^TM GDC at the very beginning. Last Monday and Tuesday, the IGDA’s Education special interest group held a workshop based around the development of game curricula at academic institutions. The two-day event was completely booked. I got in with a press pass on Monday, but had to miss out on Tuesday’s festivities due to a conflict with my student scholar orientation.

The workshop? Invaluable. Considering it’s the topic of my senior project, it was nice having a room-full of people talking the talk. The most notable problem with the workshop was the attitude of some of the academics I found myself sitting near. Nick Fortugno led an excellent session on teaching game design essentials, which included a design exercise for the attendees to participate in. I was grouped with several academics, and we were told to augment the rules of an analog game to change the message.

Perhaps because I was the youngest, I felt essentially stepped upon by my “peers” in the group, and none of the ideas I offered were even considered. To make matters worse, I felt that the design of my team grew unwieldy in terms of its complexity and limited formal structure. The group felt content to suggest how the game “should” work, rather than actually design the mechanics accordingly. When I suggested playtesting, they ignored me. The whole experience felt very counter-productive. It concerns me that this is the current state of game design in education.

Aside from this minor setback, the sessions held were extremely worthwhile, and gave me pages of notes to work with for my thesis. As mentioned above, Nick Fortugno’s talk gave me a much stronger insight into how to develop in-class exercises for design, and served as a nice refresh on some design fundamentals. Tracy Fullerton also talked about the application of game design exercises in the classroom, focusing more on examples from various institutions. I also had the pleasure of meeting Ian Schreiber, a professor at Ohio University who’s been integrating game elements into his education process. All in all, a good first day to the conference experience.

Wow, this turned out to be a longer post than anticipated. I’ll continue late-blogging^TM, but with more commentary, less specificity next time.

Yes, it seems like it just began… except that it doesn’t, because this was an incredibly long week, and I’m tired and ready to return to the East coast and begin processing everything that happened.

Obviously, I didn’t keep up numberless while I was GDC’ing, so I plan on late-blogging^TM my highlights of the conference over the next week or so, including favorite sessions and cool things that occurred to me (like the fact that Clint Hocking is amazing).

By the way, I attended The Metagame session, run by Frank Lantz and Eric Zimmerman. I mean, sure I attended lots of sessions, but The Metagame was the only one I wrote up for Joystiq, as part of my Off the Grid column.

Okay, that’s it for now. More later.

Leaving for San Francisco today. Should be a busy, busy week. I’m looking forward to it.

What I’m not looking forward to: five-hour flight spent writing my Gothic Lit essay.

I’ll post if I find the time.

Popcap’s Peggle is so awesome. It’s like pachinko meets candy meets crack meets that-episode-of-Evangelion-where-Kaoru-almost-ends-the-world.

For all of its awesomeness, however, Peggle would be even more awesome if there was a version for Mac OS X.

First Bookworm Adventures and now this? C’mon, Popcap. I’m dying, here.