So, I wanted to post some thoughts about my favorite GDC sessions and comment on some of the takeway. Unfortunately, this was such an excellent GDC, and I tend to post huge tracts anyway, that I think I had best not do it all in one post.
There are six sessions I wanna talk about in particular, so I'll do them two at a time, starting with my two 'third favorite' talks.
Chaim Gingold on Spore's Magic Crayon's
I thought Chaim's talk was engaging and thought provoking. Even better is that I'm not really entirely sure if I agree with the underlying principles. Basically - and maybe I'm getting it wrong here - but Chaim was saying we can use the computer to help the player make better decisions about (for example) where to put a foot. The reasoning is that it's better to have most people make pretty awesome creatures (or spaceships or buildings or whatever) than it is to have almost everyone be able to make shitty creatures, while an elite few make really awesome creatures. Thus, we give the computer rules that - for example - make sure all feet attach to the ground, or that eyes have bi-lateral symmetry or whatever.
Cool. Smart. Clearly the right way to do it. But at the same time, isn't it kind of like saying 'we should not allow the player to delete the door to the bathroom while his Sim is inside'? It seems to be a small but important step back from what I would expect from Maxis which would be - 'hey if the player wants to put the creature's feet on its head - why not?'
To me it's kind of like the old Lego 'problem'. Lots of kids who play with Lego make spaceships. So sometime in the '80s Lego made space Lego, which to a 9 year-old me seemed like the best invention since - well - since 'plain' Lego. Lego said 'kids wanna build spaceships, but our vanilla Lego bricks only do a mediocre job of that - let's make space bricks in blue and grey and black with lots of angles and cones'.
In effect, space Lego allowed more people (including me) to do a better job of the thing they were trying to do anyway, which was build spaceships. And that is exactly what I took Chaim's talk to be about. But in my mind, there is a cost associated with this. Call it a lost opportunity cost. Call it pandering to the lowest common denominator. I don't know. The point is that a little bit of imagination is killed when the step from 'pile of Lego' to 'spaceship' is short-looped with more affordant Lego... maybe.
It's possible - I suppose - that the imagination isn't 'lost' it's just spend solving different, higher order problems about making 'awesome spaceships' instead of solving the more trivial and less interesting (and less entertaining) problems of just getting something that feels like a spaceship. I'm not sure. Part of me wants to believe that's true, but another part of me looks at Lego today and says - shit, Lego today sure looks a lot easier and a lot less fun than it did when I was a kid. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a cynic.
Anyway - the talk was brilliant and I learned a lot from it. Questions of this sort are overly harsh and nit-picky. Mostly I think the way they're solving the (very hard) sorts of problems that Spore seems full of looks pretty fucking ingenius to me. So don't let me get in the way.
The Game Design Challenge - The Needle and Thread Interface
So 'tied' with Chaim's talk was Eric Zimmerman's Game Design Challenge. Having been up there before, I know for real how brutally hardcore this challenge is, and to be completely honest, in my opinion this was the hardest one yet - I think it may actually just have been unreasonably hard. Not to be all flakey and waffly about it, but I really think all three of the contestants did an admirable job under what seemed the direst of circumstances. The most important take-away for me was after David and Alexey had both gone, and before Harvey presented, Eric pointed out that seeing the differences of approach between Alexey's drive for elegance and David's 'guts+fun mechanics' approach was worth the show right there. And it was no surprise after that statement that Harvey's solution was clever and strove to say something meaningful.
While Alexey won, I think he had the +2 Fan Favorite Bonus on his roll. His design was clearly elegant, and he was obviously handicapped with the language and powerpoint barriers - it's possible that Stitch and Cross would be the most compelling game in a decade - it was hard to tell. I did really like his observation that because the moves were stitched, that every second move was a hidden move. He used the mechanics of the interface to generate the classical game theoretical concept of hidden information. Crafty.
As far as demonstrating the most robust understanding of the domain of the challenge, I actually think David Jaffe should have won it. I thought the 'paper airplane game' part of the design was weak, but his understanding of and utilization of the interface was the strongest. Things like detecting the topology of a fold in the fabric by passing the needle through two points simultaneously - fuck that was brilliant. Detecting bad stitches and good stitches to determine the mechanical strength of attachments to virtual hardpoints was also brilliant, though it's a clear example of what I mean when I say that, while his demonstrated understanding of the interface was stunning, his resultant design was a little weak and forced. I don't particularly think it would be good design to make the player really spend hours making strong stiches in order to have his virtual plane have more hit points.
Harvey's game was the most believably possible as an actual game in my opinion, but I felt he overreached a bit by trying to generalize the controller to all games, and ended up with what was mostly a remapping of conventional controls to something kind of like a touch-pad with some added functionality. Some of the unique gameplay elements he designed to more robustly support the controller (like stitching bits of fabric to your doll to give it new powers) were great.
Anyway, like I said, the Challenge was (possibly) unreasonably hard this year. Keep in mind that when I did it, the driving focus of my talk was about hunting for good constraints because I found the challenge too open in many ways. That clearly did not seem to be the case at all this year and I think all three of these fucking geniuses had to wrestle a little freedom out of a very harsh constraint.
Tomorrow or the next day I'll try and get around to posting my two 'second favorite' sessions. I think both of them will be surprising.
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