I just discovered the GDC pictures that Robin Hunicke (MySims, Boom Blox) put up on her blog a few weeks ago. First, not only is she a cheerfully vibrant person that made the Game Design Workshop tolerable on what little sleep I was running on, but she is an excellent photographer. So if you want to know what the Game Design Workshop is all about, check out the photos. The extremely sparse captioning makes it even more compelling because even though I was there, I’m WTFing at some of the pictures. It looks like we all had a great time!

Removing the context from some of them made for some really compelling shots. I was looking at this one for about thirty seconds before I realized that was my handwriting. Then I remembered the card game we created from which the shot comes, but explaining it I think would take away from the beauty of the shots.

One of my favorites has to be this one of Frank Lantz (Parking Wars, Chain Factor). I guess he is psychic?

Moral of the post: go to the Game Design Workshop.

So I wrote a whole post on how Patrick Redding totally trivialized David Freeman to his face (by accident, I think) after Redding’s awesome Far Cry 2 Narrative Design talk at GDC, but I deleted it after deciding that no one wants to read about my schadenfreude and it’s not the most professional thing to make someone’s embarrassment public, even if they are pompously self-important. So scratch that off of my earlier things-I-promised-to-blog-about-after-GDC list.

Instead, here’s a post about almost everything else I promised to talk about post-GDC.

1.  I met so many fantastic people at GDC.  I’m not much of schmoozer or particularly deft at networking, so I was expecting that the sessions themselves and not the people would be my highlights for GDC, but I was wrong.

At the Game Design Workshop, I got to meet Frank Lantz of area/code. They do a lot of urban multiplayer-type games which I don’t really care about, but they also did my favorite Flash game of all time whose design I am totally going to steal adapt some day. He’s a great guy that had so many poignant insights when we were doing our activities that I’m really super-glad I made that connection. I also met Robin Hunicke there (MySims, Boom Blox) who made me stop feeling like less-of-a-hack-in-a-room-full-of-veterans than I had been and is super-amazing in every regard.

At the sessions themselves,  I got to meet Mark Nelson who wrote for Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3 and wrote one of my favorite comedic characters in all of video games, Sheogorath. So it was a pleasure picking his brain for a little while. And I go to talk with Clint Hocking again, who is always insightful. I got to know that Steve Fawkner (that did Puzzle Quest) doesn’t have any magic design juice, he was just in a corner financially and came out with something crazy that stuck. Nice guy. And I met about two dozen other awesome folks that I’m not going to talk about because it isn’t interesting to anyone but me, but if we talked at GDC, don’t take your omission from the list as a sign I didn’t find you or your ideas fascinating or important.

2. Funny moment at the Microsoft keynote. Schappert is going through the titles that sold more than a million units on the 360 in the holiday season. After each, there is a brief pause while the crowd applauds.

Schappert: “Mass Effect”
Audience goes apeshit.
Schappert: “Assassin’s Creed”
Audience goes mildly apeshit.
Schappert: “Guitar Hero III”
Audience continues going apeshit.
Schappert: “Madden 08″
Six guys clap, including me. Crickets chirp. Tumbleweed rolls across the stage.

I mean, come on guys. I know you think sports games are beneath you and I won’t compel anyone to like them, but give us some respect that we are able to put a title out there that tackles similar problems as those other games every ten months (and does it all online too, cough cough) and sells like gangbusters year after year. Yeah, it’s not a perfect game by any stretch and the corporate heads certainly aren’t perfect angels, but the guys that work on the game deserve as much respect as the others on that list, don’t you think?

3. The Gears of War 2 announcement at the end of the keynote was somewhat surreal. They showed the teaser at the end of the Microsoft keynote and let’s just say it was uninspiring. The center channe, I believe, was off, so we didn’t get any of the dialogue. Then CliffyB comes tearing through a paper wall with one of those chainsaw gun things to announce the game. What are its features Cliff? “It’s gonna be bigger, better and more badass…” That’s a direct quote. It’s like a six year old was telling us about the game. You can get away with that shit with your mouth-breathing diehards, but I expect a little more meat at GDC. After the announcement, he walks off stage and the lights go up. Uhhh…. I guess the talk is done?

Okay, I lied. I’m still no where near caught up with GDC stuff. Sometime soon, I promise.

Found a link for Transparentor if you want to play it. (See earlier post on indie games at GDC)

Now that I have the energy to chew food and stand in the same day, I figure let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about GDC. One of the great unexpected experiences I had was getting to play and talk about some truly innovative, interesting and inspiring independent games (x4 alliteration multiplier). So in the interests of sharing the wealth, here are some names and descriptions of games I heard about or got to play:

I also got to meet Cactus on the show floor, author of such games as Clean Asia and the aforeblogged Mondo Medicals and Psychosomnium. He recognized who I was when I introduced myself, but our conversation was kind of awkward. Either he didn’t know what to say, was completely tired from a few days of demoing or both. Seemed like a nice guy though. I read on his blog that he trying to start up a business as an indie game developer and so I wish him the best, but I hope it doesn’t destroy that unique spark of his that I find makes his games so enjoyable. Making games for business is so radically different than making games for yourself that I can’t even begin to compare the two.

When I was a TA in a game design class back in CMU (and funnily enough when I look back on my own designs in my student phase), I wanted to just take people by the shoulders and shake them and say “You don’t have to make something palatable! This is the only chance you will get to do something that breaks all the rules! Don’t saddle yourself with the burden of making the next Warcraft/Grand Theft Auto/Final Fantasy, there are bigger ideas out there that haven’t been explored and you are the ones who can do that!” This is what I mean. These games are largely done by students are a peek into daring new mechanics and maybe even new genres that the industry might actually pick up on in five years if it listens. Some will turn out to be gimmicks, but the spark of originality will always be best cared for by the students.

Sorry to my handful of daily readers that I haven’t posted in a couple weeks. I took a trip out to GDC two weeks ago for the first time, which I might comment was one of the high points of my career thusfar. And I will detail that experience below. But the day after I returned to Orlando, I contracted what I will now call the GDisease after apparently the entire industry is suffering from some form of it. I lost the last week of my life. I really don’t remember much of it, but it involved a 103 fever and a lot of sleeping. Today is the first day I’ve had the energy to sit up and read Interweb.

One of the items I read today was that CMP is considering limiting the media passes sold next year. I met a ton of awesome people at GDC this year, but probably two-thirds of them were either media of some sort (and usually of publications I’ve never heard of) or students. The theme of the event was”Learn. Network. Inspire.” Now, it’s great that I provide advice and guidance for students and I don’t mind doing it (I met a lot of cool students), but the point of me going was to learn, network with and be inspired by other industry folks. I almost think there should be a separate GDC for students and recruiters.

At the end of Friday, I exited a great series of talks on designing for established IPs and designing unique minigames to see a line that snaked around the entire second floor of the Moscone. It was for the Portal Postmortem. As someone looking to introduce more iterative design and prototyping into my studio, it would have been a great talk to attend. But because the talk was open to everyone, there wasn’t a chance that an industry person that could actually apply the knowledge would get to see it without camping out and missing other sessions because there were a thousand people waiting in line simply because they liked Portal. So a sarcastic thanks to all the students and media hacks who took my space so they could write an article for their little website. Luckily that didn’t happen with the Bioshock postmortem, mostly because it wasn’t open to everyone but also because it had a larger auditorium. I was able to ask a question to Ken Levine that had been bugging me since I first played it.

It was a good idea to limit E3 because E3 was supposed to be a retailer event, not a press event. GDC is supposed to be an industry learning/networking event, not an E3 replacement. If you want a fan celebration, go to PAX.

Ok, time to take some more medicine, lay down and watch some hoops. Here’s a list of things I am going to post about soon, mostly as a reminder to me:

- There were some inspiring indie games on the show floor at GDC. I want to share them with you all because some of them are downloadable right now. Post forthcoming on that.

- Got to meet and talk with a lot of awesome people. Frank from area/code, Clint Hocking again, the guy who designed Puzzle Quest, the guy who wrote the dialogue for Sheogorath in Shivering Isles, former Tiburon exec John Schappert, etc. But there was a fantastic story regarding “Emotioneering” hack/author David Freeman that I simply cannot wait to gossip over. But I will, because I am tired.

- The Microsoft keynote at GDC was a bit surreal, especially the Gears 2 teaser. More on that later.

- Bioshock director Ken Levine offered up a distinctively contradictory set of advice when compared to the writers from Oblivion that I haven’t seen compared online yet and I’d like to post that for readers to chew on.

- Lastly, I played a lot of Eternal Sonata while sick and I found something that I feel happens with Eastern developers quite often (especially in RPGs), but almost never happens in games from Western devs. More on that this week.

- Wait. That wasn’t last. Have you played Chocolatier 2? Quite possibly the best hardcasual game of all-time. And if you don’t know what that means, I’ll tell you.

Glad to be back. I plan on zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….