Fueling the Fire: A GDC Retrospective

Last month, we asked a close friend of OLC to write about his experience at the 2010 Game Developers Conference.  This is his story.

George Kokoris is a coder, writer and game development student at Full Sail University. Passionately dedicated to the art of storytelling, he devotes much of his time toward strengthening the troubled relationship between games and narrative, mostly through wild gesticulations and inflammatory rhetoric. He keeps a sparsely updated blog here. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gkokoris.”

This year marked my third trip to GDC, and I can now say with absolute certainty that my favorite week of the year becomes more wonderful every time. When I first came to the Moscone Center in 2008, I had spent almost a year working as Atari Inc.’s in-house video editor, and was completing my transition from the film industry to the game industry. David Geudelekian, a producer at Atari and one of my closest friends, saw to it that I was introduced to many of the independent developers at the Indie Games Summit, and I knew from the moment I entered that world that this was where I belonged. Indie games had yet to reach critical mass, and the summit was a scrappy, passionate affair, driven by the raw ambition of lifelong indies and newly “unemployed” mainstream industry veterans alike.

I spent most of my time just getting accustomed to the world of game development and business; coming from the cutthroat world of film and television, seeing so many people actively collaborating and genuinely getting excited about each other’s projects, always supportive and optimistic, was no less than culture shock for me. Shortly after returning from the conference I was laid off, as the boiling vortex of impending bankruptcy threatened to swallow gaming’s most significant Western brand forever. I spent the next year working as a freelance video editor and developing a few half-hearted indie projects of my own, often stymied by my inexperience and lack of programming knowledge, but the fire I felt at GDC kept me convinced that I was on the right track.

At GDC 2009, I was at a low point in my personal life, but coming back to San Francisco felt more like coming home than my newly empty Brooklyn apartment did. A chance meeting with Insomniac’s Bryan Intihar earlier that year led to me being introduced to the AAA side of the game industry, and after returning home I bit the bullet, threw my whole life out the window and went to Full Sail. During that time, I discovered Twitter, and I began to connect with friends and friends of friends in all corners of the game industry through snippets of absurd conversation. I realized just how tiny the game industry really is, and it was this knowledge that sent me barging headlong into my best GDC experience yet.

It was strange to come back to the conference in 2010 as a student, but fortunately enough people knew me and saw this as a simple career change rather than wide-eyed newbie-ism. I’d just come out of the wringer.

The first day of the conference, I staggered blearily out of the hotel room I shared with composer Rich “Disasterpeace” Vreeland and went to 135 Moscone North, where Swedish indie developer, swell guy and speed-coder extraordinaire Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom was delivering a talk – to a crowd easily triple the size of the previous indie summit – about the design advantages of brutally abusing your player. Soderstrom, who builds all of his games in Game Maker and has on occasion churned out award-winning material in a matter of hours, designs games mostly for himself, and his relationship to the typical player of his games is one of playful competition. He detailed a number of infuriating tactics for driving gamers absolutely bonkers, using his own games (particularly Punishment) to illustrate things like intentionally not fixing camera rotation – so that over time the entire game becomes crooked – or the virtues of unresponsive controls to make a game arbitrarily difficult. For Cactus, the real game happens between him and the player, as he tries to push the player out of the experience and the player stubbornly refuses to give up in the face of increasingly absurd obstacles. It’s like a drinking game in a way, and anyone who has seen that man at a party knows better than to go shot for shot with Cactus.

The next talk was given by Nick Waanders and Kees Rijnen of Slick Entertainment, whom I’d met at my first GDC when Nick was building the XBLA version of N+. They were preparing to launch their top-down vehicle combat game Scrap Metal (which released the following day), and they spoke about their development process. The entire game was made by the two of them, with minimal artist involvement. Nick is an engine coder and Kees is a technical artist, so they spent much of their time using code to simplify the artistic side of development. At any given time, they both wore several hats, but the resulting game has a scrappy defiance to it that you’d probably never see in a game produced by a team of specialists. More proof (as if we needed it) that the indie spirit was alive and well, even in this quickly growing community.

The evening of the first day was spent at Mel’s Drive-In next to the convention center, talking design and catching up with former coworkers and newly discovered Twitter friends (GDC 2010 also marked the first time that anyone ever recognized me from my internet presence). It was refreshing to finally feel that fire again; that old excitement that brought me to this field in the first place. The sky was the limit, and the brainstorming continued late into the night.

On the second day, I attended a talk by Mark “Messhof” Essen (Flywrench) and Daniel Benmergui (Today I Die) about the evolution of controls in their games. Daniel’s portion of the talk covered a lot of new territory, as his game revolves around the creation of poetry using available words, and there have been few games to blaze this trail in the past. Mark spoke about fine-tuning controls, using his game Flywrench as an example. I found it especially fascinating that there really are very few English words to describe the “feel” of a game, but he made it clear that a lot of game design is intuitive. If the game feels like it doesn’t have a “soul,” it’s your responsibility to find out why and to fix it. It’s an approach that brings game design back to that magical place of exploration and adventure that many feel it’s lost.

That night was Kokoromi’s GAMMA IV party. To celebrate this year’s competition theme of one-button games, they rented out an enormous club, filled it with projectors displaying the six winners of the GAMMA IV game competition, and threw the doors open to GDC attendees. It was strange that, despite there being over 700 people in attendance, it just reinforced my discovery of how small the game industry really is. Everyone is only two or three degrees of separation from everyone else, and soon friends of my friends were introducing me to IGDA directors and award-winning game designers, just because we were there. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: game dev parties are the best parties.

The following morning I attended a talk about EVE Online given by Alex “The Mittani” Gianturco, the director of intelligence for Goonswarm, once the largest alliance in the game. Only a player rather than a developer, Alex nonetheless had a clear understanding of game design (a common trait among high-level EVE players) and encouraged MMO developers to try mimicking CCP’s methodology rather than Blizzard’s. EVE’s high-stakes sandbox means that players are constantly outwitting and outmaneuvering each other to gain an advantage, and while Alex’s talk focused primarily on metagame espionage, even the general approach of sandbox MMO design is still mostly untapped. Content-driven MMOs like WoW, he said, are nightmarish to maintain. The developer must constantly churn out new material to keep subscribers from getting bored, and even then a large group of players will still breeze through hours of content and demand more. Sandbox MMOs, on the other hand, don’t constantly need new content because the players are shaping the world, basically doing their own content creation. Alex argued that this way of making MMOs is the most efficient, because developers can focus on maintaining the game itself and work on creating new ways of playing, instead of constantly making bigger dragons.

Perhaps my favorite talk of the conference was given by Jaime Griesemer from Bungie Studios. He spoke about game balance and “feel” in much the same way that Mark Essen did; there is so little vocabulary for these things, and a good designer must internalize as much of the game as possible, so he can work from his intuition to shape the final product. He spoke, for instance, about how changing the firing rate of Halo 3’s sniper rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds totally changed the landscape of multiplayer during the initial beta tests. Griesemer’s talk covered the dizzying array of interconnected factors that caused this to happen, and I doubt there was a single person in the room whose head wasn’t spinning by the end of it. It’s no wonder Bungie is on the cutting edge; I’ve idolized those guys for years for precisely this kind of attention to detail. Game developers have to be meticulous, but few are quite so invested in the vastness of those details.

I spent much of the day on the expo floor, checking out tools and middleware and visiting the IGF booth in Moscone South. That night, the annual Game Developer’s Choice Awards show was the big event, and the takeaway for most developers present was that not only are social and Facebook games not going away, they are actively trying to push everyone else out of business. When accepting the Best Social Game award for FarmVille, Zynga’s Bill Mooney launched into what sounded awfully like a tirade against indie developers, goading them for criticizing FarmVille’s empty Skinnerian treadmill all while claiming that his multimillion-dollar company was “just as indie,” proceeding to offer everyone in the audience jobs before leaving the stage in awkward silence. The warnings of Jesse Schell echoed in the back of my mind, and I was glad to have the opportunity to drink the whole thing off and talk game design until 4AM with Rich and some mutual friends back at the hotel.

The next morning I dove into a panel including Manveer Heir, designer at Raven Software, and Leigh Alexander, news director of Gamasutra and an old friend from my Brooklyn days. They discussed the self-perpetuating problem of gaming’s lack of diversity; because so many video game characters are white men, mostly white men relate to games and want to work in the industry, thus leading to even more games about white men. Games have reached a point where they can no longer exist apart, oblivious to society and its issues. After the panel, Leigh introduced me to Kotaku/Action Button writer Tim Rogers, who in turn introduced me to Bob Pelloni of Bob’s Game infamy. We spent a few hours in the press room talking about game writing and development, and there I met Bungie’s Matthew Burns, who informed me that, among other things, Bungie has the hardest programming test in the game industry, which of course only made me want to work there even more than I already did. My ensuing conversation with Pelloni and Rogers bounced erratically between game writing, running a company and living on boats until we all spun off in separate directions like hyperactive dreidels in the Thunderdome.

That night, at a dinner held by BrainyGamer’s Michael Abbott, I had the chance to sit down over Indian food and talk about the creative process with BioShock 2 level designer Steve Gaynor and Lightbox Interactive game designer Trent Polack. It was interesting to see how few successful game designers have any programming experience at all, let alone a degree in game development; Gaynor has a degree in sculpture, and got his job because of a handful of stellar maps he made for F.E.A.R. shortly after the game’s release. With the industry still somewhat new to its massive commercial success, things haven’t gotten painfully bureaucratic yet, and producing excellent work is still sufficient to land gainful employment.

Over my remaining time at the conference, I met so many passionate people that I still marvel at how wonderful this industry really is. Discussing photography and atmospheric design with Trauma creator Krystian Majewski, sharing a drink with CCP’s Hilmar Petursson, trekking the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco with the inspiring and erudite Mitu Khandaker; every human interaction I had only reaffirmed my love for games and the people who make them.

On Sunday, after spending the afternoon walking off the conference with Alex Gianturco at Fisherman’s Wharf amidst discussions of EVE politics, life at sea and the importance of charisma, I sat by the gate at SFO and collected my thoughts. Social games are a tremendous force in the game industry now, and the more momentum they pick up the more they seem to overshadow the aesthetic, experiential games that I so desperately long to create. At the beginning of the conference, I worried that by the time I entered the industry, the games I want to build would no longer be commercially viable, but my discussions during the week made me realize that I am in this industry by choice, and it is entirely within my power to use everything I’ve learned to build whatever I want, so long as I can find someone out there who will enjoy it.