Reality Panic

Just got back from my third straight trip to the state of Pennsylvania (the first was the Penn State conference + Philly IGDA Chapter meeting + IGDA admin office stuff, the second was the IGDA board strategy retreat). This third time was as an invited guest to SIGGRAPH’s 2009 strategy/planning weekend in Pittsburg. Ya, those guys really plan ahead!

While in town, I took the opportunity to hook up with Heather Kelley, who has been a “visiting” professor at Carnegie Mellon over the past semester. It was a crazy art show week in Pittsburgh and Heather took me around to a few shows and related events. Also, I gave a lecture at the 8-Bit Poet Collective (a student group at CMU promoting indie game development).

Here are some photos from the trip:

Drew Davidson (CMU ETC) welcomes the SIGGRAPH committee members to the Entertainment Technology Center.

 

ETC student project Quasi.

 

The “lobby” area to the ETC.

 

Must be a lot of Star Wars nerds at the ETC…

 

University of Pittsburgh’s “tower of knowledge”, the tallest university building in the world (or so I was told by the taxi driver).

 

Playing some dodgeball after the 8-Bit Poet meeting.

 

Checked out the I-am-a-Heather art show at Future Tenant. Heather Kelley had an interactive/game piece.

 

A larger scale piece at the Pittsburgh Biennial art show.

 

More standard photos on a wall art at the Biennial.

 

Heather rides the rocket chair!

As a rule, I don’t play Mature-rated games with my kids around (who are 5 and 2.5 years old). However, I bend the rule a bit if what I’m doing in the game is not mature oriented stuff.

For example, in working to get all the achievement points in Assassin’s Creed, I spent some extra time just running around the cities and climbing all the high point towers. Since that involves no violence/etc, I allowed my son to watch me play (as a side note it was actually educational as we talked about the time period and the types of houses/buildings, and the fact there were no cars, etc).

Anyway, a few weeks later, out of the blue, he drew me the below rendition of Altair at the top of a tower and the two carts of hay to jump into.

Just got back from a busy week in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including:

• attending and moderating a session during “Playing to Win: The Business and Social Frontiers of Videogames” at Penn State University
• having dinner with new board chair Jen MacLean to discuss org strategy
• visiting the IGDA admin office in New Jersey to work on various operational stuffs, including a finance session with IGDA treasurer Tobi Saulnier
• dinner with the IGDA-Philly chapter coordinators
• attending and speaking at the IGDA-Philly chapter meeting

On the whole, a very productive, albeit exhausting week. Especially given late night college-style partying that took place during the Penn conference… But, I digress.

The Playing to Win conference was a good first effort, and really got going with a bang. The first several sessions focused on the “social” element of the conference sub-title, and featured some high-powered speakers. Though, after that initial set of sessions, many of the following panels lacked the same focus and firepower - though, there was certainly many nuggets of goodness interspersed. Would be excellent to see them focus solely on these “social” elements in the future.

Also, it was a real pleasure to finally meet GamePolitics’ Dennis McCauley, who was there to speak from the gamer’s perspective.

Presenting at the IGDA-Philly night a few days later was a treat, as I always appreciate the opportunity to sample different chapter cultures and styles. The meeting was well run and there was a good ~50 person crowd on hand. My lecture was a rehash of the “at least 10 reasons the game industry doesn’t suck” lecture I’ve done a few times before.

Anyway, here are some photos from the trip:

David Bickham (Center on Media and Child Health) gives a somewhat balanced opening keynote.

 

An amped up Clay Calvert (Penn State) gives a legal rundown on anti-game legislation failures.

 

Dennis McCauley (GamePolitics.com) presents the consumer perspective.

 

Adam Thierer (Center for Digital Media Freedom, The Progress & Freedom Foundation) discusses the role of parents.

 

Stevan Mitchell (ESA) covering the ESA’s roadmap for fighting piracy.

 

Amusingly, a “genuine software?” warning popped up during Stevan’s talk (it was a conference system, not his).

 

Jen McNamara (Breakaway Games) presents Pulse! as an example of the power of games for serious applications.

 

Brian Smith (Penn State) talks about fantasy sports leagues, a wildly successful form of digital games.

 

Jen MacLean (38 Studios) does a wonderful job of wrapping together all the disparate threads of the conference into her closing keynote.

 

John Demos (Three Rings Design), Jen MacLean (38 Studios) and Jason Coleman (Big Huge Games) out for some college-style partying in State College, PA!

 

The surprisingly good cover band, Spider Kelly, in action.

 

IGDA-Philly coordinator Daniel Hettrick munching some pre-meeting pizza with Steve Lane (U. of Penn).

 

Daniel kicks off the meeting.

 

Corvus Elrod (Zakelro Story Studio) gives a session on self-promotion.

 

Tom Bennett (Drexel University) and Vance Souders (Firewater Games) chowing down after the chapter meeting.

 

Alex Horn (Comcast) and Colin Campbell (Big Huge Games) at the post meeting watering whole.

As noted previously, after my Bully debate with the Canadian Teachers Federation, I reached out to them asking if we could be a part of the solution (as opposed to the perception that games are part of the problem). I’m happy to say that I found my way to the head of their cyberbullying group and we are arranging to speak in more detail, etc. More on that as progress is made.

In terms of being “part of the solution” a few recent examples crossed my path:

• Ruckus Nation: HopeLab’s global competition to get kids moving announced their award winners.
• Future of Interactive Technology for Peace Conference: CMU is using the event to determine if games can be used to enhance the peacemaking process.
• Games For Health Conference: Now in its fourth iteration is on for early May…
• ESA Foundation Scholarships: …with a focus on getting more women and minorities into game development.

Of course, we have the ever popular Child’s Play Charity raising millions to help sick children. As well as more novel efforts like OneBigGame to create unique games for the benefit of children’s charities.

And, that’s just off the top of my head. There’s a bunch more stuff like this going on that I’m barely aware of…

I’ve got a Bully interview/debate set for tomorrow morning on CBC News:Sunday with Mary-Lou Donnelly of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. I tried to punt this one to journalist Steve Tilley, as I thought he did a great job editorializing on the irony surrounding the teachers’ condemnation of the release of Bully: Scholarship Edition (but he wasn’t available :(

So, I’m doing a bit more research and prep, and trying to understand the core of the teachers’ concern/complaint. In reviewing the CTF’s official statement, they spend most of their words describing how problematic bullying is. OK, no debate there, bullying is a serious and complex issue that needs society’s ongoing attention.

But what about the game itself? It is quite evident that none of the teachers actually played the game or bothered to do much research on it - seemingly defaulting to their likely model of all games being bad. Not only do they misrepresent what the game is about (along with content that doesn’t actually exist), they miss the whole point about the player-character being a kind of anti-bully. That many of the missions are to protect the weaker characters, and connect with the various factions at school. That you need to attend (and excel at) class in order to get ahead. And that actually being a bully has negative repercussions that slow down your progress.

The saddest part of all this is that the teachers are missing a prime opportunity to make progress. Their statement laments that the game “undermine[s] efforts to create safe schools”. Whereas, I’d argue that teachers could have leveraged Bully to both better understand the social politics of high school (by embodying a troubled teen) and open a much needed dialog with students about bullying.

Can we blame them? While some argue that Bully could have been an even more scathing critique of school life, the challenge is that many simply do not look to games for meaningful social commentary (like The Breakfast Club, for example). The mental model (certainly for digital immigrant teachers) is still stuck in the realm of frivolous toy as opposed to valuable cultural artifact…

Update 1: Clint Hocking offers to play Bully with the CTF to understand/evaluate it (book club style). Also, after the TV debate I contacted the CTF to open discussion and find ways to work together… I’ll post updates if/as things develop…

Update 2: Had a nice chat with Mary-Lou Donnelly from the CTF. She’s going to put me in touch with the folks heading up their anti-cyberbullying efforts (which lead the charge to ban Bully). Ultimately, we all want to stop bullying and build safe/effective schools, and there’s no doubt that games can play an important role in that effort. We’ll see what happens next…

A week of hardcore GDC action can really break you. Man, do I feel old. And, I’m very jealous of the IGDA student scholars who seemed to be out every night until 4am, but in lecture sessions for 9am! Though, I must say that this GDC did feel more intense than in past years. Perhaps the focus on the summits got more people over to GDC sooner in the week than usual. All I know is that my plane landed at noon on Sunday, and my first meeting was at 1pm - and the action didn’t let up until Saturday.

Overall, it was another great GDC. Though, sadly, I didn’t make it to as many actual conference sessions as I would have liked. There’s just always so much going on… Unfortunately, I did make it to the Microsoft “keynote”, which was one big brainwashing pitch. Even though some of the specific announcements were cool/worthwhile (like the XNA community portal), it all felt so forced and manufactured. GDC should stop calling these sessions keynotes and just label them as platform announcement hours or whatever. The Ray Kurzweil session is more along the lines of an actual real keynote…

Also, this was a special year for me personally in receiving the inaugural Ambassador Award. At the ceremony, I was fortunate enough to sit with Ralph Baer, though, you could tell he was a little dismayed with the heavy-metal gag video that opened the ceremony…

To save myself from rambling, I’ll use these photos to jog my GDC08 memories.

Gordon Walton (BioWare Austin) and Aaron Thibault (Gearbox Software) participate in the IGDA’s first ever Government+Association Summit.

 

Asante Bradford (Georgia Department of Economic Development) presents a case blast on the new Georgia Entertainment Industry Investment Act.

 

IGDA chapter and SIG leaders out for dinner after some behind-the-scenes workshops.

 

The 2008 IGDA Student Scholarship recipients.

 

The scholars take a tour of the snazzy Three Rings Design offices.

 

“Lite” reading in the Three Rings toilet stall.

 

Ian Baverstock (Kuju) welcomes delegates to the UK luncheon - one of many such government driven events at GDC.

 

Poster session during the IGDA’s Education Summit.

 

Petri Purho (Kloonigames) presents an IGF student postmortem during the Education Summit. His game, Crayon Physis Deluxe went on to win the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

 

IGDA Party: The small line up for the IGDA members-only party. The ~10-minute wait time was way better than last year’s 1-hour+!

 

IGDA Party: We packed over 2000 members into the Westin ballroom.

 

IGDA Party: Patric Palm (Hansoft), Drew Johnston (Microsoft) and Mike Cornford (IGDA scholar).

 

IGDA Party: James Everett, Heather Kelley and ?.

 

IGDA Party: Brenda Brathwaite rewards members (?, Catherine Herdlick and Greg Trefry of Gamelab, Sofia Battegazzore and Gonzalo Frasca of Powerful Robot) with free drink tickets for a successful game pitch (ie, putting together a winning hand in the Writers SIG social card game).

 

IGDA Party: Jesse Schell (CMU), Tobi Saulnier (1st Playable) and Justin Berenbaum (EmSense) make their way into the party.

 

IGDA Party: Tracy Kobeda Brown (PMS Clan - Ticorah / CMU ETC) and Jill Duffy (CMP) connect.

 

IGDA Party: Bill Fulton (Ronin User Experience), Gaurav Mathur (Factor5) and Marty O’Donnell (Bungie).

 

IGDA Party: Can’t be a real party without Scott’s in kilts: ? and Paul Rylance of Wyte Dragon.

 

IGDA Party: ?, ?, Luna Cruz (Anino Games), ?, ? and Gabby Dizon (Flipside Games).

 

IGDA Party: Brian Robbins (Fuel Industries) and Bob Bates.

 

The ever popular discussion on games, violence, censorship, etc, hosted by the IGDA.

 

John Schapert delivers the Microsoft “keynote”.

 

Backstage during the Choice Awards rehearsal.

 

StrategyLegends: Brian Reynolds (Big Huge Games) and Sid Meier (Firaxis).

 

Heather Kelley, Jenova Chen (thatgamecompany) and Phil Fish liquor up before the ceremony starts.

 

Phil Fish collects his IGF award for excellence in visual arts in Fez.

 

Realm Lovejoy and Kim Swift grab the Best Game Design award for Portal.

 

Ralph Baer gets a standing ovation for his Pioneer Award. Best line: “I’m still cranking out stuff”.

 

Joe McDonagh and Ken Levine caught without a written speech for winning the Best Writing award with BioShock.

 

Bob Bates, myself and Ralph Baer post-ceremony.

 

A make-shift barber shop at the Sony party. Now I’ve really seen everything…

 

Q-Tip entertains at the Sony party. But, was mostly just noise preventing good networking…

 

The Moscone West escalator: A good problem for AI pathfinding/flocking researchers ;)

 

Clint Hocking (Ubisoft) delivers an awesome/beautiful lecture on immersion. Wow!

 

Steampunk is always hip: Cosplayers promoting Recoil: Retrograd at the Nordic pavilion.

 

Laura Fryer (Microsoft) and Noel Llopis (Power of Two Games) checking out the IGF games.

 

Pleo. Weirdly cool.

 

Steve Meretzky (Blue Fang Games) dons his winning rabbit ears after the Game Design Challenge. Alexey Pajitnov, Brenda Brathwaite and Eric Zimmerman partake in the silliness.

 

Tough Crowd: Jade Raymond tries to give a lecture during Ubisoft’s party.

 

Daneil James (center) welcomes Kellee Santiago (thatgamecompany) and Brian Robbins (Fuel Industries) to Three Rings for the after-after party.

 

Dr. Babsi Lippe (Avaloop) welcomes women to the IGDA booth for the annual Women’s Group Gathering.

 

Packed house for the annual rant session. Inspiring stuff!

 

Jon Mak’s performative non-verbal rant.

 

Our attempt at a katamari, which seemed to be quite popular (@Joystiq, @IGN, @YouTube). It never got big enough to actually stick a person to it (which was the original plan/hope).

Post-Party: Jane Pinckard (F9) and Robin Hunicke (EA) at the annual day-after GDC party…

 

Post-Party: Poor R.O.B. looking a little lonely :(

 

Post-Party: Jon Blow, simply wiped out from a busy week at GDC working to change the world…