Mon 25 Jul 2005
Took in some great Asian movies at the annual Fantasia Fest in Montreal. Got me thinking of the notion of game screenings and festivals. Likewise, my recent trip to Vancouver for Vidfest made me wonder why the digital media festival didn’t include any screenings of games - despite the fact that games were part of the overall agenda.
It is easy to dismiss the idea of a screening because games are interactive and can’t be “played” by an audience at the same time (giant games of pong notwithstanding). Even the de facto industry festival, the IGF, doesn’t really do screenings per se. Rather, each game/team gets a pod to demo their game from during the week of GDC. That approach is super valuable to the teams who enter the IGF, but I still wouldn’t quite call it a screening in the more traditional sense. Not sure what they do, if anything, at the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival…
Perhaps the closest I’ve seen was several E3’s ago, when BioWare was first showing KOTOR. It was behind closed doors, in a small theatre setting. They showed the prerequisite intro cut-scene, but then several of the developers talk about different aspects of the game (eg, writer talked about story arc, programmer discussed latets bells whistles, etc). And, while they were discussing the features, challenges, etc, someone else would play through appropriate areas of the game, etc.
What if that could be templated into a 20-minute chunk and then piled together with another 5-6 chunks? We’d end up with approx 2-hours of game screenings/demoing. Would you sit through such a thing? Would it be worthwhile/interesting for the audience? Where/when could something like that take place?
Anyway, just thinking out loud. The questions remain: what would a game screening look like and would a game festival have to have them to be a festival?
July 30th, 2005 at 12:45 am
Personally, I’ve been to at least one IGDA meeting that I can think of off-hand where a game was ’screened.’ (Though, this was in the Orlando chapter when I was a student at Full Sail, where the meetings are usually held. So we were all of the ‘wannabe gamedev’ crowd and most of what was discussed was programming related.)
They took us through the first level of their game in about ten or fifteen minutes while talking about it and then showed us programming and design aspects of different parts of the gameplay that we asked about. For example we asked about ongoing fighting in an unreachable background area to give a sense of larger scale combat. They showed us that the background fighting was mostly random animations that all streamed well together with extremely light scripting for variance, so little processing or data-storage was required at all aside from resources. And even farther back where soldiers were marching down mountain paths, they zoomed back to show that they were just textures. Sure now these are obvious tricks, even if they are still good, but to us at the time they were insanely clever and cool.
I thought that the IGDA meeting wasn’t a bad place for it considering the Orlando meeting’s usually at Full Sail anyway. But I have little clue about how other IGDA meetings operate.