Reality Panic

I hear that the weather is always nice in San Diego. I hope so, as I’ll be there all of next week attending SIGGRAPH - the big conference/expo on graphics research and tech. I enjoyed the event last year, and expect no less this time around (my ““usual suspects” panel on the future of play was a big highlight :)

(Hopefully they’ll get my badge right this time around. Read it carefully… Hehehe, still makes me laugh ;)

I am running several sessions, and I encourage anyone attending SIGGRAPH to come check them out:

Given the general busy-ness of being at an event, blog postings will not likely be often - unless, of course, they’ve got conference-wide WiFi up and running…

It is really nice to read an article in a major (Canadian) paper covering the maturing of games as a sophisticated medium. Special focus is paid to the morality questions presented in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (ie, playing on the Dark of Light side for the Force). I suppose it is forgivable that the journalist had no sense of this existing in games before (the Ultima series from the past, Black&White more recently, just to name two examples)…

Along the lines sophistication, I get super excited when smart people put together smart events like the recently announced “The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds“. I spoke a bit with these folks and gave some suggestions on topic areas and speakers… Sadly, I’ll miss the event as it is right between my trips to speak at the first International Digital Games Research Conference and the Australian Game Developers Conference .

And, another display of sophistication is the mock court planned for the Black Hat security/hacker conference. The “Hacker Court” will try the case of a man accused of hacking into a MMOG server and destroying another player’s digital gear. The DoJ will be there, along with a Federal Judge and the pioneer of MMO economics, Edward Castronova (as an expert witness). Mature and sophisticated indeed!

A lot of news has been floating around regarding the SEC inquiries into several game publishers (eg, THQ, Activision, Midway, Acclaim). It is important to remember that this is not motivated by any wrongdoing - the SEC seems to just want to “better understand” how they account for sales, etc. Fair enough.

The scary thing, however, is the suggestion that possible changes to accounting practices will lead publishers to be even more risk-adverse. A scary potentiality indeed.

Publishers will likely be checking out this GameSpot list of movie licenses that might not suck… (Side comment: Battle Royale sounds like a pretty intense movie!)

More and more developers will start looking into the indie scene for sure.

I am sucker for school/coming of age movies (comedic or dramatic). Many of these are pretty lame, but something about seeing losers struggle (as I certainly did) and eventually succeed is fun to watch. No doubt, the plots are pretty formulaic and predictable. Choose from the geek-turn-cool-gets-girl plot, the ugly-duckling-girl-becomes-women-wins-hunk plot, the lots-of-guys-get-drunk-party-with-chics plot, or some derivation thereof. They are all the same.

Case in point: Old School. I watched the DVD recently. It is not going to win any Oscars, but it is an enjoyable/funny school genred movie. (Hehehe, that Will Ferrell just cracks me up). Anyway, point being that despite its predictable plot and the fact that it follows pretty much all of the genre conventions does not take away from my enjoyment of the movie (ironically, in some ways, it is the fact that it follows these conventions that lends to its enjoyment).

On the gaming front, I recently started playing Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. It is very much a Diablo clone, however refined and evolved. I must say that I am enjoying it very much. It has been a while since I’ve played a Diablo-style game and BG:DA follows all the conventions and feels very familiar, comfortable and intuitive to play (ie, no need to read the manual, play the tutorial of even check GameFAQs for tips).

This leads me to point to a recent IGDA article on the evolution of game genres with a comparison to biology. It is long, but worth the read. One point it makes is that following genre conventions with only minor innovations along the way is usually a good approach (also, that the best time to really innovate is after mass extinction (ie, death of 2D when PS1 came into being)).

Also along the old school front, it is worthy to note that the concept of emulation and preservation of games it going to be a big issue (for academics, for IP law, for players, publishers, developers, etc). Check out this debate on the rights and wrongs of ROMs, as well as this thorough article on piracy (which touches on emulation, ROMs, IP issues, etc).

Finally, I just reread the classic Gamasutra article on Formal Abstract Design Tools by Doug Church. It is a new school look at game design from an old school developer…

Was just reading about the amazing port of Splinter Cell from Xbox to PS2 over at Gamasutra. Despite the technical wizardry, what I found most interesting was this team picture of Ubi Soft Shanghai.

It is a bit hard to count precisely, but my best effort brings in 10 females of the 40 total people in the shot. A 25% female team. Cool!

Interestingly, it seems that many Asian studios have a much healthier gender mix than their American (guesstimated at <10%) and Euro (guesstimated at <5%) counterparts.

During GDC Europe two years ago, a studio tour video was given of NanaOn-sha (the Japanese studio lead by Masaya Matsuura (the designer behind Parappa the Rapper)). It looked like every other person in the studio was female…

While a recent Wired article clearly claims that Western game developers aren’t chasing women, I wonder to what extent this is true in Asia. Or, is it just a non-issue as gaming (and play, in general) are such a pervasive part of many Asian cultures.

(As an aside, there was a great quote in the Wired piece on the idea that having more female developers would mean more women/girls would play games: “…It’s like saying men would buy more makeup if more men were working in that industry.” Certainly an interesting way to look at it ;)

Alan Yu, the director of the Game Developers Conference, was in Montreal last week on business. I hung out with him a bit to discuss IGDA activities at GDC, and also arranged an informal lunch date with some of my Ubi Soft Montreal buddies (Eric Le, coder on a top secret project; Danny Oros, art on Far Cry; Nicolas Rioux, programming studio manager, and the award winning Clint Hocking of Splinter Cell fame).

Anyway, at the end of the busy week, Alan suggested we take in a movie to relax. And, since Pirates of the Caribbean was sold out, we went to see 28 Days Later.

Hot damn, what a freaking scary movie! It is frightening in so many ways: the tension, the suspense, the violence, the believability, the isolation, the hopelessness, etc, etc. I really enjoyed it :) Alan, on the other hand, was “not prepared” for the intensity and came out shaking a bit…

On top of being an exciting movie to watch, it had a lot of depth. The ideas of rage being a virus, current sensitivities to biowarfare and terrorism, human survival and needs, society and violence, and other such messages and commentary are threads that I am still trying to wrap my brain around. Of particular note, I found the balance between the viral rage, and the “rage” displayed by the uninfected hero to be quite ironic.

Despite the visceral and overtly violent nature of 28 Days Later (appropriately rated R), it has a lot to say about the current condition of humanity. It is sad to think that many pop-culture critics will see the film as a formulaic blood and guts affair out to incite rage in all of us…