Reality Panic

In just a few hours, I’ll be taking off for London to attend the Game Developers Conference Europe, part of the newly bundled (and gov endorsed) “London Games Weeks“. It is going to be a busy week…

First up, I’m having Sunday dinner with my buddy and game theory mastermind Eric Zimmerman. He’s an IGDA Education Committee member, and we’ve got some session planning to do. Monday is admin/setup stuff. Tuesday, being the first day of GDCE, is mainly for day-long tutorials, but later in the day, we’ve got the orientation for our scholarship recipients (which is always invigorating).

Wednesday is going to be crazy, as I’ve got three sessions: one on standardizing game credits (a growing area of debate/concern), another on studio size/survival and a special “town hall” meeting with many of the Euro industry orgs taking open feedback. Then Wednesday night is the inaugural Develop Industry Excellence Awards (of which I was a judge).

Thursday is more lectures, and then Friday is the IGDA’s Academic Day, which Eric and myself are orchestrating. The “futures” panel should spark a lot of debate…

Sprinkle in some ECTS floor time, some cocktail receptions, some meetings and other random stuff, and you can pretty much bet that I’ll be freaking tired by the end of the week!

Call me a sucker for punishment :)

A short while ago, Sega promoted Mie Kumagai to serve as president of subsidiary HitMaker. She became the first female studio president in Japan… Now, Polygon has a quick interview with her.

I particularly like the last Q/A:

Question: “Do you think the number of women players is rising?”

Kumagi-san: “I never played games myself before joining Sega, and I think the image of a female player isn’t desirable in society. But games are a great form of entertainment. I learned that at Sega and I feel women need to be educated about the fun of games. The audience for games is wide and should include more women. Darts are a more conventional game, but women really enjoy it. At a local darts bar in Ikebukruo women represent 50 percent of the cliental. I want to break down the barriers around videogames the same way.”

Darts? Who knew?

Nice to see a critical look at those who slam games, game violence and gamers as social cavepeople. As Gerard Jones similarly states, most politicians and researchers simply have not paid enough attention to the gamers themselves or they take what’s on screen too literally (Jones get’s into this in his recent debate with anti-game crusader Daphne White (be sure to listen to the full RealAudio broadcast)).

Also keying off of the recent QuakeCon event, CNN has an article on the shifting culture of video games. Culture and audience being what Seamus Blackley - always the provocateur - passionately tells us we should not be ignoring…

And, from the taking things too literally department, these guys have “reenacted” scenes from The Getaway in London. Cool! (Nice umbrella shotgun stand-in ;)

There are a bunch of interesting books in the library section of Scott Miller’s bio. Two that I’ve read recently are “Focus” and “Positioning“, both by Al Ries. My motivation was to get a better sense on how to focus the work of the IGDA and position it in the minds of developers. Both books are extremely insightful and have, for the most part, lead myself and the IGDA’s board of directors on our current path of recharging IGDA batteries, etc…

From a game dev/biz point of view, I’d say these books are as equally powerful and important. An obvious recommendation is to stick to what you are good at (ie, focus on your strengths). Surprisingly, it is amazing to see so many developers not heed this obvious advice… Not-surprisingly, those that do, have amazing success (think id with FPS games or BioWare with RPGs). In many ways, a successful developer can become so synonymous with their successes that if they try to do anything else, it would likely be met with failure…

One area we often see this happen is with “line extensions”. That is, putting your logo/brand on a different product. Say BioWare wants to bank on their reputation and success as an RPG developer and decided to “extend” into racing games. While BioWare might think “BioWare” means quality and credibility, consumers most likely think that “BioWare” means great RPG games. So, best to stick with RPGs ;)

A related concept is that of trying to improve your weaknesses. It is fairly intuitive to try to better your weaknesses since you are already good at your strengths. This is a waste of time. Any effort not spent focusing on that strength is wasted. Interesting.

Further, when assessing your strengths/etc, it is usually not what you think they are. To truly understand where your focus lies or what position you hold requires you to look outside your company (or yourself for that matter), and learn what consumers think.

Anyway, hard to express the axioms distilled in these two books. But, in short, you are what they say you are…

I attended a session on cross-cultural interface design during SIGGRAPH. It was an excellent course, given by human-computer interaction expert Aaron Marcus. The main premise was that localization does not equal translation: there’s a lot to factor when designing for different cultures. While the course focused mainly on web sites as visual examples, it is easy to see the relevance for games.

Too many games simply translate text and do not take into account such things as cultural metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance preferences. Even just scanning some news articles you get a sense of German’s extreme dislike of violence, English fear of blood, Korea’s connectedness, the dark side of online gaming, potential areas of racism, and so on. Just to name a few areas of contention…

Certainly, developers need to be more aware of cultural differences in order to succeed in the ever-globalizing games business. To point, EA Europe’s managing director states that the audience for games needs to triple in size, with major growth coming from games with global appeal.

We would all be wise to look into cross-cultural design. While each year at GDC, developers cram to hear from renowned Japanese designers on how to make great games, there is a wealth of (non-games specific) information already out there just waiting to be leveraged.

My copy of “Cultures and Organizations” is on order. The book was oft mentioned by Aaron as he uses its concepts to help better understand cultural dimensions. More on that later…

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article titled “Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?“. It is a very thorough run through of the study of games, games for education and other such academicy things. It is a surprisingly unbiased (if positive) piece in a publication billed as the “No. 1 news source for college and university faculty members and administrators”. Nice.

A large portion of the article centers around professor James Paul Gee (whom I’ve written about in the past and is the author of this great book), and his theories on games and education. It is fun to read about his vocal critics. One in particular states that “…if [Gee] thinks that playing some goddamn video game is the equivalent of memorizing a Shakespeare soliloquy, that’s crazy.”

And, since I was never a big fan of memorizing Shakespeare, Gee’s response is right on: “It’s not the equivalent. It’s more the equivalent of being able to produce a play, of being able to make up poetry. I think people ought to produce things rather than memorize.”

Anyway, all this plays into Gee’s notions of learning and doing, interacting and emoting, etc, etc.

Even with all the work the IGDA is doing to build bridges with academics, there’s still a (somewhat diminishing) sense that games are not worthy or are trivial. Well, Gee warns that “Shakespeare in its time was popular entertainment, and that the elite looked down upon it. We all know that some of the things that kids know now will be elite knowledge.”

Imagine a few hundred years from now. Games as “elite knowledge”. Interesting. (Hmm, but does bring back the question of preservation…)

In related news, industry grand-daddy Nolan Bushnell hints to Atari’s designs targeting a flow state… Too bad he always has to come down hard on violent games. Oh well. And, always fun to read about a gamer’s view on the effects of all this.