I’ll be heading to Boston this weekend to participate in SIGGRAPH and the Sandbox game symposium prefacing it. It’ll be nice to be back, as I’ve skipped out on the past few SIGGRAPHs (my last one being in 2003).
This go round, I’ll be particularly busy as I’m on, or running, a total of five different sessions during the combined events! They are:
Not to mention the usual round of parties, the standard set of meetings, the always entertaining Electronic Theater and the very funky Guerilla Studio and Emerging Technologies exhibit. And, probably the best session of all: The 5-minute per paper shotgun preview at the start of the week.
At least I don’t have to worry about jetlag :)
The July issue of Wired ran an interesting article titled “What Kind of Genius Are You?“. The article explored the theory that there are two distinct types of creativity: quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet.
The quick and dramatic creators are dubbed conceptualists, and create their best work early on in their career and then never quite match up to their early genius. The careful and quiet bunch are the experimenters, toiling away over years, perfecting technique, learning new tricks, etc. The article, covering the work of an economist exploring these theories in relation to painters/art, graphs this scale of artist age against art valuations.
(More details are provided in last year’s book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.)
What’s most interesting is the author’s suggestion that these theories apply to all artistic and creative endeavors. Wouldn’t it be fun to similarly graph the age/success of some of the industries luminaries. Perhaps Romero would fall into the conceptualist camp. Will Wright an experimenter?
My personal sense is that more developers would fall into the experimenter category. In part, this would be due to the iterative nature of game development, but more so due to the cumbersome nature of creating mainstream games (ie, it is kinda hard to be a conceptualist at a young age given the tools/cost/manpower required to create a game and the unlikelihood that a company would give you the control/funds to do so).
Now, match that up with the IGDA’s demographics data from last fall showing how young we are as an industry (~31 is the average age) and the finding that the average career length is only 5.4 years.
Can we say that we are really losing developers before they’ve had a chance to do their best work? If, in fact, developers tend to be more of the experimenter type of creator, what would the industry look like if the average career length was 10 years? 15 years?
As noted previously, I had a busy week of action planned for my trip to the UK. While the main purpose of the trip was to participate in the Develop conference in Brighton, I did sneak up to Middlesbrough for the Women in Games conference taking place right before.
WiG was a well organized small scale conference. There were about 80 attendees, mostly women, leading to a surreal game industry moment when I was sitting at a table eating lunch with seven women… The conference content had a primarily academic slant and covered stuff like gendered behavior in online games, initiatives to get girls gaming and looking at games as tools for teaching abstract programming concepts. Fun stuff. I ran a panel on quality of life challenges with a handful local professionals - admittedly a more industry oriented topic of discussion. A key takeaway was a pointer to the hilarious sadly-not-far-from-the-truth Saturday Night Live spoof commercial for “Chess for Girls!“
While in Middlesbrough, I also had the chance to catch up with Dave Sharp, an old industry buddy of mine. What he’s been cooking up with the Digital City initiative seems truly inspiring! If only other regional governments were so supportive…
Arriving in Brighton, I was immediately struck by the young/hip vibe of the city - and the smell of the beach/water/seagulls. Brighton really was a perfect choice to host a conference for harried developers to escape to for a few days. And, things got off to a boisterous start with Mark Rein’s infamous inflammatory opening keynote speech. I must coyly admit that I’m the one you called him out as a dinosaur - sorry Mark :) But, I don’t feel so bad after Phil Harrison, during the closing panel, said he utterly disagreed with everything Mark said and that he was a failure as a keynote speaker (who should have been inspiring the audience instead)… Anyway.
The conference was jammed with content. The healthy crowd of approx 500 developers were barely able to fill up all the rooms. A good problem to have. Andy Eades’s “Ferrari” talk on the quality of life at Relentless Software was particularly inspiring (despite the gaping jaws of most attendees (”I that really possible?”)). Also, the “fresh ideas to borrow” and “opinion jam” sessions were fun and informative twists on the usual lecture format. Mizuguchi san’s lecture was almost devoid of any practical takeaway, but provided great insight into how one of the industry’s visionaries is inspired by everyday things and human interactions.
Overall a great, albeit hectic, trip to the UK. And, here are some pics of the action…
Deb Tillet (Breakaway Games) gave the opening keynote at WiG
Is it a wonder that the only guy-based design workshop team came up with an idea of pirates and blowing things up…
Women from various Nordic countries discuss local initiatives and programs to support girl/women gamers.
WiG conference organizer Gabrielle Kent (U. of Teesside) gives a welcoming speech during the conference dinner.
Kirsten Kearney (aka UK Frag Doll Kitt) gave an inspiring speech on her views of being a female gamer, a journalist and a mother.
Margaret Robertson’s (Edge Magazine) opening slide for her “fresh ideas” talk, someone should have blogged the results by now…
John Sear (U. of Derby) and Toby Barnes (Pixel-Lab) fill up on coffee.
Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Q Entertainment) discusses some of the inspirations that brought about Rez.
Ken Perlin (New York U.) filling up at the bar, kindly sponsored by UK publisher Codemasters.
The future of indie development: Introversion’s Thomas and Vic Arundel dressed all fancy for the Develop Industry Excellence Awards. (Check out photos of other fancy dressed developers via the Nokia photo blog).
Michael French (Develop Magazine) hands off the Legend Award to Charles Cecil (Revolution). Well deserved!
Michelle Hinn (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Richard van Tol (AudioGames.net) enjoy a drink in the hotel lobby bar.
Charles Cecil opinion jamming. Was good fun!
IGDA volunteers’ lunch: (starting from back left) John Sear, Toby Barnes, Thomas Arundel, Martine Parry (top of head), Vic Arundel (back of head), me, Brian Rodway, Adam Martin…
…(clockwise from front-center) Mike Drummelsmith, Carl Bateman, ?, Emmeline Dobson, Mary-Margaret Walker.
? receives SkillSet accreditation recognition by Ian Livingstone (Eidos) during the academic reception.
Before heading out for the GamesIndustry.biz party, I took a nice stroll on the beach.
And also ran into the Pavilion, which is very much at the root of Brighton’s existance…
Derek Littlewood (Free Radical) and John Sear enjoy a drink on the red side of the bar.
Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Justin Keeling (IGN) acting foolish on the blue side of the bar.
Hardy poker players raising money for charity during the party.
Ernest Adams watches a demo by Dimitris Grammenos during the game accessibility workshop.
Lunch on the beach with Jon Purdy (U. of Hull).
Brighton’s beach. Wish I had more of a chance to just chill out…
Doing final prep before heading out to the UK for a week. A slightly more hectic trip than the usual fly into London for GDC Europe as in years past. This go round it’ll be 6 nights, 3 hotels in 3 different cities.
First up will be the Women in Games conference in Teesside. This is their 3rd year running WiG and I look forward to the eclectic mix of academic and industry speakers. I’ll be running a panel on QoL.
Then it is beach-side in Brighton for the newly christened Develop conference. This one is much more industry/pro focused, but should have a nice casual/informal air about it given the location. I’ll be plenty busy for this one with:
Of course, that’s among the usual barrage of other sessions, meetings, receptions, etc. Should make for a fun/busy week in the UK :)
Cheers!
Last month, GameDaily ran an interesting article asking “where have all the game gods gone?“. It was a look at the lack of celebrity-status developers within the industry and how most of the developers who where gods back in the day (eg, Carmack, Miyamoto, Wright, Spector, etc), are still the same gods we have today.
Within the development community, we generally pick on their #2 reason: “The publishers have more power”. That is, the publisher wants control over their brand and only want to invest in their brand as a means to keep the attention of consumers. This is completely counter to music and books, for example, because no one cares who the book publisher is, they just want the latest book from King, Clancy, Rawling, etc…
Then, a few weeks later, during the build-up to the game marketing conference, GameDaily ran a series of game marketing facts. One was:
What buyers need to know about a game: Those who want to find more information about a game they are interested in are most eager to find out about graphics (40%), price (39%), and gameplay (38%). The publisher/developer is only interesting to 2%.
Oh my! Nobody cares about developers — or publishers for that matter. I wonder how chicken/egg this is. Do consumers not care because we don’t have a robust “celebrity promotion system” that pushes our leading creators out as public figures? Or, is it really that they have no interest, and without interest the industry just doesn’t bother?
Might this also be related to the debate over games as art and the lack of serious criticism of the medium? Henry Jenkins makes some interesting comments on that topic…
FYI, the full marketing survey/report is up at the MI6 website.
