The Dispatch: Game Developers Conference 2010 in Austin, TX

“Conference” is something of a misnomer. The GDC is a developer’s retreat. Outside of the expo no one is here to sell anything. No one is here to promote their game. The developers are here to exchange ideas and give others the benefit of their wisdom. Like the bearded guru’s of legend these men and women are humble fonts of knowledge who are here to spread the good word, and the good word is video games.

The Austin Convention center is packed with sessions, and you can’t go to them all. I chose sessions that ran the gamut of the gaming industry, but with overlapping times there is still so much I had to miss. Sessions at the GDC are lectures. Much like their collegiate counterparts, leaders in the industry use PowerPoint presentations to discuss aspects of the video game industry: Social Networking Games, the MMOFPS problem (massive first-person shooter), micro payments, international markets, data mining, net neutrality, service retrospectives, the list goes on.

While few outside the expo are trying to sell anything and much of the conference is academic, don’t be fooled, there is business going on at the GDC. Hands are shaking and cards are being traded. If there is selling at the GDC; the product is first impressions. College students, recent grads and even the gaming initiated are looking for any opportunity to advance their career.
It’s not as cutthroat as it might sound. While many would sell any organ they could do without for a chance at a job or internship, there is a polite and inclusive nature in the chatter. Industry leaders surprisingly alleviate tension. When they aren’t offering up friendly free advice at the conference, they’re out at the great local Austin bars inviting attendees to have a beer and talk video games for a chance to network even further.

One embarrassing caveat: Every attendant wears a low-hanging badge that identifies who they are and for whom they work. What became eventually clear to most attendees was the average human height (especially the average female, to my embarrassment) caused the badges to hang just around crotch level. Everyone wants to know who you are because you are always a potential contact. So you effectively have a flock of professionals making passing glances at each other’s junk… for business reasons.

Mostly I attended what interested me personally, but I tried to keep everyone in mind. Here’s a look into the GDC experience in 2010.

Game Design and Video Game Writing

Many of the sessions available at the GDC focused on game design and a significant portion of those were about game writing. What was once a tertiary consideration in gaming, writing is now included as a key element to game design. If the trend continues, writing is likely to become its own subject and not just an implied component of a game design team. As in any field, good writers are hard to vet. New writers are doubly so. Many of the lectures on writing tried to inform potential applicants on what the industry is looking for in a writer.

It’s Not in the Writer’s Manual: A Q&A for New Writers

Twenty or so aspiring writers were allowed unfettered access to the advice of industry leader: John Gonzalez (Creative Lead Designer, Obsidian Entertainment, Fallout: New Vegas), Chris Metzen (SVP of Creative Development, Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft), Rhianna Pratchett (Independent, Mirror’s Edge), Andrew Walsh (Freelance, Prince of Persia), Evan Skonick (Vicarious Visions) and Toiya Finley (Schnoodle Media, LLC). The session was a remarkably inclusive environment where the successful gave generously from their experience to those with only aspirations of success. Speakers gave frank and even heartfelt advice to new writers. Chris Metzen, in a moment of reflection implored writers to tell their stories from the soul, “We’re full up on clever. Clever hooks are done; the tank is full. Write soul. Sing though your writing.”

Writing the Whirlwind: 10 Years on the Frontlines of Halo Storytelling and Beyond

Joseph Staten (Creative Director, Bungie) gave a retrospective on writing the narrative for Halo over the last 10 years. Equally impassioned, Staten described how to keep an intellectual property (IP) fresh over time, “Pour all of your blood into it, leave nothing in the tank.” While maintaining reverence for the creative process, Staten mentioned in a sobering moment that, “[Halo]’s about shooting stuff. Killing aliens is relaxing” and that story is always beholden to gameplay.

Narrative Design Between the Lines: Game Development Conversation Standards

It’s not all heart and soul, sometimes its grammar and spelling. John Gonzalez (Creative Lead Designer, Obsidian Entertainment) walked attendants through the labyrinth of conversation standards required to keep the dialogue and narrative of Fallout: New Vegas in check. From faction details to the proper spelling of “Stimpak,” Gonzalez scrolled through the actual New Vegas documents while those in the audience strained to read at lightning speed to steal what little details they could.

Game Writing Workshop

Richard Dansky (Manager of Design/Writer, Red Storm) held a writing workshop focusing on peer feedback. It was an opportunity for one new writer to have a dialogue tree reviewed and critiqued by an industry professional and for several new writers to get a better understanding of how to give and receive criticism. What could have been a wolf pack tearing the unlucky writer’s prose to bits was instead an encouraging and well meaning critique that truly helped her and everyone in the room to write better dialogue.

Narrative Mechanics: An Approach to Crafting Emotion in Games

Writing is far from the final frontier in eliciting emotional responses in players. Jeremy Bernstiein’s (Independent, Dead Space 2) lecture on crafting emotion through the use of game mechanics highlighted an often underutilized tactic for crafting emotion. Via the very tools a we use to interact with the game Bernstein laid out the blueprints for not only putting fear into the player, but vulnerability, tension, helplessness and empathy. Citing examples such as the Andrew Ryan forced resolution in Bioshock (helplessness) to the hand-holding mechanic in Ico (empathy). The possibilities for dynamic emotional triggers was limited only to the creative power of the game designer.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Conquest Endgames in MMOs

The developers of EVE Online presented a retrospective that focused on the use of territory conquest for MMO endgame content. EVE Online has been a tireless prize fighter in the world of MMO’s, outlasting all of the major sci-fi space massives while producing an astonishing thirteen expansions in its seven year run. With a plethora of successes and failures under their belts, the developers at CCP were frank about both. The EVE community has notoriously sunk its collective teeth into EVE’s PvP conquest content, which caused a number of challenges. Chief among them was sheer player number in a given zone. On June 6th, 2010 EVE Online reached 60,453 players on a single server. It’s not hard to imagine enormous alliances clashing in a zone and crashing the server. Through clever incentives and a bit of social engineering the developers made great strides in solving the crowding of space, but what about time?

With the competitive popularity of EVE the very time zones of our own tiny planet played a major role in the graying of hairs at CCP. Sooner or later the players in Europe would have to go to sleep, and that’s exactly when American players would be lying in wait with an armada of enormous warships. The developers suggested several options for dealing with this fundamental issue: Segregate time zones, synchronize combat with scheduled combat, or overlap time zones to reduce exploitation.

With the coming release of EVE Online: Incursion in November 2010 it doesn’t appear that CCP has any plans to rest on their laurels. Even with the coming World of Darkness MMO in the pipeline, nothing seems to be slowing them down.

How Online Gaming Adopted the Grind

The Grind. It’s the elephant in the MMO room. More precisely, it’s the elephant in the MMO room that sits squarely on the face of the player while suggesting that the player relax and come to terms with this arrangement to better facilitate reaching maximum level and endgame content. Damion Shubert (Lead Combat Designer, Bioware, Star Wars: Old Republic) feels our pain. Generally speaking, Shubert sees the use of the grind as a crutch. It’s cheap, it’s easy and it’s rarely goes wrong “killing ten rats never fucking breaks.” Grind exists as a kind of membrane between moments of “gold content” or quests that are central to the title and therefore receive the most effort and scrutiny. Often between pitch battles with featured characters and scripted events are large stretches of killing a number of things that are at least within the hazy boundaries of the narrative.

Shubert considered tactics to break up the grind that presumably are being applied to Star Wars: Old Republic, many of which probe into the deep psychological framework of operant and classical conditioning as it applies to the average MMO player who is, by and large, a rat in a box. They pull the lever for the pellet and hope against engineered odds for the occasional epic pellet drop. However, Shubert is not dogmatic in his view of the grind. There are ways to apply the grind appropriately without wearing down the will of the player: Consistent leveling curves, multiple objectives in similar areas or similar enemy types and keeping numbers reasonable (avoid confusing 1,000 killed bandits with a challenging gaming experience).

The 256+ Player Real-Time Server Architecture: Making the MMOFPS a reality

This is my personal holy grail. Too long the RPG has ruled the massive online market with their turn-based tyranny. Sony Online Entertainment attempted to pull the sword from the stone with Planetside, but its efforts were unworthy. Since that time the MMOFPS has remained something of dream for the future. A plan for when technology could meet the demands of such an ambitious endeavor. Lin Luo believes he has designed a solution that will bring the future to the present making the present the past and the past some kind of enriched super-past.

In any FPS there is simply too much going on for any server to handle more than 16-32 players per team. Should they all be in close relation to one another, the server would likely lag or crash altogether. Luo postulates that he could fix this issue by dividing the work load. A central hub server would synchronize 4-8 “battle servers” that would be responsible for populating and coordinating various object requests or physics calculations individually when relevant. Let’s say that MastaKilla69 fires a rocket in an attempt to kill Spartan420 in a crowd of over 100 players. His client would request a rocket be populated. That request would travel to the hub server and then be populated by a connected battle server then routed back through the hub server to each connected client within view of the rocket so that MastaKilla69 and the 100+ throng of players all bear witness to Spartan420’s exploding demise. Thus, no one server pulls the entire load. It appears, on the surface, as a rather elegant solution. While Luo admits to a small increase in latency due to inter-server communication, he’s confident that there are ways to reduce this during development.

Got Gold? An Inside Look at Chinese Gold Farming Markets

One of the more entertaining lectures was given by Jason Psigoda an American expatriate in China who has taken a deeper look into a problem encountered by all MMO players: The Goldfarmer. Crime is always fascinating, and video games are always interesting. If you combine complicated crimes and video games you’ve got my attention pretty well nailed to the projection screen. Gold farming in China is an enormous business, and for the most part, it’s legal. Complete with multi-tiered operating structures, clandestine delivery services and even a gold trading index that gives the worth of an amount of gold in a given game in real time. This and more prompted me to describe the whole process as “some pretty nefarious shit” and I request an interview with Mr. Psigoda at his earliest convenience. So keep a look out for my interview with Jason Psigoda on the Chinese goldfarming market. There really is so much more to it than chat spam.

Networking with the Pros

After a short awards ceremony where many of the awards went to Riot’s “League of Legends” (deserved) the last lecture was strangely on how to make contacts at the GDC. After all the fumbling attempts by eager students not to make an enormous ass out of themselves in front of major designers and producers, they were treated to a well produced “Here’s what you did wrong” by Jeremy Gibson from USC. While well-meaning and with good intentions, and admittedly containing a lot of good advice, the whole lecture was marred by the hanging resentment of being told something too late at literally the last moment of the conference. Better luck next year, kids.

The Takeaway

If you want to make an honest shot at the video game industry, you need to attend the GDC. The ticket isn’t cheap ($149-$1195 depending on level of access, discounts for early registration), but you get every dollar back in advice, experience and contacts. The people you talk to are real designers of top grossing games and they are willing and enthusiastic to give you advice with little exception. You can go to an expo, but there the same people are basically at work. At the GDC everyone is relaxed and filled with enthusiasm for video games. You can’t buy a better opportunity.