GDC 09 Diary |
by Hugh McAtamney |
GDC is the ultimate industry event for the games industry but academics also play an important part and by all accounts get a lot out of the event too. Hugh McAtamney, lecturer in games at DIT, attended this year’s event and wrote the following report for gd.ie.
This is definitely the biggest conference I have been at, and the Moscone Centre which is hosting the conference, (named after Mayor Moscone, from the movie ‘Milk’), is huge. GDC 09 will take up the all of the convention centre. A highlight of this event from an Irish point of view was Havok’s presentation of the latest version of their tools and their announcement of the new titles using their products.
The conference lasts from Monday to Friday and is broken up into 2 blocks.
Block 1, Monday and Tuesday, hosts a number of 1 and 2 day tutorial/workshop summits as well as 6 strands of game development presentations all running concurrently.
Block 2 hosts the conference EXPO, careers fairs and industry presentations. This is where all the big gaming news is released with new technologies presented, new products demoed and where press conferences and awards are held.
There is also a whole floor of the convention centre set aside for business meetings. I soon realised that I wasn’t going to get to see even 3% of the sessions. On Monday alone there were over 100 sessions.
IGDA Education Summit
I had registered a preference for the 2 day IGDA education summit. The other summits were AI, Casual games, Mobile, Outsourcing, Independent games, Localisation, Serious games, and Worlds in Motion. Anything cutting edge in these areas within academia as well as industry reviews of game titles, platforms, novel developments and the like were all here. It was overwhelming.
The opening education summit was a choice of two sessions: Game Design Improv or The Blender Game Engine. The former was a condensed 2 hour game design workshop not too dissimilar to the ones Ernest Adams does for school kids in DIT each November. The blender tutorial was a 2 hour ‘make a game’ from scratch.
Blender is an open source game development platform that incorporates tools commonly found in industry standard tools like MAX and MAYA with PYTHON, an open source scripting language prevalent right throughout the gaming industry. I am considering using it in class in DIT so I thought this would be a good one to go for. The session started with the development of 3D models, animation, rigging, scripts and events right down to final deployment.
The presentation rooms are impressive with massive screens and dedicated PA system in each room. The two presenters included a lecturer and student from a ‘cross-university’ masters degree in games design, something which seems to be quite common in the States and Canada. There is a similar initiative of cross-university courses happening in Europe, which DIT is getting involved in.
The 2 guys knew their stuff but lost nearly everybody in the room after about 10 mins. On our table we all knew enough to help each other out and get to the end. I could see other tables in the room, one by one, quietly shutting their laptops as the course went on. The main problem was the very steep learning curve required to use the piece of software. In fairness to the guys they put a good bit of work in to preparing modules which allowed you to keep up with the presentation but even still we found it tough going. I’ll reserve judgment on Blender for the moment.
I felt that the education summit was the weakest one I attended and this was reinforced at the next session which was a working lunch on games in education and involved 5 poster presentations dotted around a large room with people sitting around eating lunch. I felt sorry for the people presenting their work as it wasn’t a great environment to do so.
The presentations were interesting but were all typical content that you might see at pure EDU GAME conferences… ‘this, is what we did, and this is what happened’… real show and tell stuff, but interesting none the less. One that caught my eye was the integration of QA into game courses. Considering that there is a huge amount of QA jobs out there (just look at irishjobs.ie), very few courses do modules on QA.
Day 1 afternoon
I decided to head to where the mobile, casual, independent games etc. talks were happening. There was a great buzz here and I kicked myself for missing some amazing sessions in serious games and on iphone game development, such as the keynote from Neil Young, CEO & Founder (ngmoco) who was talking about Why the iPhone just changed everything, and Electronic Arts’s Mike Pagano who was talking about The Challenges and successes of porting games to the Apple iPhone.
I realised that I had to change strategy for the week. This was going to be a perfect information gathering opportunity; not academically, you can download the papers, presentations etc. afterwards, but from a networking perspective. There were game developers looking for staff and looking to network with people who might have access to future staff and there were other universities and colleges looking to link in with institutes like DIT. Microsoft and Intel had a huge presence at this conference each with their own lounges, for playing games and chilling out.
Highlight of the day for me was the Augmented reality presentation Handheld Augmented Reality Games given by Blair MacIntyre. This presentation had lots of examples of actual working projects, including an excellent isometric 3D zombie shoot ‘em up running on an IPhone, and a 2 player rescue game for the IPhone that required players to save people on the top of buildings faster than other players. You can check some of the projects demonstrated at the augmented reality lab website at Georgia Tech. Also interesting was the fact that many sessions had industry and academia presenting their work together. It made the content seem more relevant.
Day II - Red or Blue Ocean
Tuesday’s most popular session was the review of Spore as an educational game by Margaret Robertson. The speaker spent some time looking at evidence of where the game was being used in schools as an educational tool, but not in the ways that many had anticipated. Overall the verdict was divided in terms of its value as an educational tool, but many felt it was useful for children with disabilities and behavioral disorders.
In the afternoon I decided to go to a few of the sessions on Casual games where PopCap and Playfirst, both with bases in Dublin, were presenting. These focused on opportunities and gaps in the casual games market (blue ocean) and those areas already full of games (red ocean). There were two lectures:
Red Ocean or Blue Ocean? with
John Welch,
Ofer Leidner (Oberon Media),
Daniel Bernstein (Sandlot Games),
Dan Prigg (RealGames, RealNetworks),
Sebastien de Halleux speaking and
Designing for the Blue Ocean with
Kenny Shea Dinkin (PlayFirst),
Jane Jensen (Oberon),
Brian Goble (Hip Soft LLC),
Margaret Wallace (Rebel Monkey, Inc.),
Jason Kapalka (PopCap Games),
Nick Fortugno (Rebel Monkey),
Todd Kerpelman (EA/Pogo),
Chris Early (MS/Windows Gaming),
Steve Meretzky,
John Welch,
Dan Prigg (RealGames, RealNetworks) all speaking.
Day III – conference really takes off
2,000 people participated on days 1 and 2. Day 3 was the official opening of the conference, expo and careers fair and a further 16,000 people registered. They traversed the Moscone centre going to over 200 sessions that day alone. Everybody in San Francisco seems to have a GDC badge. Game developers, students, academics and fans were everywhere.
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday focus on developments in the industry. Of most interest to me was Havok presenting their very impressive new product called CLOTH and a beta version of their new AI system. Crytek were also demonstrating version 3 of their engine. Popular too was the demonstration of the next thing in gaming - 3D glasses and high frequency LCD’s. All very cool. Even NASA and the US Army had stands.
Also there were development agencies from Scotland, Canada and Indonesia, touting for students and professionals. Scotland has a high profile in the gaming industry and their development is something we in Ireland could take note off. It’s driven by the success of educational institutes such as Abertay and some well known game companies.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
What was amazing to see was the amount of jobs on offer. Everybody is hiring. While there are plenty of people looking for work, there seemed to be plenty of jobs going. What was encouraging is that the jobs tend to break down into a number of categories
- Software developers, engineers, programmers (computer scientists)
- Graphic designers, animators (art students)
Other jobs included:
- Level designers
- Content creators
- Game testers / QA testers
- MS XNA, APPLE and SONY were all promoting their independent game development platforms.
The game developer choice awards and independent game awards were on day III also. Another highlight that day was the keynote speech made by the President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, who was talking about the development of the Wii and popular Wii titles. He spoke in detail about how top Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of the wii, wii fit and Nintendo dogs) uses every day human interactions to create games – “watching people doing everyday things” is his greatest inspiration. He discussed the importance of prototyping, using small development ‘proof of concept’ teams (something that was re-enforced in a presentation on the game dead space). He talked about the new SD card integration with Nintendo and gave everyone (i.e. those sitting at the back of the 6000 seater room) a copy of rhythm heaven.
I also attended the lecture on Advanced Data Mining and Intelligence from Large-Scale Game Data which looked at how to interpret behavior from statistics generated by MMO usage logs. The focus was on project setup, data analysis and actionable results, with attention paid to the game world's economy, player grouping patterns and customer satisfaction. Bruce Ferguson (Senior Producer, Sony Online Entertainment) talked about the demographics of MMO’s and that a large percentage of women are introduced into MMO’s through a male friend who plays the game.
What was also interesting was that women tended NOT to team up or group with other women but instead preferred to group with entirely males. This statistic was not the same for men. Also of interest was the most effective (Hit Point rate) group size. Bruce showed a table of different group sizes ranging from individual groups to 25 person raid parties. The most effect group size was 6, 5, 4. Groups of this size had an above average Hit Point rate compared to solo players and large groups. He suggested that these type of statistics could inform game designers/level designers/ quest designers about new types of group quests that would encourage (or dis-encourage) these group sizes.
Later that day we attended the Havok Technologies: Present and Future presentation. This was brilliant as we got to see the new cloth product and upcoming AI system. Check it out here and here on U-tube. Then it was time to go to the game developer shindig hosted by Havok and Intel. Everybody was running around San Francisco going to various developer parties. A bit like they do at the Oscars I suppose, but with more nerds.
Day IV
Once again there was too much to see and not enough time to see it. There were plenty of tech demos, programming tutorials and game post mortems to whet your appetite. Thursday had the most choice but 4 of my favorite talks were ALL on at the same time.
The day opened up with a brilliant keynote speech from Hideo Kojima, Head of Kojima Productions, creator of the Metal Gear franchise. As with the keynote the previous day it was very elegantly presented and entertaining. He delivered it in Japanese which actually made the presentation more enjoyable and authentic, whereas the previous day I struggled with the brutalization of the ‘ingrish’ language, the sound of Japanese in the background came across as cool. He took us through the initial productions on the MSX system which incidentally was the first computer I ever had.
Next up was the lecture on the art of quest building in games, The Cruise Director of AZEROTH: Directed Gameplay within WORLD OF WARCRAFT given by Jeffrey Kaplan one of the original game designers on World of Warcraft. Everyone is interested in World of Warcraft and the queue to get into this one was the longest I had seen. The presentation focused on giving an insight into the core gameplay feature of the biggest selling game of all time and we were rewarded by screenshots of the highly secret ‘world of warcraft editor tool’, when this happened everybody took out there camera phones to get photos of it.
It was a frank post mortem on the evolution of the WOW quest system and its impact on the gameplay.
After lunch was an excellent session on the 10 best academic papers of the year. Game Studies Download 4.0. This was presented by a panel of IGDA experts including Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal and Mia Consalvo who sifted through hundreds of academic papers to present an over view of the 10 best.
Day V - final day
There was a sense the whole gig was winding down today. While there was still over 150 sessions, there were less people. We went to the dead space presentation, DEAD SPACE: How We Launched the Scariest New IP, which was a great way to start the day. This was a typical game developer post mortem presentation with lots of nice footage from the game.
The presentations today weren’t that inspiring and tended to lean towards round table and panel discussions which can be very hit and miss. One highlight was Peter Molyneux from Lionhead games who gave a great overview of Lionhead Experiments Revealed which was interesting as he is one of the most creative game designers.
On reflection
Dave O Meara from Havok asked me what I thought about GDC. I told him that’s its completely different from an academic conference. However there is a fair bit of academic input most of which is closely linked with industry involvement. This is a good thing.
GDC has every aspect of the industry here in attendance with all types of business being done. This is particularly clear when you walk into the careers expo. At the front you have queues of people at the Blizzard and PlayStation desks handing in resume’s and application forms. This continues down five long corridors containing nearly all of the major games companies (except for EA, no sign of them anywhere) and related businesses. The further you get down this massive hall the more serious the players become (Unreal, XNA, Havok) and the bigger the spaces that are allocated to each company get. Instead of stalls they are mini offices with up to 5/6 rooms, and while anyone can walk into these offices and hand in resumes and get free T-Shirts etc. You get a sense that this was where all the serious business was being done.
There is no doubt in my mind that this conference has a lot to offer academics, professionals and students with a serious desire to work in and study the games industry. This isn’t an entertainment expo nor is it an academic one. It’s a conference for game developers, it does what it says on the tin and if I only go to one conference a year then GDC would have to be it. I guess that having it in San Francisco helps.
Author’s Bio
Hugh McAtamney is a lecturer in Games Programming, Game logic and design in the School of Computing, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). His research background is in Visualization and Virtual Reality. He is also the head of the proposed MSc in Digital Games (anticipated start in Sept. 09). This is a joint faculty programme between the schools of computing and media in DIT.
For more see:
www.seriousgames.ie
www.comp.dit.ie
http://schoolofmedia.dit.ie
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