Game Intestine

If your experience of GDC is exclusively through the gaming press you would incorrectly assume that the entire conference is a junior version of E3 that is dedicated to poorly announcing new products or a soapbox for developers like Peter Molyneux to make wildly absurd predictions.

If you work in the industry, it is a chance to upgrade what you approach to game design, to learn how to use particle physics or to meet old colleagues who have gone to new companies. For them it is almost like a convention for tax preparers or medical equipment manufacturers.

I sat next to a guy who played tap tap revenge, then tap defense, then a word game. But when I saw his GDC 07 tag around his bag handle, I was sure he was headed to GDC. I asked him and he said "Ya I will be working in the bookstore, look me up and buy some books." I now give the side glance to any slightly pudgy guy who is using a piece of technology. Is he coding? Is that game he is playing on his cel phone just a time waster or is he studying the merits of its design? I am profiling people. Scoping them out to see if they have a connection to the industry. From the outside looking in, my behavior would be creepy. However, in this context, I think it is called networking.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have ventured into the world of game creation. Step 1 was to sign up for my local community college's game design class. It is now week 6 of the semester and we have been divided (according to our seating arrangement) into five groups. For the rest of the semester my group members and I will create a fictional game complete with design documents, concept art, and even press releases.

The movie cirtic Nathan Donarum has brief post on Roger Ebert's blog where he wonders why the game "Gears of War" is in the film The Hurt Locker:

"On my second viewing of "The Hurt Locker," I noticed a curious detail. There is a scene in which Eldridge plays a video game. The video game is "Gears of War," a hyper-masculine, adrenaline-pumped game about...well, war. The main gameplay deals with firefights, and hiding behind different objects to avoid getting shot, and to avoid dying. It has a real focus on survival, and a real focus on the thrill of the fight."

His theory is that "Gears of War" was specifically picked because it defines the character who is playing it. That game is an accessory that is used for the character's development.

It is as hard to picture Dennis Kucinich looking forward to a night of Modern Warfare 2 as it is to believe that Dick Cheney would get excited about that lost lamb that he found in Farmville. When looking for entertainment, a person gravitates towards something that reinforces their core beliefs. The message that a game is projecting appeals to some psychographics and not others. The characters who are portrayed as the heroes vs the villains and the methods by which they achieve their goals all factors in to a game's belief system.

The dawn of another year (not a decade yet) is the best time to start something new. I say that now because the subject of this website, and correspondingly, my status with gaming, is changing. I am going to shift focus from developing long and incredibly time-consuming walkthroughs to making games (which, will be short but also incredibly time consuming to make).

I haven't been hired at some fancy company, I didn't join a hyper-creative indie studio, and I didn't team up with a thoughtful solo coder. It is just me. I just got shot by the indie development cupid and have become entirely infatuated with the thought of creating my own games and, most appealingly, getting someone else play something that I created.

The worst moment in all of Brutal Legend is the level titled "Sanctuary of Sin." The setting is a lavishly decorated palace courtyard that would be befitting of Liberace. You mission is to lead your troops to destroy the stage of General Lionwhyte (voiced by Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford). However, two large turrets guard the enemy's stage and instantly decimate any troop that you send at them, well any troop except for the invisible yet slow roadies.

I just played a game while I drank a cup of coffee. Simultaneously. And neither my performance in the game nor my performance with the cup suffered while I did it. This was possible because of the wonderfully pared-down control system for the WiiWare game Swords and Soldiers. In this RTS game, I was quite capable in controlling an entire battle (including building units, mining resources, and upgrading my technology) with a single Wii remote and the A button.