Notes from GDC: When Choice Was Liberated from Challenge

For game developers around the world, March is the season to head West. My fellow cave dwellers have awoken from hibernation, flocking, spawning, and returning to our respective territories for the Game Developer’s Conference 2014. I'll be on the floor of the conference all week for various game-centric events, combing through the various tracks of the summit, diving into the strange and wonderful world of conference parties, dodging sales reps on the expo floor, and eating many burritos.

SAN FRANCISCO - Late Monday night, at a dive near the Tenderloin, I found myself at a Kickstarter launch party for New Jersey-based gaming publication Unwinnable's new project, Unwinnable Weekly. A lone, brave bartender took on an army of game developers (in addition to the St. Patrick’s Day crowd) by herself, in what must have been a very tiring evening shift. Every other person I talked to was in town for GDC but not actually attending the conference, as if it was some Video Game High School homecoming-reunion that's more about the tailgates and after parties than the game itself.

What happened?

Unwinnable party #gdc14 featuring kaho abe https://t.co/1tz3XK3XQF

— Colin Snyder (@scallopdelion) March 18, 2014

Earlier in the day, I'd checked out a couple sessions, namely the Games Narrative Summit, the Independent Games Festival, and Educational Summit. While Design and Audio and Art are always interesting, it seems the crowd is the niche details aimed at hyper-specific skillets associated with AAA game development. At least that’s what seesion titles like “Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11: Compute-Based GPU Particle Systems” suggested.

During the Games Narrative Summit, indie darlings Davey Wreden and William Pugh, both of Galactic Cafe, discussed what they self-deprecatingly claim they don’t understand about focusing on player choice. (Full disclosure: I've done client work for Wreden.) They considered The Stanley Parable (2011) as their experiment in what happens to choice when it becomes liberated from challenge, which certainly became a videogame, despite their best efforts. Their refreshing lack of hubris and quixotic, subversive design sensibilities continues to bode well for their first release, and they’re likely to win several awards at Wednesday’s Independent Games Festival Awards and again at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards immediately following.

This is, after all, the audience that (hopefully) picks up most quickly on the lessons of The Stanley Parable, although they certainly have some stiff competition. Wreden’s experiments in anti-systemic games are exactly the types of experiences Paolo Pederocini was asking for at IndieCade East earlier this year.

From there, it was on to "Teaching Games with Games: 7 Talks in 7 minutes" (so, 49 minutes?) on the Education Summit. It featured a familiar cast of New York gaming academia and their brethren from across the nation, who discussed their methods of teaching concepts using existing games, or games they've created to teach how to make games.

The group was assembled and hosted by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp, both of Parsons New School and Brooklyn game collective Local No. 12. I particularly enjoyed Dartmouth College's Mary Flanagan's lessons in teaching human values through game systems, which is part and parcel of her project over at Values at Play. Michael Sweet, of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, showed off his methods of teaching adaptive music systems through playing games. Sweet’s methodology revolves around purposely playing the game in an awkward, broken manner, to learn the relationships between event and musical changes.

Take Space Invaders, a game that is certainly familiar to most in attendance here. I never actually pinpointed what caused the game's music to increase in tempo (accelerando?). Was it the invaders reaching the end of their march? Or the number of invaders left on screen? By playing the game without firing a shot, Sweet illustrated exactly what triggers this musical shift, so his students can effectively learn the game’s logic without peeking under the hood, a simple and elegant design lesson.

David Kanaga is a sorcerer? #gdc14 https://t.co/km0tPy1Tg0

— Colin Snyder (@scallopdelion) March 17, 2014

Last on my docket for the day was David Kanaga, the man behind the sounds of Proteus, Panoramical, and perhaps soon, one of my own games. Kanaga gave a talk—or maybe it was a sermon, or perhaps just a brilliant, possessed voice of some divine origin, one which I cannot describe with justice—titled “Music Object, Substance, Organism”.

I'll be sure to post video of the talk once it surfaces online, but it went like this: Kanaga opened with a video of a “tsunami” mod of GTA V, which he scored beyond recognition into brilliance. His subsequent rapid-fire presentation, itself playing automatically while he frantically flit about to describe his stunning visual accompaniment, was in all likelihood bewildering to, say, 60 percent of those in attendance, but utterly mind blowing to the rest of the crowd. To wit: Richard Lemarchand of USC’s Interactive Media & Games Division physically stood up and pantomimed his mind actually exploding just as Kanaga wrapped.

What could top that? Just like that, Day 1: Complete.

And then, bonus rounds. The dirty secret of GDC, of course, is that all the real conferencing happens at the warring after parties dotting the Bay Area—at places like The High Tide, that dank dive near the Tenderloin.

After shlepping all the way across town and getting unceremoniously denied access to Media Indie Exchange, an organization who has tricked several very talented indie developers into thinking they’ll showcase their games at IGN’s office, we found a crowd at The High Tide. After hours, Unwinnable's launch event quickly became a bombardment of “miracle money” buskers and (very polite) ladies of the night, all whom feigned interest in videogames but who nevertheless felt obliged to entertain for a moment before ultimately denying their requests or services.

Before long, the game folk all dispersed into the night, pouring into the piss-stained streets, hopefully in search of bedding and burritos.