Motherboard's resident game designer and critic Colin Snyder is currently running around the Bay Area, eating many burritos and navigating the 2013 Game Developers Conference. Look out for his dispatches throughout the week.It's sunny in San Francisco. Perfect weather, really. Hundreds of "So I Married an Axe Murderer" plaster the bus stations. For every aging, beret'd beatnik there are roughly four young start-up dudes trolling North Beach in designer denim. Yesterday afternoon, I drank at Vesuvio next to Jack Kerouac Alley. Everyone was wearing animal masks. I ate a burrito in the Mission. I walked up a street perpendicular to sea level. I discovered new muscles in my legs.But that was icing. Monday, of course, was the inaugural day of GDC 2013. It was a short day, a time for travelling and prepping the show room floor. Daytime programming was mostly reserved for indie talks, an education summit, and special interest workshops on everything from artificial intelligence to animation to games writing.My first stop was a talk about Free Indie Games, in which Terry Cavanagh (VVVVV, Super Hexagon) and fellow curator Porpentine discussed the impact of their online blog-turned-freeware curation of strange independent games.Porpentine is concerned these games aren't getting enough press, and she has a theory as to why that's so. During the talk, she wove a tale of destruction upon the powers that be, liberating us all from "the Capitalist Death Machine" that dominates videogames today. One of the games--a work designed by a human and not derived "from a spreadsheet," Porpentine said--was about jizzing on turds and cat ghosts. Porpentine laments that indie games are labelled "insane." Indies love Twine, the HTML text game creator. It has liberated the creation of text adventures. I still don't want to play any Twine games.Later on, my good pal Syed Salahuddin of NYC-based DIY gaming collective Babycastles, together with Katherine Isbister, led a talk on working in academia. Salahuddin and Isbister, if you're not familiar, created a games prototype (with funding from Yahoo!) at the NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab. Injected with New Arcade sensibilities, the prototype would go on to became YaMove!, a game about dancing in synchronization with your partner.Think of it as a B-boy/B-girl team battle--players have iPods strapped to their persons, their movements gyroscoping and computing on the fly. Isbister's work is all about human interfaces, and to see her theories on human interaction be facilitated through games was very rewarding. Salahuddin helped steer this cool technology towards a full-fledged game, moving the project from the prototype into the competitive new arcade game it has become.Follow Colin at @scallopdelion.
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