Tiny Subversions

Craig posted a brief conversation we had about space and time in Sly Cooper. Check it out.

So it was one year ago today that I started this blog. According to my first post, this blog was meant for GDC stuff, ludology, and game reviews.

I've managed to include plenty of GDC stuff, some ludology, but I have not actually managed to finish even one of my game reviews. Oh well, two out of three isn't so bad.

Give My Blog a Birthday Present

If you are a regular or semi-regular reader of this blog, and especially if you don't typically post in the comments section, I urge you to post here and make your presence known! My blog will be very happy to hear from all of you.

Let me know what you like. What you don't like. What you want to see. I want to improve this blog!!

Many thanks to Glyn Heatley of the MSc in Computer Games program at Algoma University College, who took the time to put together printer-friendly PDF versions of my GDC Guide! Get 'em here:

GDC Guide Part 1 (PDF)
GDC Guide Part 2 (PDF)

Labels: gdc

I found two jewels this morning at Edge Online.

One is a music video for the De La Soul song "U Gotta Believe". The song takes place inside the seminal rhythm game PaRappa the Rappa, and was apparently written for the game, as well. It's worth checking out.

The other is a news report on the Mother 3 edition of the GBA Micro. It's made to look like it's been played to death (chipped enamel around the buttons). Also, Mother 3 will come with a real-life Franklin Badge!!

I'm adding the following to an older article in my networking series (Be Educated) but I don't want my regular readers to miss it, because it's pretty important/hilarious.

If you are looking to break into the video game industry, QA is a great place to start. That being said, do not, under any circumstances, ask somebody if they can get you a "Q & A" job. QA stands for "Quality Assurance". While I suppose in a very broad sense, the early build of a game is posing a question ("Does this build suck?"), and it is the QA tester's job to provide the answer ("YES!"), there is no such thing as a Q & A job in the game industry, and if you ask for one, you are demonstrating your ignorance. Or at least your lack of eloquence.

Labels: networking

Well, my Postmortem talk last night was, I think, incredibly well received. My lecture itself still certainly needs polish, but I can handle that. I used to be a very good public speaker, but what worried me the most was that I haven't given a public speech in about a year. Fortunately, I proved last night that I haven't lost touch.

In other news, I will be going back through my networking articles today and making revisions. I will mostly be adding hyperlinks to articles both internal and external to this blog that didn't exist when I started the series.

Once again, Boston folks: come see a preview of my GDC talk, "The State of Cognitive Exercise with Digital Gameplay" at tonight's Boston Postmortem. If you mention the blog, I'll give you a prize. Maybe.

Wednesday, February 15
7pm @ The Skellig (a pub) in Waltham, MA

Labels: boston, postmortem

So I'm currently reading a book called Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It's a study of creativity, honing in on the kind of creativity that (1) comes from an individual, (2) is recognized by others, and (3) changes a culture in some significant way.

One passage in this book discusses corporate creativity, and how Motorola in the early 1990s would attempt to encourage creativity in its engineers by holding brainstorming sessions for free association of ideas. The problem with this was that while many novel ideas were pitched, the management still needed (and didn't really have) a way "to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then [find] ways of implementing them."

This immediately brings to mind two practices that I hold in high esteem.

Google's "20% Time"

Google has a very famous practice for encouraging innovation among its developers. It's called "20% time". The gist is that for 20% of the work day, Google engineers get to work on a pet project. The project has to be remotely related to Google's business in some way, but it can be basically anything under the sun.

What's nice about this system is that, aside from the initial purchase of a computer and an IDE, software pretty much costs only time to produce. If a carpenter wanted 20% time, her company would have to shell out extra resources like lumber and paint. In Google's case, software only costs bandwidth to deploy, which means they can have things like Google Labs, where they can debut the "valuable ideas" mentioned in Csikszentmihalyi's book, and those ideas can be validated by the general public's use or disuse of the product.

(Edit 2/6/07: I just read that 3M had a "15% time" rule way before Google ever existed. So there. 3M did it first.)

Lightweight Prototyping

Chaim Gingold gave a presentation at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC 2005 on the topic of lightweight prototyping. You should take a look at the presentation yourself, but it boils down to code/content prototyping through multiple fast iterations of small-scale prototypes. When I say "fast", I mean it: These are prototypes where a new iteration can be coded in a half a day or less. And when I say "small-scale", I mean it: the example he gave at the workshop was tackling the problem of organically generating roads to link buildings together. The prototype itself was little more than a graph theory demonstration with slightly better art.

The basic idea is something I hold near and dear to my heart: prototype often, and do it in baby steps (as the P.I. of the electrical engineering lab I used to work in would say).

Where I'm Going With This

Games are software, and while AAA titles are not cheap to make, small game prototypes are very cheap to make. They can even be done with scrap paper and a pencil if you want.

What if a game company offered something akin to 20% time to its developers? What if the only direction given concerning this 20% time would be "prototype often, and in baby steps"? Skeptics will counter, "We're always in crunch, we don't have time for this crap!" Well, if you're always in crunch you're totally mismanaged and you have bigger problems than encouraging creativity. Furthermore, I realize that 20% is pretty hefty. That's cool. What about 10% or 5% time?

I could imagine what might happen:

• An artist goes out on a limb, building risky architecture that might not fit in with the design vision--but then, a designer sees it and gets inspired to create a new level to include it.
• A graphics programmer says, "I wonder if I can get the engine to render everything cel shaded?" Maybe it's not useful for this project, but the next game the company makes now has cel shading as an option when discussing visual aesthetics.
• A designer builds a pencil-and-paper prototype for a completely alternative combat system to the one being developed. It doesn't replace the combat system as it exists, but it does shed light on inherent weaknesses that were not apparent to the developers beforehand.
• A developer dabbles in a completely different area than he or she is used to, and discovers that maybe they'd like to switch job roles. Or maybe that developer just learns enough about that other field to make working with people in that field a much easier task.

Just some idle thoughts about HR policy for that distant (but inevitable) day when I am running my own game company...

Labels: management

Someone told me about this, but it never quite hit home until I experienced it myself:

Seeing people bad-mouth your game on Internet forums hurts a lot.

Yes, I work at a big company and it's probably only .001% my game. Yes, it's the Internet, and the Internet is full of morons. Yes, this on a forum and not a major review site or magazine, both of which matter infinitely more than one stupid forum post.

As much as I would like to, I simply cannot jump in to the dialogue and say, "HEY! I work on that game, and here's 20 reasons why you're wrong!" It is simply not professional, and is a good way to get your ass fired ("Employee Starts Internet Shitstorm" is not something your boss wants to see on Slashdot Games).

But still, I did not really believe it would hurt until it actually did.

Note: This is part of a series of articles called Effective Networking in the Games Industry. I'm writing these articles in no particular order, so I'm sorry if this seems scattered. I promise I will collect it all and put it on my permanent webspace for future reference.

Your Program Guide

When you step into the SJCC, the first thing you're going to have to do is register for your pass. You might have already received your pass in the mail, but you still have to register and get your books, fliers, and, most importantly, your program guide. I say without hesitation that your program guide is the most important tool you have (other than your wit and disarmingly good looks) in your quest to make the most out of GDC.

The program guide is compact, and it folds out like a map. In fact, it actually contains a map of the convention center, with all the rooms conveniently labeled. But the most important thing is the actual program guide: the list of what lectures are happening, when. Here's a picture I took of my guide from GDC 2004.



You'll notice that the program guide is incredibly information dense, a very good thing for a Tufte-head like me. Let's zoom in a little bit to get a handle on things.



The guide lists the session title, the presenters, the room number, and the presentation track (design, audio, visual art, production, business, etc.). Everything is grouped by day and time slot.

You'll also notice some sessions in orange. Those sessions were not orange until I got my hands on them. Remember how I mentioned in Part 1 the benefits of getting to the conference very early? One of the things you should do is sit down with your program guide and highlight all the sessions you might be remotely interested in attending. It's important to try and highlight more than one session per time slot. Some of the sessions get pretty crowded, so it's nice to have an alternative if you find you can't fit into the room. Also, some sessions, particularly roundtables, are repeated later.

The Types of Session

Which reminds me: I should mention that there are a few basic kinds of sessions. I'll break them down for you.

• Lecture. This is the meat and potatoes of GDC. It's one or two people, 45 minutes, imparting supreme wisdom to the audience. As long as the person is a good presenter and knows what they're talking about, you can't really go wrong. Networking opportunities: engage in conversation with those seated around you both before and after the session. They're interested in the topic enough to attend a lecture, so you probably have some common ground.


• Roundtable. The roundtable is where there's a moderated discussion between 10 to 30 participants. The moderator talks for about five minutes and then asks a question. The roundtable participants, including you, are invited to respond. There's usually some healthy debate here. Networking opportunities: if you think you know enough about a topic to participate in meaningful conversation, then definitely go to at least one roundtable during the week. This is also the only place where you learn something, however miniscule, about the other people at your session. This means if one of the 30 people at the table mentions something that you have in common, you can approach them about it afterwards!


• Sponsored session. Ugh. Unless you're at GDC to get swag, do yourself a favor and don't go to these. They're extended infomercials usually held by middleware or hardware companies. (Incidentally, if you're at GDC to get swag, do me a favor and stay the hell away from my industry.) Networking opportunities: none. There is nobody at a sponsored session worth knowing.


• Panel. The panel discussion is often a mixed bag. If there are five brilliant people on the panel, it's probably worth attending just to see them argue with each other. If you only care to see one of the five people, be aware that your favorite person is only going to be speaking for 9 minutes of the 45-minute session. Networking opportunities: see Lecture, above.


• Workshop. [Added per Craig's request.] There's only one real workshop that I'm aware of at GDC. Some things are called workshops, but they're little more than lectures. The real deal is the Game Tuning Workshop. This is a 2-day workshop which is part of the Monday/Tuesday tutorials that only 30% of GDC attendees buy passes for. The attendees are divided into groups of six to 10 people, and are tasked with a design challenge. For instance, the challenge might be to write a pitch for a video game based on a license, and your group is assigned a random license picked out of a hat. Networking opportunities: pretty amazing. You are literally working alongside industry professionals on game designs. I did some of my best networking last year at this workshop, and I found myself working with people who worked on some of my favorite games of all time.
  

But Wait, There's More!

I'll be posting at least one more article in my GDC Guide sub-series. Keep your eyes peeled, readers.

Labels: gdc, networking

I just renewed my IGDA membership. This will be my fourth year of membership, but, excitingly, it is my first as a non-student member! While this means I pay a little more, membership rates are so low this year that it hardly makes a difference to my wallet. And as I've written before, it's totally worth it.

So I'll say it to you again: current or aspiring game developer? Join the IGDA!

Update: GDC is no longer held in San Jose, so my specific map notes no longer apply. However, there is general advice in this article that still holds for the new San Francisco location.

Why GDC?

For anyone in the game industry, there are two events held in the United States every year that kick the pants off of every other event. One event almost anyone who plays video games knows about. Of course I'm talking about E3. As for the other event, many people new to the games industry don't even know exists. This event is the Game Developers Conference, or GDC.

Many people who want to work in the games industry, especially young people, want to go to E3 because they think it will help their professional development. This is, however, patently false. E3 is a marketing and press event, with about 30,000 attendees if I'm not mistaken. Unless you are a journalist, or involved in marketing, the only reason you go to E3 is to either demonstrate your game to the media/publishers, or to be a fanboy and see what new games or hardware will be coming out in the next year. E3 will almost certainly not increase your personal potential as a game developer.

I will say without reservation that GDC is a fantastic event, and has always been (professionally speaking) the best week of my year, hands-down. GDC is smaller than E3, where something like 10,000 professional game developers come together and talk shop. Where E3 is game marketers speaking to the press and the fans, GDC is game developers speaking to other game developers. Compared to E3, the press presence at GDC is practically nil, which is an excellent quality for any event.

GDC is really good for a few things:

• Learning about the games industry. When you attend sessions, you get to hear professional developers talk about important issues in areas ranging from design and programming to legal and business. More importantly, in between sessions and during the after-parties, if you play your cards right you get to hear war stories straight from the horse's mouth. It is in learning these stories that you undergo a kind of individual acculturation: over time, you become a part of the game industry's unique culture, and all of a sudden you talk the talk, and even begin to walk the walk a little bit. This will also teach you about the stark realities of the industry, and help you determine exactly what it is you want for a job.
  
• Meeting professionals. A more important subset of this would be making friends with professionals, although just meeting people is a good way of building your weak ties.
  
• Building confidence. Going to GDC and successfully engaging in conversation with the pros is one of the greatest feelings you'll ever have, especially if you're not yet a professional game developer yourself. It can give you that confidence boost you need in order to put up with getting rejected or ignored by a dozen game companies in a three month period. Not that I know anything about that. *cough*

The Space

GDC 2006 is being held in the San Jose Convention Center (SJCC), and is run by CMP Media. Last year it was held in San Francisco for the first time ever, and while a lot of people welcomed the change (the convention center in SF has more space, SF is a cooler city, it's closer to a lot of Bay Area studios) I found it to be bad for networking. Why? Well, the space itself was pretty good. The problem was the city. San Francisco is awesome, which means that the developers, rather than hanging around the convention center after the day's session, would disperse into the city, hang out at their friends' nearby studios, etc. Which meant it was harder to find new people to hang out with in the evenings.

San Jose sort of keeps everyone confined to the same 6-block radius downtown. I like that. It means I have a better chance of running into attendees I don't know.

The SJCC is essentially one big floor. All the action happens on the exhibit level (except for registration, which takes place downstairs). There are some places and times that I've found are good for networking, and others that aren't so good. I'm going to discuss those in the reaminder this article. This is from my memory of past GDCs. None of this may be true anymore. CMP may have changed the whole structure of the conference, for all I know. But all signs point to my advice being relevant once again. Just take it with a grain of salt.

Everybody Eats

What do you have in common with the CEO of a game company? You both need to eat in order to live. While that may seem blatantly self-evident and useless, it in fact has major ramifications for networking.

At GDC, people who posses the right conference passes (basically anything but the Expo-only passes) get free breakfast and lunch every day. CEOs and grunts alike descend upon the food tables during the designated feeding hours. It is truly a sight to behold! All of these people are clamoring for two limited resources: food and a comfortable place to sit. What this means for an intrepid networker is a chance to obtain these resources and leverage them to your own networking benefit.

I've highlighted in this map where the food and seating are usually found.



A Breakfast Strategy

Show up to GDC very early. Breakfast is from 8am to 9am. The first sessions start at 9am. Show up at 7:30am. Pretty much nobody will be around at this point. This is good for two reasons.

First, you'll be there with just a few other early birds. They'll have nobody else to talk to but you! Networking doesn't get much easier than this.

Second, all the breakfast seating will be empty. This will not be true in 45 minutes. Grab a seat at a table now. There will be about 4 to 6 empty seats at your table. Once the tables start to fill up, one of two things will happen. People might ask to sit at your table, which means you get to say "why, certainly" and then engage them in conversation over breakfast. Or, people will look longingly at your table but not sit down because they think you've claimed it for someone else already. At this point, you can survey the people who are seatless, determine who is interesting to you (often a person's company and position are listed on their passes hanging around their necks), and offer seats to the interesting people and their friends. You haven't even met them and you've done them a favor. You're off to a good start.

A Lunch Strategy

Try and grab two lunches. This isn't technically allowed, but if you have a lunch-enabled pass, you can hit both lunch lines and usually finagle a second lunch. This is not because you need to eat two lunches to network, but it means if you've met somebody earlier with a non-lunch pass, you can offer to procure a lunch for them. You will get in their good graces, I guarantee, and it's a great way of making friends.

Hang Out With Smokers

This was mentioned in Mencher's article, but I'll reiterate here: smokers are people too! No reason to leave them out of your networking strategy. Head out to the terrace where most of the smokers spend their off-time. It's a nice break from the monotony of the conference halls.

I've highlighted the smoking terrace here:



Small Sessions

Everyone gets excited about the big-name people, but I never actually go to their keynotes. The only big-name sessions I ever attend are Will Wright's, and that's only because he is freaking brilliant and also the best presenter you will ever see.

I like the small sessions more. They are less claustrophobic, there's less press, it's less of a general zoo, and it's just easier to meet people after the sessions. The small sessions tend to have people who are genuinely interested in the subject matter of the session, and not the star power of the speaker, so most of the people you see at the session will be more than willing to strike up a conversation about the content of the presentation.

Open Spaces

People tend to hang around in the open spaces, and to rush through the crowded spaces as quickly as possible. So you should hang out in the open spaces, too. You'll meet more people. This map has my favorite open spaces highlighted, along with some particularly bad places to get hallway networking done.



Not Done Yet...

This guide is a first draft. I'll be writing more over the next few weeks!

Labels: gdc, networking

Marc Mencher has an article on Gamasutra today titled "Top 12 Networking Tips & Tricks for GDC 2006". It's a pretty good read, but there's nothing too GDC-specific in there.

I am actually going to start writing my own guide to GDC in the coming weeks, which will have specific strategies related not only to GDC as an event, but also about how to use the floorplan of the San Jose Convention Center to your advantage.

I will be this month's speaker at the Boston Postmortem on Wednesday, 2/15, at 7pm at the Skellig bar in Waltham, MA.

I'll be giving the same talk that I'm giving at GDC ("The State of Cognitive Exercise with Digital Gameplay"), sort of a practice run, edited for length because not everyone at the Postmortem cares about Games for Health. For more information on directions, my talk, etc., see the Boston Postmortem website.

Come out and share a drink with me!

Labels: boston, postmortem

I just stumbled across a fascinating article about the difference in communication styles among gamers across several genres of multiplayer game, titled Choosing your 'voice' for gaming online.