GDC: Day 5

Friday was the last day of GDC and my body clock had finally adjusted (more or less) to California time. Which means that I actually made it to a morning session (although not the 9am session). The talks I attended were:

1. The last minute or so of Emil Pagliarulo’s keynote for the Game Careers Seminar
2. The Game Critics Rant
3. The Dating Game
4. Real Time Research
5. Games Have Feelings Too!

It’s amazing how much more content you get when you arrive before lunchtime. I should remember that for the future.

An idle thought about: Chess

The somewhat impressionist image you see above was taken at eight in the evening on the corner of Market and Ellis St in downtown San Francisco. It depicts a group of young men sitting at tables playing chess. This image blows my mind.

GDC: Day 4

Okay, now I am almost up to date. Here are my reflections on day 4 of GDC.

GDC Day 3

Things have been a bit of a blur, so I’ll just mention a couple of the highlights of day 3 of GDC.

Wednesday morning I slept late, after staying up all hours at the IGDA party. When I did finally wake up, I wasted what was left of the morning looking for a laundromat, since the hotel wanted to charge me per item for laundry, meaning that it would cost $108 to wash 4 days worth of clothes, which includes $3 per sock. For that kind of money I could burn my socks and buy twice as many replacements! But you’re not here to read about my socks.

GDC: Day 2 continued

After our presentation, the rest of the day for me consisted of the IGDA ‘working lunch’ for academics and industry people, followed by Jesse Schells talk about his book and finishing with the IGDA party which continued into the wee hours.

GDC: Day 2, MDA presentation

Day 2 of GDC is over. This was the day of my MDA workshop with Robin Hunicke, Ethan Kennerly and Ben Smith. For a presentation that we kind of (ahem) put together at the last minute, it all went surprisingly well.

GDC: Day 1

Yesterday and today I attended the pre-conference workshops at GDC. I’ve mostly been attending the Education Summit (at which I presented) but I also took the chance to hear some other talks. In this post I’ll concentrate on yesterday’s talks. Hopefully I’ll have time to write up today’s events later.

Words on Tour

Words on Play is hitting the road – or rather the airways – for a six week tour around the US. First stop is the Game Developers Conference to present at the IGDA Education Summit. Then I’m travelling to UCSC, MIT, SCAD and NCSU before finishing off with a cruise on the nerd boat (aka the Foundations of Digital Games conference).

If anyone is interested in catching up along the way, drop me a line!

Dan Ariely @ TED

Dan Ariely, whose book Predictably Irrational I previously reviewed, has given a TED Talk about why otherwise moral people will sometimes cheat and steal.

Analog vs Digital

I’ve been thinking recently about the difference between the analog and the digital, in particular with reference to musical instruments. It seems to me that digital devices often lack a lot of the flexibility of their analog counterparts.

Consider the guitar. To play it you press the strings against certain frets to select a chord and then strum to make a sound. Simple enough? Alright, but you can also slap the strings, or the body, or slide you fingers along the strings, or bend them as you play, or pluck the strings on the tuning head or… a host of other things. In the hands of an expert some quite remarkable sounds can be produced.