Category Archives: conference

Carry on Camping

Posted by under conference, game design

Two years ago the Guardian hosted a most unusual one-day conference, Gamecamp, in east London. It was an exceptional day—I wrote about it here—with a lot of brilliant and fascinating people bringing together some very different experiences and expertise about games and gaming. There was also a pre-release copy of Rock Band, which was good, and a lack of beer, which wasn’t.

Gamecamp 2 has been formally announced for 8th May 2010, and as with the last event the tickets are free but limited. This time it isn’t being organised by the Guardian, it’s being organised by… well, me. As part of a team featuring the absurdly talented Katy Lindemann, Mark Simpkins, Rachel Clarke, Rain Ashford and Phillip Trippenbach, I hasten to add.

Gamecamp is organised on the *camp model, meaning it won’t have keynotes or invited speakers. But it has an exceptional venue (eBay/Paypal’s wonderful UK headquarters on the banks of the Thames in Richmond), a couple of great sponsors, and some confirmed attendee names that have already caused broad smiles and a spontaneous outbreak of OMG OMGs among the committee.

If you want to attend then the first tranche of tickets will be released at noon on Friday 12th March. There are only 150 tickets total. They will go very quickly.

For more information see the Gamecamp website; for the breakingest news follow Gamecamp on Twitter.

(We are still looking for sponsors. If you’re in a position to offer us some funds to cover the cost of, say, lunch and thereby earning the love and admiration of an important sector of the British games community then please drop me or anyone else on the committee a line.)

Brave n00b World

Posted by under conference, game design, geophysics, mmorpg, world of warcraft

Roo Reynolds, the man behind Lego is Full of Win, not only videoed my presentation ‘Brave n00b World’ at Interesting 08 but has Done Computers to it and made it available on the internest. Lo!

I was originally going to call it ‘The World of the World of Warcraft’, but the Onion beat me to publication of that particular joke by about eight days. And as I said before, there’s a lot more where this came from.

(Edit: to take advantage of the number of hits this entry is getting, the WoW guild whose credit you can’t quite see  at the end is <unassigned variable>, and we’re a Horde guild on the European server Nordrassil. We are a friends guild, meaning you have to know one of the members in real life before you can join, but we are recruiting. If you know me or someone who recently received one of these postcards or someone who’s done some of this cross-stitching—you may gather that we don’t take this entirely seriously—then drop me a line.)

How Interesting

Posted by under conference, world of warcraft

Saturday was the day of Interesting 08, the second unconference organised by Russell Davies (no T on this boy) at Conway Hall in London. Thirty speakers gave talks on subjects close to their hearts, the only common linking theme that the topics were—and the speakers should be—interesting. Possibly it was the best not-a-conference conference I’ve ever been to.

I presented a very cut-down version of my current paper (a geophysical survey of the World of Warcraft, which will be appearing here in the near future) and was gratified to get laughs in places I wasn’t expecting laughs. I was kind of surprised that, at a conference that was inherently playful, I was the only person talking explicitly about games. The closest were Roo Reynolds who spoke about Lego, and Collyn Ahart Chipperfield who talked about spaces for the fantastic.

What do I mean when I say the conference was “playful”? Several things.

It wasn’t serious. ‘Serious’ is not the opposite of ‘playful’, as anyone who’s ever played Diplomacy will tell you, but an absence of seriousness can certainly help create a playful atmosphere. The hall was decorated with bunting, the catering was biscuits, cupcakes and apples, and the event kicked off with a singalong version of ‘The Final Countdown’. From the get-go you knew this was going to be infotainment in its purest form.

Almost all the talks were short. I asked for ten minutes and got five. The weakest presentations were (with one exception) the ones that noticeably overran their slots. It encourages focus and attention to core points.

It was a lucky dip. When a speaker stepped on stage, you had no idea what they were going to talk about. Topics included what spooks horses, toilets, the history of vacuum cleaners, zoetrope animation without the slits, the role of booze in the development of society, guerilla geography, favourite words, beating insomnia with bad audiobooks, odd communities on Flickr, and much more. The guy who designed the ineffably cool new UK coinage spoke; so did the guy who did the remix of Radiohead’s ‘Nude’ using obsolete computer hardware.

Nobody was trying to impress you or sell you anything. It was about the joy of enthusiasm and communicating that joy.

And perhaps most importantly, even though almost all the speakers used PowerPoint or similar, everyone presented their material differently. Roo, who kicked off, showed 30 slides in three minutes—you can see it here but he’s cheated slightly by re-synching the sound with the slides. On the day the slides appeared automatically and he had to speed up or slow down what he was saying to match each image on screen. (He alludes to this at one point on the soundtrack.) It didn’t make his presentation more smooth but it made it more exciting, more of a competition, Roo against machine.

All the PowerPoint presentations were in a style that, if brought to a regular meeting or conference, you’d be asked to leave. Lots of full-screen pictures with no captions. Cartoons. Elegant graphs, often with slightly irreverent captions. A good number of images from classic SF movies. Nothing that was there just for teh funneh, but plenty that was meant to amuse as well as inform.

For the audience, barring the ‘Final Countdown’ singalong and one item that called for volunteers, it was also entirely passive. You listened or you didn’t listen, you enjoyed or you didn’t enjoy. You were not called to interact, but you felt involved. Playful, yes, but elements of direct or indirect play would almost certainly have spoiled the experience.

How does that work, then?

There’s a theory that says visualising walking, step by step, burns almost as many calories as actually walking. I can’t find any links to it and have no idea if it’s true, so take it for now as a metaphor. Everybody at Interesting 08 was thinking of what they could talk about at Interesting 09. It was the number one topic of overheard conversations. Even though non-speakers couldn’t play this time, their head full of thoughts about being up on the stage made the experience of watching others speak vicarious.

Secondly, because the talks were short and had to pack a lot into their time, they tended to be strong on wide-ranging high-points. Finding links between the different talks became a game, whether conscious or unconscious, and as the day went on the links coalesced into a web that felt like a tent covering all of us, the same way that a really good multi-stranded novel pulls all its threads and characters together. No coincidence that the bunting criss-crossing the hall looked like a net. It was an enormously unifying and satisfying feeling: not playful in a conventional sense, but playing with ideas is still play, and Interesting 08 was packed with ideas.

Links to the Interesting talks will be up on the Guardian website soon. Meanwhile, kudos to the organisers, congratulations to the speakers, and thanks to everyone who laughed at my jokes.

GameCamp

Posted by under conference, game design

Saturday was GameCamp, a one-day cross-disciplinary games conference in east London organised by the Guardian. Trust a broadsheet newspaper to fundamentally misunderstand what people do on a bank-holiday weekend. Anyway, 120 people invaded Sony’s 3Rooms venue in Shoreditch, and I forced my shiny new business card onto as many of them as possible. I have to say, whatever you think of Sony’s games consoles (and I try not to), they know how to decorate a venue.

The thing was modelled on Barcamp, which is to say its organisation was ad-hoc and self-regulating. As a result there were loads of simultaneous sessions and people tended to gravitate towards the ones by their mates or on subjects that they already knew something about. This was a shame. A few broke out from the pack—Simon Rogers’ overview of the cutting edge of tabletop RPG design was one, as was Tom Armitage’s hilarious and thought-provoking description of how an MMO based on Jane Austen could work—but the majority didn’t. The audience for Tassos Stevens’s talk on real-world politics and ARGs was, for example, pretty much identical to the audience for my later debate titled ‘ARGs: are they fucked?’ The only places where people crossed over and just chatted were around the food table, the Rock Band setup, and in the pub afterwards.

Still, the quality of the talks and attendees was fantastic. I ran into many old faces, some who I’d been hoping would attend, and others who I didn’t know had gone into gaming and who are now quite senior at large companies. Before the conference I suggested to the organisers that having a gathering about the UK games scene and not inviting anyone from Games Workshop was like having a party in a zoo and not inviting the 800lb gorilla. There was nobody from Games Workshop there. It would have been interesting to hear their perspective.

Nothing on pervasive gaming either, not that I saw, which was a surprise given its general news-trendiness over the last year or so, nor board-games. But at least I was able to run a session of the Peoples’ Revolutionary Committee, which was suitably cathartic for all involved.

Thanks to Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian for pulling the event together. My pics here, other people’s here.

Dogs about towns

Posted by under conference, game design, narrative

Over at Extenuating Circumstances Dan Hon has already done an excellent job of liveblogging chunks of GaME 07 (Imperial College, yesterday) so I won’t duplicate his effort. I will say that it was a good day, the talks were of variable quality, and the stand-outs—as you’d expect—were David Braben talking about ‘Creating Games for the Next Generation’, and Peter Molyneux talking about ‘Emotion in AI’.

Braben swiftly junked the idea that better graphics, better sound and more realism are enough to make a next-gen title (as if the success of the Wii and the failure of Motorstorm hadn’t comprehensively proved that they’re not) and talked a great deal about The Outsider. So far as I could tell TO is a free-roaming open-ended urban game in the post-GTA mould, with two important differences:

  1. Game characters react to environment, context and behaviour, not just yours but those of other NPCs. Save a cop’s life, word will spread among cops that you’re okay.
  2. The game starts just after the assassination of the US President, and you may or may not have been the guy behind the rifle.

As we used to say at Bizarre magazine, “Money down.” I’m sold.

Molyneux did a re-run of his much-documented GDC talk about Lionhead’s next game Fable 2, only without the Powerpoint slides because he’d just dropped his laptop and without the game-sound because Imperial College couldn’t make the sound on an Xbox 360 work. Specifically, he talked about the dog. Every player of Fable 2 will acquire a dog. They won’t all be the same dog; they’ll start off looking different, and will grow to resemble their owner as the game goes on. As Molyneux put it: “If you turn out to be an evil bastard, you’ll have an evil bastard’s dog.”

(—Dan had left by this point and I did make a concerted attempt to liveblog the talk, but my laptop died half-way through, despite having been recharged over lunch. Thank you Asus, that’s why I pay an extra £100 for an extended life battery. Honestly, I tried. Sorry.)

The thing is, I went into the talk as a skeptic. We live in a post-Nintendogs world, and putting a cute animal into a plot to elicit player-empathy is a cheap trick. I was expecting to be unimpressed, and twenty minutes in I was a convert. Not an evangelist, mark you. I can see how this can work. I’m not saying it will work, but I think it might.

The dog is more than just a companion and a tool, which were my two fears. (Having said that, it’s a fine companion and tool. It’s been built around the intelligence and training AIs developed for Black & White, plus Molyneux’s Three Laws of Dogotics, and thanks to some nifty graphics work including animating the tongue, ears and tail separately from the main body, looks and behaves like a believable dog. It’s not under the direct control of the player, but of your avatar—this is something I’d been messing with for Frup the day before, in the context of ‘Dei-Ex-Mechanicae‘, which I will describe in a later post—so you make the avatar make the gesture for ‘Bad dog’ and it’ll react and learn from that. And yes, you can issue commands by whistling into the Xbox 360 headset. The dog will also apparently pee on the corpses of your enemies. Like I said, money down.)

But more than that, it’s a lens for the rest of the game-world. The dog is a path-senser, an enemy detector and will fight to protect you, yes, but those are all tool aspects. But game characters won’t just react to you, they’ll react to your dog as well. Even if you’re not a dog person, even if you regard the dog as a game-resource to be optimised, another useful bit of equipment that you don’t suffer encumbrance for… if someone kicks your dog, you’re going to object to that. Because it’s yours. And if Molyneux has got it right and you do feel a sense of emotion towards the dog, then you’re going to feel that kick yourself.

I don’t think this is the solution to the problem of getting players to react emotionally to their experiences in video games, but I do think it’s a start. Like I said a while back, we’re going to spend a long time taking small steps and getting things half-right. (Braben says that, in movie terms, it’s about 1930. I’d say it’s 1925. We’ve found our Keaton and our Chaplin. We’re still waiting for our Welles and our Hitchcock, and talkies.)

For example, I have worries about whether, in a narrative game with a fantasy setting, it’s a wise idea to have the game-element the player cares most about be a dog, and I said as much. Molyneux’s answer was as polished as the rest of his talk but gave me the sense that he’s actively thought about this and built compensating mechanisms into the game. Whether he’s built them into the narrative is another matter.

But… after all, this is a game where the player’s avatar can marry and have children, and we know there will be other dogs in the game too. Can your dog find a mate and have puppies? And dogs have a shorter lifespan than humans… multiple generations of dogs? The whole subject opens up a ton of possibilities, and if there’s one developer who can be relied on to think through the implications and do something interesting with them, it’s Peter Molyneux.

Having said that, if the dog turns out to be a prince who’s been transformed by an evil fairy, I’m going to go down to Guildford and pee on every car in the Lionhead carpark.