1:18 AM
GDC Day One Report:

Woke up, got dressed, and made my way over to the hotel restaurant, where the Heads had breakfast before taking a shuttle bus into downtown San Jose, home of Adobe and the San Jose Convention Center, GDC Central. Spent all of three minutes registering for the convention, which made me think the GDC really had their act together. I would be proven wrong later in the day.

Flipping through the map-like program schedule I realized Ernest Adams talk "Why We Shouldn't Make Games" had already begun, so I made my way into the warren of meeting rooms to catch the last half hour. He had some great things to say, especially with regards to less-structured forms of gameplay--or what I found more interesting, forms of gameplay where the player defines the structure. He said an awful lot that I agreed with, but also allowed me to begin sketching out when exactly I disagree with him--and it's more often than I might have expected.

After that, I made my way over to a nearby hotel meeting room for a panel called "Battling Level Design in Hardcore Genres for a Casual Audience" given by Tim Longo, who worked on the Star Wars Starfighter console games. I had a slight degree of disconnect. First, the spelling on his Power Point slides was atrocious. Second, he used two structures for his talk (game production and consumption as analgous to a magic trick, and varieties of game audience as different types of 'Arnolds') and used them in kind of a confusing manner. But. He still had a lot of good things to say about how to make levels that hardcore gamers will enjoy yet won't frustrate those who simply rent it from Blockbuster for the night. Then, I ran over to sit in on meetings with various companies and discuss upcoming Head projects.

After that I got to see the latest iterations of the Unreal tech, and it looks great. As I don't know how any NDAs I might have signed in the past might come into play, I will say no more. Game news sites have been covering it nicely anyway. I got to reacquaint myself with some of the Epic folks I met at E3 last year and meet some new ones; they're good people from top to bottom.

We also stopped and talked to the developers of two great Unreal engine plugins, one a Karma control interface for ragdoll animation and the other an amazing auto-lip synch plug that will cut massive amounts of time out of localization. Neato stuff.

Wandered around the exhibit hall on my own for a bit and voted in the IGDA awards, then went out and decided to join the line to fill out a survey and get one of the neat GDC T-shirts I'd seen people wearing. Big mistake. There were nine stations for the interactive survey, little touchscreens people were tapping on with styluses (styli?). In the fifteen minutes I waited, one person finished. One. They wandered over and filled in the rest of us--it was a 72 question survey, and one with a constantly changing user interface. I joined the half of the line that immediately gave up.

Besides, I was almost late for the panel I really wanted to get to: "Rez: The Synesthesia that Games Invite" by Tetsuya Mizugutchi. I got there right at 5:30, as the talk was starting, and was stunned to find that there were at least three hundred people in the room, making it standing room only. So I stood against the back wall for the next sixty minutes--but it was worth it. Mizugutchi showed us the complete evolution of Rez, starting with its origins in a dirty African street bar. He then showed us videos of the dev team and several stages of evolution--and I was surprised to see it develop from "not Rez" to "not Rez" to--suddenly!--"Rez"; you could really see where the magic of the concept coming to life kicked in.

About half the room revealed they hadn't actually played the game, so Mizugutchi gave the best explanation of the game he possibly could; he turned on a PS2 hooked to the room's AV system, cranked up the sound, and played Level 5 on the forty-foot screen. The next eight minutes were as close to a concert as I've ever seen game playing be; Mizugutchi has obviously played the game more than a few times, and was almost using it as a musical instrument, popping off bad guys in perfect synch to Adam Freeland roaring in the background. Heads were bobbing in the audience, feet were tapping--and finally a GDC volunteer came in and said that the speaker was complaining about the noise--two rooms over and one floor down. Mizugutchi played for a couple more minutes, just to the cusp of the Girl, then set aside the controller to a huge round of applause. For watching someone play a game. A game as a spectator event. It rocked.

He closed by talking about the current crisis in games, and to my understanding feels much the same as Ernest Adams (who was sitting two rows in front of me, by the by)--but with some crucial differences. Mizugutchi said that developers were indeed chasing audiovisual fidelity instead of gameplay, but instead of putting them in opposition he arrayed them simply as three tracks of evolution where one had fallen crucially far behind. ("I would have loved to have better audio for Rez," he said. "If you want to know what synthesizers sounded like in 1992, look no further than the PS2.") Good visuals are good; good audio is good; developers just needed to set aside the gameplay decisions which were made ten years ago--which we have near perfected--and go in search of new experiences for the player. Games aren't taking the wrong path, he said--they had simply stopped making progress. It's still a bad situation, but it's not as assuredly fatal as it could be.

(A Q&A session followed the talk, and the first hand that shot up was to ask the question "So how do you free the Girl?" Heh.)

Off to find the rest of the Heads, and joined by some folks from Midway Chicago we went to find dinner. A group of sixteen dropped to nine, then eight, then as we waited for a table, to five. Which was fine, because we got a table faster. Dinner was California cusine, and the experience reminded me of the L'Idiot scene in L.A. Story--only the service though, happily, and not the food, which was great.

Wandered back to the Fairmont Hotel, where I was left to my own devices while the others made their way to get drinks. Wandering around looking for a seat I bumped into Tetsuya Mizuguchi sitting on his own. I only had time to tell him how much I had enjoyed Rez before I spotted a table finally opening up and went off to claim it. Tim came over with some old buddies from FASA Interactive, and I got to hear them trade war stories for a while before we made our way out to the train and the hotel, which is here and (as of when I started typing this update a half hour ago) now.

GDC is indeed inspiring; I've been making as many notes about ideas for our current projects as I have the seminars, and I look forward to discussing them with the rest of the teams when I get back. But first, I have two more days of GDC (and a day of travel) to look forward to. Better go get my schedule ready.

Worst free swag of the day: gMax "straw with glowing pellet inside".
Runner up: Cheesy AMD FM pocket radio ("with light!")

Best free swag of the day: DeusEx lapel pin
Runner up: GDC whitepaper complilation CD