12:24 AM (0 comments)
GDC Day Two Report Begins Now:

(A little shorter today, hopefully; I need to get to sleep.)

Woke up too early again, grab a quick breakfast and made it downtown and into Harvey Smith's "Systemic Level Design for Emergent Gameplay" talk. I learned a lot about the way Ion Austin does their stuff, and I like it a lot; it's precisely tied into the kind of things JP and I have been discussing lately. When I get back, I need to email Harvey and get a copy of his Power Point presentation--hopefully this idea will start percolating through the masses (added bonus that will aid in this happening: Rowan came to the talk as well, and also agreed with the whole thing.)

Then, across the street to the main lecture hall for the one keynote I wanted to catch, a talk between Will Wright and Scott McCloud. The setup was pretty cool--a couple couches, a coffee table with their laptops, and enormous screens to the left and right of the stage--left showing Wright's desktop and the right McCloud's. Both made great use of visual aids, and their discussion evolved into an interesting theory on games and storytelling as a Sisyphan and futile attempt by humanity to control the flow of time. Then they opened it up to the floor, and the pseudo intellectuals came out of the woodwork and ruined the whole thing.

Lunch at exotic (no) Johnny Rockets, then next door to Waldebooks, where I picked up a book for the ride home. Then it was back to the expo hall to shake down the Epic crew for more technical details on the Unreal tech, and a couple meetings with folks varied and sundry.

Then, the Heads exploded across GDC to go to separate sessions. I went to the session I've been looking forward to the most since January, a talk on the AI Game by the lead designer on the project. Very illuminating and great fun, so much so that I don't want to undervalue it by trying to type about it here. Afterwards I got to sit down and talk to the designer, along with the lead writer for EA's now defunct Majestic, who happened by. Much enthusiastic talk by three like minds was shared; if I weren't happy at the Head, I now know exactly what I'd like to be working on...

Talking made me run late to meet Tim and Rowan, so I jogged through the rain back to the convention center. Along the way I called my folks and said good bye; they're going to Branson of all places, and I wanted to tell them I loved them before they were replaced by the Missouri Pod People.

Found Tim and Rowan, and we embarked on the Booth Crawl, an official event that is basically wandering through the exhibit hall, but many booths are handing out free beer. As I don't drink, I was free to concentrate on gathering the cool non-beer stuff being handed out. Best swag: PS2 plastic glass (a beer stein, but it's still kinda cool). Worst: another gMax pellet straw, and a T-shirt that somehow tries to connect the game industry and Maryland. I don't get it.

Leaving the exhibit hall, I noticed that the free T-shirt/survey line was only one person long. As I had discovered earlier in the day that there was no actual way to purchase a GDC shirt, I jumped in line. As Tim and Rowan were going to wait anyway, they did as well. We paid the price by filling out the survey, 72 mind-numbing questions and an electronic interface every bit as bad as I'd been told. But I now have the ticket that will get me my T-shirt tomorrow.

By then, it was already 9:00. It took us almost another 90 minutes to get dinner down the street at Original Joe's (classiest diner in the world, decor-wise; sadly, the personal service and great food also meant a lengthy dining experience, a bad thing for three hungry people.)
However, much good discussion was had, and I'm still in the stage where I'm convinced GDC inspiration will actually come back home with us. (The quiet cynic in the back of my mind keeps reminiding me of the odds of that, though.)

By then we were too tired to do anything but find the trolley and ride back here. Here is no longer exciting. It is a place to update this page for all of you, then go to sleep. I have done the former, and will now do the latter. Until tomorrow, friends.

1:46 AM (0 comments)
A quick survey of Yahoo's Most Popular News:

1) Okay, how cool is this? (Family-friendly future tech)

2) whoa. (Slightly gruesome photo.)

3) Sex and violence! And that's just the headline!

1:26 AM (0 comments)
Check out the ad links for this Google search; refresh the page if must to see them on the right side of the page.

1:18 AM (0 comments)
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

1:00 AM (0 comments)
"--and mail the sperm to his wife."

Tim was just setting the alarm for the morning, and this was the first thing the blared out of the clock radio.

Anyway, time to bring you all up to date: when last I reported in, Human Head's Tim Gerritsen and I had just arrived at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and I had just logged in and talked to you via CelTech (tm).

The next morning, we woke up and went down to grab some breakfast. I ordered some pancakes and orange juice, and Tim just juice. Apparently we looked thirsty, as they brought us each two glasses. Finished the pancakes, finished one glass of juice, and thought about sipping at the other--just to at least justify its existence--but decided not to bother.

Then we went up and wandered around talking to people while we waited for GAMA (the trade show for the Game Manufacturers' Association, a non-electronic games show) to open. Ran into my old friend Casey from D&D gaming back in college, now living in Arizona, and introduced Tim to a bunch of my friends and professional contacts in the industry. Then the floor opened and we went in to wander around; more gabbing with all sorts of folks (including promising my current manuscript to the publisher three weeks from now--hurray for self-imposed deadlines!), and the scoring of some free stuff (including great Batman and Spider-Man promo figures for WizKids upcoming HeroClix game) ensued.

By late afternoon we had done everything we came to the show to do, and took a shuttle bus down to the Strip. Having been in Vegas so recently with the Monkeyfans, everything had a strange familiarity. But I made a concerted effort to do some new exploring, and went deep into the shopping areas at the Venetian, saw as much of the Venetian Guggenheim as we could without paying, wandered down past the Mirage and watched some sort of music video shoot being set up, and ended up at the Bellagio, where I finally saw the famous dancing waters. They were okay.

Then it was a cab back to the Orleans. Tim and I had a late dinner with RPG freelance superstar Matt Forbeck, and the waiter brought Tim and I each two glasses of the drink we ordered. (And no, it wasn't the same waiter.) As an experiment, I answered the question set by the Monkeyfans a month previous: the staff of the buffet do nothing if you walk away from the desert cart with an entire cake. I had two pieces, then made sure the rest was consumed by those at my and nearby tables.

After that, Tim wanted to sleep. I wanted to do some writing (remember that deadline?) but didn't want to bother Tim, so I grabbed my satchel and laptop, and headed down to the casino. I knew they'd never let me set up at an empty poker table or anything, but I did manage to find an empty table at one of the casino's closed restaurants where I set up my laptop and got to work. I got a few strange looks from security guards, but I made sure to set up so it was easy for them to walk by and see that I had nothing other than Word open. So there, in the place that defines distraction and cacophony, I stayed up until two in the morning and managed to write almost two thousand more words. (I'm as amazed as you are.)

Finally, the cleaning crew was coming around to clean up the closed restautant, so I packed up, helped stack chairs, and made my way back to the room. Got waylaid by Matt Forbeck and a group of industry folk--Steve Jackson, Ken Hite, John Nephew--who were sitting around drinking and chatted with them for a few minutes. Though I wanted to stay longer--and if I knew what was good for my freelancing career probably should have--I knew I had to get up early in the morning, so I went up and went to sleep.

Was awakened by Tim at 6:30 AM with the disturbing news that I talk in my sleep. Not much, not distinctly, but I do talk. Apparently I said I loved someone; makes me wish I remembered my dreams more often so I knew who it was.

We checked out of the hotel and went out to wait for our car to be brought around, where we ran into John Rhys-Davies, of Sliders and Gimli fame (or, if you're like me, Salla from Raiders of the Lost Ark), and the keynote speaker at GAMA the night previous. It was odd to see him in person--I have a mental portrait of a much more robust fellow, and it looks like the years are starting to catch up with him. He's still charismatic, but physically he seems sunken and tired. Then his driver brought around his car, and he was gone. A minute later, and we were headed down the road as well.

Summing up the next ten hours quickly: we ran into Casey again eating at IHOP (yes, more pancakes), were checked for fruit at the California border, saw an enormous and amazingly cool wind farm, drove past an airline graveyard, ate lunch at a place where they gave you a big bowl of peanuts and let you throw the shells on the floor, wandered around the countryside after driving up to an arbitrarily-closed freeway on-ramp, saw the garlic capital of the world, drank two enormous bottles of Diet Coke, and eventually arived here in San Jose, where the forces of gaming are gathering for the Game Developer's Conference.

Checked into our room at the hotel and spent the next couple hours waiting and making occasional phone calls as we waited for the third Head--Mr. Rowan Atalla, the Cheerful Curmudgeon--to show up and join us. Gave up, went to the restuarant to grab some dinner, and were immediately joined by Rowan, who had just arrived. (Famous Game Personality Spotting #1: Steve Merzetsky was at a nearby table.)

Then it was back here to the room, where it took a call to hotel maintenance to figure out how to wire my laptop to the hotel's T1 line (you gotta love Silicon Valley hotels!) Now I'm catching up on a few days of web traffic, reading blogs, and writing this here update. For those who don't read the same pages as me, here's your digest: JP revealed the dark secret of his apartment to his parents; Jon stays at work late on Saturday nights looking at supermodels (and note that blog has now blogrolled you in the rightmost column of their page, Jon); Bezzy has gone cartoon crazy and is providing supplemental arguments with each comic; Lileks thinks repairmen are revealing the secrets of God and really dislikes Michael Moore; somebody needs to give Lampshade a quarter; TMOL is maintaining its usual high standard; Angela Gunn keeps pointing me towards good reading and saying clever, witty things that are rapidly making her my online crush; and Metafilter continues to be the high school to SA's junior high.

Now I sleep. Tomorrow, exciting report from GDC!

1:15 AM (0 comments)
Alive and well in Sin City. All the vices of the world available to me, and what do I do? Eat a good meal, go up to my room, and post here. Well, mainly I'm up here because I'm tired. But I wanted to check my email and stuff, and this was just a few clicks away, and...

Yeah, it is kinda sad.

2:47 PM (0 comments)
You'll never believe it, but I'm sitting here in the airport with Mr. Phil Prange. Say hi, Phil:

(He says hi.)

He reccomends that everyone go look at the best political news site on the web. And I can't disagree.

Why don't you go do that, and we'll go back to waiting for our planes?

11:29 AM (0 comments)
Who's peekin' out from under a stairway, callin' a name that's lighter than air?
Who's trippin' down the streets of the city, smilin' at everybody she sees?

11:25 AM (0 comments)
If this isn't a hoax, it's just stupid. I can just see the developers of the game cringing. Or at least I hope they are.

11:18 AM (0 comments)
Thanks to Lileks for pointing me to the Middle East Media Research Institute; I look forward to using it to read about the Middle East, much in the same way I've been reading about India and Pakistan in the SIFY News.

11:14 AM (0 comments)
Bezzy is now an angry young cartoonist. Watch him rant. Rant, Bezzy, rant!

(I particularly like how he's given himself fangs...)

11:09 AM (0 comments)
TMOL, once again on a roll. You're reading it every day, right?.

And you're going to pick up System Shock 2 and Anox, right?

Right?

10:56 AM (0 comments)
Okay, semi-dark secret: I like Billy Joel. And I like piano music (Anybody who doesn't should pick up one of these great albums.) And the last time I saw Billy Joel in concert, he was great--especially(and I know this sounds like heresy) his cover of "Sunshine of Your Love".

That said, it sounds like he isn't doing so hot lately. (NYTimes link)

3:33 PM (0 comments)
So I'm at the lanudromat this afternoon. As is typical, I waited far too long to do laundry--until it was either do laundry or wear nothing but dirty clothes while I'm out of town this week--so I was of course jealous when a guy came in with nothing more than a medium-sized backpack full of dirty clothes and starts loading them into the next row of washers.

Then:

When other people would start pouring detergent into their machines and getting their change ready, this fellow just keeps loading...the clothes that he's wearing. He tosses his jacket in, his socks, his sweatshirt, and his pants. Stopping when he's at t-shirt and boxers, he then does the detergent-change thing and sits down to read a magazine. As for myself and other nearby patrons, we marinade in a peculiar broth of shock, amusement, and feigned disinterest.

It was about ten minutes later that the girl running the laundromat spots him and comes over. Mr. Strip doesn't see that he's done anything wrong, and the girl points out the ubiquitous "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy. Mr. Strip reaches under his chair and pulls on his dirty sneakers. Girl says he has to put on pants or leave. Strip says his only pants are in the wash.

Here's where Girl turns Hero: she goes over to the laundry service counter, digs around behind it, and comes out with this enormous flowered caftan thing, tosses it to Strip, and says "Wear this or get out."

(I should point out that even the sports fans aren't watching the NCAA tournament on the television anymore. The place is silent, except for the occasional snicker.)

Strip stays slumped in his seat for a minute, looking down at the caftan, then stands, steps into it, and puts it on. The laundromat erupts in laughter and hoots. Strip, embarassed, keeps his eyes on the floor while raising an acknowledging hand to the crowd.

Then everybody goes back to their business. He was still wearing the caftan when my driers finished up and I left.

So what I'm wondering is:

1) Things like this actually happen outside of commercials and sitcoms?
2) How could Strip possibly be embarrased to put on the caftan (and he was) after he strips down in the laundromat?!?!?!!?
3) Next time I go, will the policy be amended to "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Pants, No Service"?

Doing laundry is an enormous pain, but if it's ever going to be this entertaining again, I'm going to have to do it more often.

I leave for GAMA and GDC tomorrow, but some freelance stuff I need to work on dictates that I bring my laptop with me. So hopefully between it, my never-ending ability to procrastinate, and my wacky cell phone/modem hookup, you'll hear from me throughout the week. Until then--