When Will Wright looks at the world, he sees it differently than most people. He observes systems, he analyzes layers and he notices patterns in the most seemingly normal, every day things. "It's an affliction," he said at GDC on Saturday. "Every time I see something, I deconstruct it. ... But it's fun." Wright began his career in games as an independent, a "renegade" whose first game was Raid on Bungeling Bay. He later founded ...
Independent designer Jason Rohrer is one of the gaming industry's few radicals. It makes sense that he fears people will assume his next project, a DS title ostensibly about the diamond trade in Angola, will be a quintessential "serious game," a grave lecture on the brutalities of that business. "It's not a finger-wagging game at all," a cheerful Rohrer said at GDC, where he introduced Diamond Trust of London as part of the Serious Games ...
Independent designer Jason Rohrer is one of the gaming industry's few radicals. It makes sense that he fears people will assume his next project, a DS title ostensibly about the diamond trade in Angola, will be a quintessential "serious game," a grave lecture on the brutalities of that business. "It's not a finger-wagging game at all," a cheerful Rohrer said at GDC, where he introduced Diamond Trust of London as part of the Serious Games ...
The shift of the game-playing population to internet-based games is analogous to the growth of the American supermarket, according to EA's Ben Cousins. In a talk Friday at the Game Developers Conference, Cousins explained how studying the history of the American retail experience solidifies his somewhat controversial theory that quick, convenient, internet-based gaming will overtake traditional retail-based products completely. According to cousins, the retail dynamic at the turn of the 20th century was a high-quality, ...
On the final day of GDC 2010, BioWare designer Christina Norman outlined the dramatic change of combat in Mass Effect 2, explaining how and why these changes took place. Mass Effect 2 put a lot of emphasis on real-time gun combat and cover which, while mostly praised by enthusiast media, was at times controversial for fans of the traditional RPG aspects of the original game. At the end of the original Mass Effect's development cycle, ...
Noted game designers Jenova Chen, Kim Swift, Heather Kelley, and Erin Robinson presented concepts around the topic of "Real-World Permadeath" during this year's Game Design Challenge at Game Developers Conference, with Chen's HeavenVille taking the audience-determined top prize -- a bottle of Jameson whiskey. The terms of the challenge demanded the designers present pitches for games that in some way involve the actual permanent death of a real human being. No further requirements were established. ...
Most people measure the console wars by hardware unit sales, but although those numbers can be indicative of a console's success, that's not where the real console war is taking place, independent design consultant Don Daglow said at GDC on Friday. "The real war is the war on Wall Street," he said. That's where CEOs are judged, and those CEOs are expected to grow their business year after year, or else that stock price will ...
A panel of online luminaries - including Valve's Jason Holtman, Zynga's Brian Reynolds, BioWare's Ray Muzyka, Nexon's Min Kim, and Blizzard's Rob Pardo - discussed the new frontier of connected gaming. "If you're going to design a game that has multiplayer of some element of connected gameplay," said Pardo, "really understand what you want to get out of it. What you want out of that connectivity. Once you get into asynchronous connectivity, like you have ...
During 'The Nuovo Sessions' microlectures at GDC Friday, indie game developers who are known for pushing the boundaries of innovation shared ideas and development philosophies. And despite the fact that they share the label "indie," their views -- as espoused in this last-minute replacement for Experimental Gameplay Workshop centered around the IGF's Nuovo prize for new and different games -- vary. Alexander Bruce, the developer behind the Unreal Engine 3-based "art game" Hazard: A Journey ...
The GDC's popular Microtalks session allows 10 game industry people to discuss a topic of their choice for 5 minutes. We present here the highlights of three of those talks, from Foundation 9's Jane Pinckard, writer and consultant Margaret Robertson, and Jesse Schell, instructor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon. Jane Pinckard Pinckard decided to tackle the subject of romantic love in games. "When we design software we've got really good about asking the question ...
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