Boston Gameloop '08

Yesterday was the first ever Boston Gameloop UnConference which took 45 local developers, threw them into the MIT-Singapore Gambit Lab and expected them to talk about interesting things.

We did.

This is the brainchild of Darius Kazemi and Scott MacMillan who have been turning the Boston Post Mortem into a real developer community over the last year or so (and I'm probably showing that I have my head up my ass by not mentioning the other people on the BPM committee, sorry, other people). Darius asked us to write, post, or even just email our scanned notes to him and he would transcribe them.

When he asked that I made this:



That's Ralph, a little guy I've been drawing since I was eight. Yesterday, for some reason, he had a mullet. I was just trying to bring a little visualization to the proceedings. Oh, and yes, we learned the earth-shattering fact that a free open bar gets people to come to your event. There was no free open bar (isn't that redundant?) at Gameloop.

We arrived at the ungodly hour of 9am on a Saturday, and we milled about, as geeks will do. We were told to put up a topic that we wanted to talk about, or if we weren't sure there would be enough interest in our topic, but it up as a trial topic on a sheet on the board. We would put a hash mark on anything we were interested in. If a trial topic got enough has marks (no definition of "enough") then we could move it over to a card and schedule it.

After a bit, the board started looking like a schedule, and eventually it looked like this:


So here was my day, and I apologize if I don't get the titles quite right:

• Interactive Actors that Express Emotion - was an actual talk prepared by Gerry Seidman from Actor Machine. He's working with Ken Perlin on a bunch of Maya plugins that will allow a model to be given a character, or a basic description which will allow the model to animate in line with the character. Basically you don't have to keyframe everything, behaviors are part of the model itself. Gerry showed a lot of demos from Ken Perlin's actors page. This would seem to enable very quick, procedurally generate crowds, as well as low-overhead projections for live performances. I'm going to ceep in contact with Gerry on this, as some of my projection work could benefit from this, as long as it would all work with importing models into Unreal.
• Boston Games Industry, What's Next? - Did you know our Post Mortem is the best attended and most frequent IGDA meeting in the world? Did you know Massachusetts has recently instituted tax benefits for the film industry, and at the last moment included the game industry in those benefits? Did you know the general perception in the games industry is that there are no developers in or around Boston? Yeah, that last one sucks. So what's next for the Boston games industry seemed to be two things:
  

1. We need better PR to tell people that we exist. It occured to me this morning while reading Edge, that every month they spotlight a different city or region, get a roundtable of all the developers there, then do individual articles about the major developers in that area, yet I hadn't read one about Boston. Hmm... So basically we need a Local Game Industry Evangelist, which was when everyone looked at Darius.
   
2. The other thing was to leverage our strengths, which seemed to be that we're a hotbed of academia with a number of very strong game development programs. The talk then turned to internships and entry-level hiring vs. experienced hiring. I outed myself as an academic (there were no academics allowed at this, though the MIT-Gambit lab seems perilously close to academia, and they were well represented) and talked about when to look for interns. It seems to me that game companies don't think summer starts until June, when all the WPI kids leave at the beginning of May. I asked them to start looking in March/April in order to actually get local kids into local companies.

• LUNCH! Pizza and soda. Not doing my waistline any favors.
• Board Games Workshop - in which we took familiar board games and discarded the rules and made new ones. We grabbed Scrabble and, after some farting around, Devin Griffiths (who said he wasn't a designer. "Feh," I say to you, "Feh.") came up with Scrabble Hold 'Em which put three common tiles in the middle of play and gives each player four tiles to make words with. The first player to finish gets 5 extra points, the player with the longest word gets 2 extra points. We were trying to make a very short game, and we were trying to eliminate the downtime in Scrabble where you're sitting there as the other person stares at their tiles. Even then, we wanted to solve another problem of Scrabble, that players don't interact, so we came up with Scrabble Stealing in which each player gets 7 tiles and starts to make words, but at any time another player can offer a tile and "steal" a random tile from you. Tiles already in complete words were "safe." When the first person uses up all their their tiles, the game is over, and you only get scored on tiles in words. This again kept it short, gave a "screw you" element to the game, and rewarded people for coming up with the first word they saw instead of staring at their tiles forever. This hour probably went by the fastest of the day.
• Low tech games (ARGs != Marketing) is the session I proposed. I wanted to talk about indie ARGs and bring game design sensibility into what seems to be a "webbie" industry. At ARG Fest O Con, it seemed odd to me that not one local game developer was present, in fact, even though it was announced at Post Mortem, most every game developer at GameLoop didn't know about it. I deal with the problems of getting players for our ARGs, because they're quick, they're free, and most people "like the idea but just don't have the time." I described the inverted pyramid -- hardcore at the tip doing most of the content, casuals in the middle watching the hardcore, cheering them on, but not really participating, and the lurkers who tune in, don't have time, and read about how it went when it's all over. This seems remarkably like a problem that MMO developers deal with. Do you make more content for the hardcore, or do you serve the casuals? One idea that came up for ARGs, was a very quick ARG (my class does 5 day ARGs) that you sell tickets to. That would monetize the ARG, localize the ARG, and everyone participating would know that the commitment was short. This really takes a page from LARPing and Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre. I'm going to think about this more. My one regret was that there were two other bitchin' sessions during mine, and I would've liked to go to both of them.
• Turning Licensed Properties into Games - This was a talk that Matt Weise and Geoff Long are prepping for Austin GDC, basically pointing out that licensed games only recreate a small subset of the activities portrayed in their source material, and that the barrier to using more is no longer technical, it's a lack of imagination. Unfortunately, when they asked me to name the last movie I had seen, I replied (truthfully!), "Shooter." It was not the best illustration of their point, but we moved on to Rudeboy, Almost Famous, and Death Note. They used conversions of James Bond properties to shooters as a good example, and then went one step further to point out a weird verb in the Bond lexicon -- "Use super senses." This is when Bond shoots exactly the right thing to cause a chain reaction that saves his bacon. In one of the Bond games, they translated this as "Bond sight" where bond can see targets that will cause unexpected things to happen and create "Bond moments." I'd like to see them extend this and not just handwave that verbs like seduce, investigate, and grow up are possible, but show us how they've already been done in other games. That would pretty much prove their thesis.
• Finally, OMG Jonathan Blow is teh Awesome! or Design and Narrative - This was Scott leading a roundtable that was interesting, but also somewhat maddening, because some of us were speaking different languages. There seemed a whole camp (led by Tynan and Scott) who saw emergent stories as the future, but admitted that the stories had to be interpreted (read, rewritten) by humans in order to become interesting. So AAR's of Starcraft become interesting because a human is interpreting what would be unintelligible if you just watched the game. Additionally, there are a whole host of games, all strategy titles, which have interesting events happen, that, when strung together become a narrative that was experienced by the player. Personally, I don't see AARs of strategy games as threatening the novel anytime soon. When the writer-types in the room (myself, and Devlin leading that charge) talk about game narrative, we still want a feeling of authorship on our part. Bioshock is pretty much the same story for everyone who plays it, and it has definite high points and lulls, which were designed by the writer and designers. Mostly I wanted to talk about Braid, but everyone in the room hadn't finished it, and that put a bit of a damper on that discussion. Again, Braid is being held up as what games are capable of as narrative, but everyone who plays it has more or less the same experience. Braid is authored, whereas King of Dragon Pass, and Dwarf Fortress are designed in such a way that interesting things might happen. And that's a big might. Most of the time, nothing interesting happens, but when something special does happen, that's the one instance the player remembers and recounts.

Afterwards, there was a brief announcements session and a promise that we would all do it again, but not for a year or so, and starting at 10am instead of 9am, maybe with healthier foods, and with t-shirts that weren't orange.


Then there was beer at CBC, with even more discussion. All in all it was a very tiring, very rewarding day.