I’m trying to be really, really good and hunker down on my book work, so I didn’t make any effort to check in at the Game Developers’ Conference even though it was right here in San Francisco, and now I’m kicking myself, because it appears that two of my favorite thinkers on the subject — my old friend Greg Costikyan, and Brenda Laurel, whose “Computers as Theater” was pivotal in shifting the course of my career — delivered blistering rants today at a panel there. I don’t know if the event will ever be more thoroughly documented, but in the meantime, these notes will do [link via BoingBoing]. Here are choice excerpts:
Costikyan: How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here, right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love. Laurel: GTA [Grand Theft Auto] I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren’t interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house. |
UPDATE: Greg has now posted the text of his talk. And it seems that at least some of Brenda Laurel’s talk drew from material in her essay here on “New Boys.”
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