#GDC2014

[nikaharper]

Originality, Complex : An Indie Soapbox

Don’t worry, it’s all been done before.

Your story has already been told It’s probably translated into three languages And is part of an original piece in Croatian which you’ll never read That code has been written before Your programming problems have been solved in a basement in San Jose And the chords in your verse sound just like Nirvana, and that one song THEY got it from first. The book that you’re writing is a lot like a famous French novella, but with added dragons.

Your cutscene was in Reservoir Dogs Your gameplay is a mix of Pac-Man and Deus Ex The story you’re telling about your childhood was lived by hundreds of other kids in your country who also believed their toys came alive at midnight. Your slides are awkwardly similar to the guy who gave a talk before yours Your color scheme is the same one from Nokia’s website, they probably patented it. Your game title sounds like Warcraft fanfic And the character names sound a lot like Discworld. There was a mod like the game you’re making, and that was in like 2005. Yeah, people have spoken up about that topic, it’s called the Human Rights Movement, and they did that shit for charity. I’m not the first to have tattoos at GDC Or to say the word “bullshit” on this stage This talk has been done before. ....But it isn’t redundant.

Old news is still news, to someone, and you never know when they need to hear it. That’s why art, literature, speeches and expressions can be timeless. Either they capture a moment, or they go on speaking to the human condition. About originality, about fear or self-worth.

There’s a human element to creating, teaching, and learning too. There’s a personal element to how we absorb the information that we get. Any moment could be someone’s first impression on a genre, a style, message or experience.

Repeat the good lessons and the good stories we’ve learned, because somebody hasn’t heard them yet. And they certainly haven’t heard them from you.

Once upon a time, there was a wicked queen who wanted to be the fairest in the land, and when a magic mirror said her step-daughter was more beautiful, she ordered the girl killed. The huntsman let the girl escape, bringing a deer’s heart to the queen, while the girl hid in the home of seven dwarves in the forest. The queen tried to trap the girl with a suffocating bodice, a poisoned comb, and at last a poisoned apple, which worked. The dwarves put the girl into a glass coffin, which was seen by a journeying prince. The piece of apple is dislodged from the girl’s throat, and she awakens to be married to the prince and live happily ever after by making the wicked queen put on burning metal shoes and dance herself to death. We know that story, that’s the Grimm fairy tale version of Snow White.

Once upon a time, the same story I just told but with more magic and less poison, aaaaand there you have Snow White, the version done by Disney.

Once upon a time, a girl is thrown out of her sorority for being too hot, and stumbles into a weekly meetup of dwarfish students whom she begins to work for... Well, that’s probably a Snow White porno.

Once upon a time, a young queen is frightened of her new husband’s daughter, whom she has caught sucking blood. She orders the girl killed, but the heart beats on in the queen’s hand. While trying and failing to assassinate this vampiric creature once and for all, the girl returns with an enthralled prince, and they sentence the queen to burn alive. That’s Snow White, but... done by Neil Gaiman.

When we hear a message repeatedly, sometimes we need to hear it... differently. To remind us it isn’t just words, stale ideas and emptiness. Our own interpretations might inspire someone more than the original ever could. I’m not the first person to encourage people to write, but I said it to people who may not have heard it before, or certainly not enough. If we all interpret the world differently, then the way we express even a simple concept can be highly original. So maybe we shouldn’t worry about that so much.

It’s not about being the first to do something. It’s about someone else’s first experience with it. The first time it reaches and teaches someone, and they might need it more than ever, right now. And you might be the only way that they can get it.

Ideas are an evolution, a subtle change to things we know and concepts we adhere to. There’s a difference between a style and a bandwagon, a message and a cliche, inspiration and a clone. The difference, I think, is love. Just because something has been said before doesn’t mean you have nothing to say.

So. It’s all been done before. But it bears repeating.

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Performed this at Game Developer's Conference 2014, to a room full of passionate indie game creators. It was incredible.

[rachybee-says]

Just wanted to put this somewhere where I can find it again.

Super useful game animation tips that I wish I’d known 2 years ago.

[maximumwitchturtle-blog]

Remember that time Tim Schafer mocked and denied these people their identity?

But it was just a racist bigoted joke, right?

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/gamergate-developer-tim-schafer-provokes-rage-with-joke-about-online-gaming-activists-at-industry-10089124.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjoZK4048aM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jal0rkDssq4

https://archive.is/eQsnr

https://archive.is/Aiu7X

[ctin-488]

A good message for all of us. Inspired by GDC, but true all the time.

[thegamehuntersgamescom]

Game Hunters played #TheOrder1886 Diablo III ultimate edition and Until Dawn #PS4share #4ThePlayers #PlayStationGC

[jfixby]

game developers I met at GDC14 (2/5)

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Hannah McGill http://www.hannahmcgill.com

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Jakub Dvorský http://amanita-design.net

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Tomas Dvorak http://floex.cz/en/discography.php

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Samuel Boucher https://twitter.com/MonsieurEureka

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Juan Pedro Salvo Seade http://batijuampe.blogspot.com

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Emily Carroll http://emcarroll.blogspot.com

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Katerina Arrington http://katerinaarrington.blogspot.com

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Adam Alexander http://www.adamalexanderart.com

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Eric Maly http://malygamedevelopment.com/projects/crazy-pixel-engine/

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Matthew Allen http://www.golddragonart.net

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[nikaharper]

"If this burden is stopping us from creating, then there's no reason to have it."

My GDC 2014 talk on Surviving Internet Negativity is now live!

[agamersescape-blog]

Nintendo plays a huge part in any video history museum. They saved the industry in the 1980s.

[rdansky-blog]

GDC 2014 (Yes, You Read That Right)

I wrote this for the UbiBlog last year but for whatever reason, it never got posted. You see, I was going to write a pithy GDC post about this year’s show, but then I remembered this and dug it out for nostalgia value, and realized the important bits - not the details, maybe, but the rest - still hold. 

So here it is, artifact but still pertinent. The pithy stuff from this year is still coming, I promise. But this will tide you over.

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GDC is…. It’s 10 PM in a bar called Soma filled with shouting, cheering game writers. We’ve hit the final round of Write Club, the IGDA Game Writing SIG’s favorite improvisational game writing competition. Three contestants are left, having survived numerous elimination rounds and challenging writing prompts like “Write a mission and villain description for Batman: Suburbs of Arkham”. They are about to take on the last challenge: Write a monologue for the protagonist character in a game about a bloodthirsty cabbage hell-bent on revenge for the murder of his family (working title: Cole’s Law. If you don’t get it, I can’t help you). The crowd is into it. The MC, the estimable Jeremy Bernstein, is into it. The competitors are into it. And the clock starts, and everyone goes nuts – in a good way.

It’s a booth at Mel’s, the legendary diner around the corner from the Moscone Center. It’s past midnight. People are arguing over who’s going to eat All Of The Fried Things that came on the sampler platter. People are also discussing Marvel’s approach to superheroes as opposed to DC’s, and descriptive passages in novels by Guy Gavriel Kay, and various and sundry other things along those same lines.  This is a pack of game writers at play, traveling in a pack.

It’s Room 3016 of Moscone Center West, day 2 of the Game Narrative Summit, middle of the afternoon. Michelle Clough is giving her talk on why we need more sexy men in video games and she is absolutely killing it. The room is in the palm of her hand. It’s a perfect storm of material and speaker and audience and the time being right for people being ready to hear this stuff. Every year at the GNS we have one talk that comes out of nowhere and blows everyone away. Michelle’s is this year’s. People are cheering. People are laughing. People are taking notes. People are tweeting out choice quotes. It’s magic.

It’s Wednesday morning. I’m sitting in the Ubi lounge when a student pops up. He’s an aspiring game writer. He wants to talk about what he can do to get into the industry, and what he needs to know and do. He showed up because the previous night he met some other Ubi folks – the estimable Maxime Beland and company – who talked to him and pointed him in my direction. I sit down with him and I talk about building a portfolio. I talk about how to analyze the narrative aspects of games as you play them. I talk about networking. It’s a good chat. Hopefully he walks out of it with more and better intel than he had going in. And it’s because some pros took a moment to help someone who wasn’t a pro and was a stranger. Community matters.

It’s a dark corner of a dark bar, and the Very Serious Writers are talking. They are talking about narrative structure, distortion and tension. They are talking craft. They are talking about the things that they generally don’t get a chance to talk about most places because most places where you find a writer, you don’t necessarily find writers, comma, plural. So this is a place where game writers find community, where they find the folks who can speak their professional language and understand their professional concerns and offer shared experience with similar problems. It is a community, one that gathers at rare moments like the Game Narrative Summit.  At those moments, it is a pleasure and an honor to be part of that crowd, to be among the talented folks working on this particular craft within game development and driving to make it better. To be among professional peers, folks whom I can hopefully offer something to and folks I can learn from, and folks I can sit down and bullshit with.

It’s memories. Years ago, at the first Game Narrative Summit (it was the Game Writers’ Conference then), I walked into the room for the first session, ahead of Marc Laidlaw’s opening talk. There were roughly 200 people seated in that room – students and senior developers, pros and dreamers, journeymen and superstars. And so help me, my first thought was “I’m not alone.” True story: I’ve talked to at least 50 people who were in the room for that moment. And every single one of them had the same thought walking through that door.

It’s running into old friends in the middle of the street and finding out what ridiculously cool things they’re working on. It’s watching someone who’s just rocked a room for the first time realizing that people really are interested in what they have to say. It’s random encounters in hallways with brilliant people that turn into fascinating discussions that turn into “holy crap, we’ve been talking for an hour and now I need to go write this down”.  It’s wrapping up a session and having folks come up to you want to continue the discussion. It’s people expressing genuine thanks that they learned something in a session, that something there was useful or resonant to them. It’s being the dumbest guy in the room, and being glad to be the dumbest guy in the room because that means learning from everyone else there. It means remembering to break in the new sneakers long before the show, because there’s going to be miles and miles of walking. It’s meeting up with coworkers from another studio and being able to suggest a good restaurant when they ask. It’s introducing one brilliant friend to another brilliant friend who really ought to know each other, and getting the hell out of the way while they say brilliant things to one another, brilliantly. And then, it’s going back the next day and doing it all over again.

[thegamehuntersgamescom]

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain at #Gamescom2014 #GC2014 #PS4share #4ThePlayers #PlayStationGC

[jfixby]

game developers I met at GDC14

I was at the GDC 2014 last week. Right now I'm sorting collected business-cards and making a list of indie-game developers. So if you are looking for teammates, artists, game designers or someone else to hire/collaborate, here is the first part of the list:

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Dream http://dreamthegame.co.uk

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Pomelo Games http://www.bulletboygame.com

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Barry Collins http://ashenrift.com

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Nicolas Johann Miller http://nicolasjmiller.com/about/

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Ryan Murphy http://ryanscottmurphy.com/index.html

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Jurie Horneman http://www.intelligent-artifice.com/about

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Ido Yehieli http://tametick.com

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Kyle Pulver http://kpulv.com

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Corey Nolan http://www.coreynolan.com

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Andy Fedorchuk http://andyfedorchuk.com

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Sebastian Pachmayr http://www.sebastianpachmayr.com/sebastianpachmayr/

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Tyler Bud http://castlepixel.com/rexrocket/

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Alex Camilleri http://www.alexcamilleri.com

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Loren Schmidt http://vacuumflowers.com/weblog/

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Christina Rhoades http://www.trulytristina.com

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Shayna Moon http://www.shaynamoon.com/#!projects/component_74511

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[niksong]

#30HappyDays

Thursday, March 20, 2014.

Another day spent in San Francisco, where my heart belongs.

Wine and Chinese delivery enjoyed on a wide, plush bed doesn't hurt either.

[wherewillyoubenov12]

#GDC2014 #Divergent #imax @hungryhungryhippos

[paoplayz-blog]

How do we defrag all four hundred and fifty CA's!?! Unite them with gaming acapella! :) mariobros #gdc2014 #calounge #sanfrancisco #gamedevelopersconference (at GDC)