GDC 2008, Day 4

February 22nd, 2008 · No Comments

Missed the Force Unleashed prezo today because I was almost running late and in my haste forgot to grab my badge. Brilliant. I’m pretty sure it’s online somewhere, so I should run off and read it later. I really wanted to see how they integrated Euphoria now that it’s not a complete joke and looks like it will be worth using. I have to leave the convention early and won’t be able to make my Euphoria demo appointment, so I was really hoping to catch the Star Wars demo of it.

At least I made up for it and caught two outstanding discussions today. I happened to give Clint’s Immersion Fidelity talk a go at the very last minute, and was exceedingly glad that I did. Hearing Clint give a discussion one gets the impression that he has his position for a reason; he really knows what he’s talking about. It mostly boiled down to Logical vs. Sensory Immersion, and how there’s two camps battling it out right now, each claiming to be the superior form of immersion. One day, they will join forces and games will truly rise to their proper state of dominance in the entertainment media. But how he got there was the interesting part. If I can find a link to the discussion (he posts them eventually) I’ll throw it here.

Later in the day I caught the “Let them Win” talk about accessibility in games, and it was pretty damn insightful. A lot of great arguments about how you can make a game that’s easy for a novice yet still challenging for an expert. Tons of great core things to think about when designing a game from the ground up, and even including some radical ideas such as a player will be more likely to buy a sequel to an easy game they finished than buying the sequel to a difficult game they didn’t. Important stuff to think about when your job rides on sales of your ideas.

Somewhere in the middle I caught a real stinker of a talk from the Prototype guys. Their 10 minute demo they played looked fantastic, but honestly, after ten minutes I felt that I’d seen everything their game can do. Also, I would hope that god mode was on, because if your guy can survive an onslaught of 20 armed men, multiple Abrams tanks, two Apache attack helicopters, and 5 mutant giant dog things all on the same street corner? What the fuck can kill him?

At any rate, my beef with the talk wasn’t that the game is basically Hulk with a reskin and a hoodie (honest, what they showed looked hella fun), but that their Lead Designer really put me off with the claim that their focus tests showed conclusively that you can’t make a player care about your game’s situations. They said that they focus tested a schoolbus teetering on the edge of a bridge, teeming with screaming children, and that 99% of all players would actually push the bus over the edge and then demand to be given points for it.

This might be the case if the test model/environment they used for their focus test was GTA, but shit, if you can’t make your people care about a schoolbus full of kids teetering on the edge of disaster, and claim that no one can, you fail as a game designer. Ken Levine made me care about one kid, and she was a pretty sick and disgusting monster at that. If you can’t teach your player that good behavior reaps positive results in your game, you’re obviously doing it wrong or not even trying.

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