A Very Special GDC Event
At the Game Developers Conference on Thursday March 8th, I will be hosting an unusual session called Nuances of Design. The session is a collection of four presentations by four different speakers; the unusual thing is that you play the speakers’ games during the presentations. The idea is that by playing, you can more directly share in experience they are trying to express than you would as a passive listener at a lecture.
The speakers are:
- Raph Koster, with his experiences developing the Andean Bird game, which is about what it feels like to fly;
- Chaim Gingold, with a prototype he used to develop the touch and feel of Spore’s cell game, how “programming and touching is believing”, and various tricks he learned.
- Rod Humble, with his games The Marriage and A Walk With Max, which are about expressing emotions directly through gameplay;
- Jonathan Blow, with some experiments about how small changes in a game design can greatly influence a player’s intention and play experience.
I hope plenty of folks will come and help make this session a success. To fully participate in the session, please bring a laptop running windows XP…
… with a graphics processor that can do OpenGL / Direct3D-ish stuff. It doesn’t have to be anything too crazy fast; I have a Radeon Mobility 7500 in my laptop, and that’s plenty. Also, please bring a pair of in-ear headphones so that you can plug one into an ear and leave the other one hanging out, to hear what the speakers have to say. Though come to think of it, maybe only one of the games has sound. We’ll see.
This session involves installing some software! So please arrive a little early to get it installed and test things out.
The link on the GDC’s web site, with extended information, is here.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:53 pm
[...] I mentioned this already in my post on GDC talks, but I wanted to call out Jon Blow’s very cool session entitled Nuances of Design, which he has written up over on the Braid blog. Basically, most times you go to GDC and watch people with Powerpoint presentations about games or at best videos of games. [...]
March 11th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Hey Johathan (+ other panel members), I just wanted to say thanks for trusting a room full of strangers with your prototype / confidential ideas, being able to try out the games instead of just watching someone play+explain them imo really helped convey their sense of feeling and the nuances if you will of what made them unique.
The prototype you showed (the one with 2d flatten sphere objects), I’m curious to know if you used any mathematics+HCI models in determining the different sizes, speeds, colors etc in the game.
March 11th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
You’re welcome! We all enjoyed hosting the session very much, and I hope to set up another one in the future.
For that game, I didn’t use any HCI models, so far it has just come down to an intuitive feel of what I want at any given time. I think it would be good to explore the literature in that area to influece the game design, but right now I am not quite settled on what the final design will be; so, I want to finish with the fundamental changes before I start thinking about tweaks to things like size and speed.
March 11th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Heh, good point about not changing the design. Well I’m looking forward to it finishing, thanks again
March 14th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
[...] Episode 2 reminds me somewhat of the kind of discussion we had at the Nuances of Design session — taking one example of a game that is simple, and building on it. I’d like to see more of that kind of thing. [...]
March 16th, 2007 at 7:19 am
[...] Probably the best actual talks (since Nuances of Game Design wasn’t really a talk) I attended all week were the ones on agile development. The guys from High Moon / Games From Within are very cool, and hearing about the way they do agile was freaking awesome. Getting to hear all about some of the metrics and processes that are used to create an agile team (including small Scrums, scrum of scrum meetings, keeping track of burndown, and ways to do long tem planning) definitely helped me understand just how cool agile actually can be. [...]
March 19th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
[...] Rod presented this game at the 2007 Experimental Gameplay Sessions, and also at Nuances of Design the next day. It’s a very interesting piece wherein the main mode of expression is via the actual rules of gameplay — not the graphics or the sound or a story made of words. I think that if games are really going to come into their own as a medium, we need to work hard in this area and develop it further. [...]
April 2nd, 2007 at 8:18 am
[...] idea for the gameplay came from my talks with Daniel Benmergui at the GDC. After the Nuances of Design session, we talked about the idea creating a game (for the Eerie Horror Film Fest), where the gameplay [...]
February 13th, 2008 at 12:26 am
[...] This will be the second time I’ve done this session; the first one, last year, went very well. [...]
November 20th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Wish I could attend
. My life is video games and we are in the process of making the gaming world a whole lot more social. Between yourself and those listed I’m sure it was a great event.