Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > September > 16
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
‘Not Bruce Sterling’ travels from the future for GDC
What does the future of video game design look like 35 years from now?
Even a time traveler sent specifically to speak on the subject may not give you the answers you’re looking for.
Austin science fiction author Bruce Sterling delivered a keynote speech to developers from around the world Tuesday as part of the Austin Game Developers Conference.
The keynote, held in a ballroom at the Austin Convention Center, was billed as a peek into the future of games by a renowned thinker on all things futuristic. Listeners packed the room, many of them even putting their laptops and smartphones aside to absorb the specifics of Sterling’s prognostications.
Instead, they got a little bit of performance art. Sterling, wearing a white shirt and necktie, began the keynote by saying, “I’m not Bruce Sterling.” In fact, he said he was a grad student sent from the future to discuss the future of computer entertainment. His professor, “Dr. Sterling,” was an 89-year-old professor in the year 2043, but still had the dewy skin of a 10-year-old. (Much thanks to future biotechnology.)
Not-Bruce-Sterling then showed off the future of computers: a dish rag built by General Electric that connects to future cloud networks, has the power more than 8 million of our best current laptops and can play “Tetris” on its fabric touch screen.
If the author was being especially playful, it was not without a point. The time traveler posited that, like towels, computers of the future will be so commonplace as to be ignored. “It’s like the dullest thing in the world,” he said, “boring objects of everyday life. They’re like bricks and forks and toothbrushes.”
The keynote speaker also produced some imaginary crystal shards, each capable of producing a network far greater than the collective whole of the Internet we knew around, say, 2004. In the Sterling future, computer and game console platforms won’t matter: everyday objects like doorknobs will have more embedded processors in them than computer clusters of today.
He advised the audience to look past the idea of processors as computers. Think of the possibilities in computers as woven fabrics, as the space inside atoms, as smoke, he advised.
As for games themselves: they’ll also be ubiquitous enough to be incredibly boring. Financial analysts of the future will be far more powerful controlling the real estate and finances of virtual world than the designers of those spaces, Not-Sterling suggested. Most game designers, he said, will be little more than “Towel designers,” most often toiling to make “perfectly predictable” creative work.
By the time the games industry reaches 70 years of age, they’ll have solved at least one problem: instead of using the unwieldy term Massively Multiplayer Online Games, “We just call them ‘Crowd games,’ ” the time traveler said, “you know, ‘Crowd-on-the-cloud.’ ”
If the audience was enthralled with Sterling’s theatrical first half hour (only a few cell phones and MP3 players went off during the speech; it wasn’t too bad for a tech conference), a few people weren’t completely sold by the end of the 45-minute performance.
“I thought we got elegantly mocked,” said Aaron Krasnov, a New York-area-based associate producer at Vogster Entertainment. His company is currently developing a game called “CrimeCraft.”
The producer said Sterling made some good points, but couched them in “1980s sci-fi colloquialisms” that were degrading to the audience.
“I should have stayed in bed,” Krasnov said.
Matt Puccio, of Louisville, Colo. game publisher NetDevil, was more forgiving. He said, “(The towel) was a clever prop to explain the point that we have no idea what computers are going to look like and what they’re going to do.”
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Free games for sale
For massively multiplayer online games, the free-to-play business model is getting a much more serious look.
I’m here at the Austin Game Developers Conference at a well-attended panel on how to build a successful free-to-play game. Min Kim with Nexon America Inc. is giving the talk. This conference is heavily geared toward the MMO industry, which is typified by its most popular game: “World of Warcraft.”
“Free-to-play” means what it sounds like. The game is downloadable and entirely free to play. The game company makes money by offering either a premium serivce for a monthly fee, or selling items, also known as micro-transactions. Some use advertising as well to supplement the cost of the game.
I wrote an article earlier this year on South Korean company NCsoft’s efforts to develop more free-to-play games. NCsoft has offices in Austin. One of its games, called “Dungeon Runners,” followed this model and it was a departure for NCsoft.
Typically MMOs have charged a monthly subscription fee to all users. The advantage of free-to-play is a developer can get a much larger player base.
Kim offered suggestions for developers who are considering free-to-play. For instance, don’t go crazy trying to include the best graphics possibl, he said. Make sure most of your customers will have the technology capable of playing your game. Also, don’t sell items that players can also earn in the world. They won’t pay for it, he said.
He said South Korea has a big advantage in this market over the United States because of its PC cafes. North American consumers haven’t embraced this.
And, more importantly, gamers in the United States haven’t embraced the concept of free-to-play yet. Kim described a situation where he was demonstrating the game, and then the players wanted to know where they could go buy it.
If there’s any gamers reading this, let me know what you think. Do you like free-to-play. Why or why not?
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Austin GDC, Day 1
On Monday, the first day of the Austin Game Developers Conference, I kept wondering, “How many of these people registered before the recent Austin game company layoffs?”
Bad news at NCSoft and Midway Austin notwithstanding, GDC so far feels like a gathering for an industry that’s still expanding despite the current national economic panic. Merrill Lynch sold? Sorry, we’re busy creating a playable demo for our Xbox 360 game.
It’s not defiance, exactly, but maybe an optimism rooted in knowing that video games are still a young, vibrant medium with a future. (Contrast this with any journalism conference with a large contingent of print journalists. It’s like they’re on two different planets.)
I haven’t covered GDC very extensively in the past because it always felt to me like an insiders’ conference for talking shop. This year, however, the schedule reflects gaming’s increasing shift to the mainstream. Panels are focusing much more on the user experience, on social networks, on casual games and games that appear on cell phones and sites like Facebook and MySpace. There are still very serious discussions about narrative and storytelling (a session I attended featuring Paul Marino and Mac Walters of BioWare talked about the challenges of creating decent stories in huge games like their “Mass Effect.).
One session I attended addressed the inherent difficulties in creating tutorials for games given that there are multiple kinds of learning and we all are wired differently in how we learn best (be it visually, through experimentation or textually).
A keynote about Club Penguin highlighted the challenges small, indie developers face when they are suddenly acquired by a huge, monolithic company (in this case, Disney).
This is the first GDC where I’ve felt there’s far more going on than I’m able to cover, even for a mainstream newspaper and blog. It’s a good sign for the games industry, I think, and a clear sign that video games will continue to grow and perhaps dominate the entertainment industry before too long.
On the other hand, there is that pesky diversity problem. I think the games industry will become increasingly diverse as it absorb or incorporate other kinds of businesses (PR, broadcasting, screenwriting, education), but judging from the attendees at GDC, we’re certainly not there yet. As one female freelance writer told me, “This is a lot like South by Southwest — but with a lot fewer women.”
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