The A.V. Club - Game Developers Conference

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10: The "Comedy In Games" panel

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:56:00 -0500

Coming right on the heels of Brenda Braithwaite’s talk on Train—a board game about the holocaust that has brought many of its players to tears—John Teti led a hilarious panel on humor in games. Teti moderated a discussion with writer Rhianna Pratchett (of the Overlord series), the legendary designer and writer Tim Schafer (most recently of Brutal Legend), and Sean Vanaman of Telltale’s Tales Of Monkey Island games. While it’s easy to find games that are violent, fun, dramatic, or gross, games are rarely funny. To kick things off, Teti asked if there should be ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10: An interview with art-game creator Jason Rohrer

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:00:00 -0600

Independent game developer Jason Rohrer (Passage, Between) is best known as a leading maker of art games: games that use metaphor and mechanics to express ideas about the passage of time, the creative process, and relationships between players. At GDC, Rohrer demonstrated his upcoming Nintendo DS title, Diamond Trust Of London, a kind of trading game about the diamond trade in Angola, where players have to guess each other’s moves and practice espionage to make the best decisions. Rohrer is also launching in April a storytelling game named Sleep Is Death. Sleep Is Death is a storytelling exercise for ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC ’10: An interview with VVVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0600

If the less-is-more approach to game design had a poster child, it could very well be Irish developer Terry Cavanagh. Two years ago, Cavanagh quit his job as a market-risk analyst, took out a loan, and has been living on that to pursue game-making more seriously. But his decidedly lo-fi, minimalist games aren’t trying to capitalize on what’s been referred to as the “retro fetish,” they look like Commodore 64 games because Cavanagh thinks his self-described inability to draw is an asset, not a hindrance. From the poignant Judith and Best Years to the perplexing Bridge and foreboding ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10, Day Four: Spy party!

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:00:00 -0600

John Teti The GDC organizers made a concerted choice this year to ensure that the keynote speeches would be just that—keynotes, and not glorified press conferences. This reassertion of good sense comes in the wake of Satoru Iwata's keynote last year, in which the Nintendo CEO gloated about the Wii's sales figures, admonished developers to be more like Shigeru Miyamoto, announced a new Zelda game, and then ran off the stage flipping the double-bird and screaming, "Woooo! Nintendo rulez! Sony droolz!" At least that's how I remember it. This year's big keynote was delivered today ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC ’10: An interview with former LucasArts artist Steve Purcell

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Adventure games aren’t dead, they’re just adapting. Sure, the golden era of the point-and-click quest has given way to a solid decade of the genre accumulating more than its share of rust and tarnish, but if anyone’s making inroads towards a revival, it’s Telltale Games. In 2006, the company—which includes many employees from the undisputed masters of the form, LucasArts—released a follow-up to 1993’s Sam & Max Hit The Road with a five-part, episodic series drawing inspiration from cartoonist and former LucasArts game designer/animator Steve Purcell’s comics about a freelance police duo ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10, Day Three: Step into the Virtusphere

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:35:00 -0600

David Wolinsky Just in case there were any doubts about whether Nintendo bottlenecked the whole notion of innovation in its output at the creation of motion controls for the Wii and stopped immediately at launch after bungling the confused, staggered release dates for The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube and its latest system, Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto effectively confirmed the Wii’s stumbling pace this morning in a talk about that series’ newest iteration, Other M. Sakamoto is a guy who’s been with Nintendo since 1982—a year before the NES was released in Japan—which ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10: An interview with Alpha Protocol creator Chris Avellone

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:00:00 -0600

Chris Avellone came into the games industry writing pen-and-pencil role-playing games. An opportunity in the late '90s brought him to Interplay, where he went on to be lead designer on Planescape: Torment—one of the eeriest, most innovative computer role-playing games—and also worked on Fallout 2. In the '00s, he moved to Obsidian, where he has worked on such titles as Neverwinter Nights 2 and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, the second in a series that for many, rescued the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas. His next game, Alpha Protocol, is an espionage role-playing game ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10, Day Two: Rants, adultery on the DS, and boxes jumping on other boxes

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:45:00 -0600

John Teti Attending GDC requires you to make wagers with your time. Every day, you examine the schedule, look over the potentially interesting discussions on the itinerary, and then place a bet on which ones will pay off with bucketfuls of steaming hot insight. The stakes feel pretty high, as you can only hit four, maybe five sessions each day, so you don't have that many chips to play. I placed a couple bad bets today, by which I mean that I spent an hour or two bored out of my mind in an Indie Games Summit conference hall ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10, Day One: People who didn't have very much skills

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:00:00 -0600

David Wolinsky and I are in San Francisco this week for the Game Developers Conference or, as it is known by those who are hip to the biz, GDC. There are a lot of gaming shows scattered throughout the year, and each one has its own distinctive character. E3 is the annual bacchanalia whose decadence everyone decries and secretly enjoys. DICE is where industry muckety-mucks make each other feel important. PAX is for the fans. Gamescom is German. GDC is the event where you feel like you are tapping into the bloodstream (latex gloves recommended) of the medium's creative ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '10, Day One: Which actions earn points? Which actions piss you off?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:00 -0600

The pointless, dusty debate about whether games can be considered art tends to rage more among people peering inside the game community from its fringes and anyone up for an argument for argument’s sake than a gamer anywhere in the casual-to-hardcore spectrum. Regardless of where you fall in there, though, what’s indisputable is that like art—or anything else—games affect players and elicit a variety of reactions, from doing a goofy victory dance in your underwear after finally beating a nearly impossible level to chucking your controller at the wall for being unable to do so. This ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '09: An Interview with Crayon Physicist Petri Purho

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:42:00 -0500

One of the most compelling talks at GDC was Crayon Physics Deluxe creator Petri Purho's look back at the making of his marquee game, which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2008 Independent Games Festival. After reflecting on his successes, Purho surprised the audience with a cutting critique of his game, detailing the ways in which he thought it failed. While Crayon Physics Deluxe might have seemed like a fully formed vision to outsiders, Purho had originally envisioned a game that somehow quantified creativity and rewarded right-brain thinking. He was disappointed when practical reality demanded that he ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '09, Day Four: Wake Me When Your Game Does Six Dimensions

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:16:00 -0500

John Teti: The most fun of GDC has been the accidental encounters with some of the medium's most interesting creators. My favorite chance meeting of the week came today in the PlayStation Blog Lounge when fellow AV Club writer Scott Jones spotted PixelJunk Eden creator Dylan Cuthbert nearby. Jones immediately grabbed the nearest Sony PR rep and got me a quick interview. So with 15 seconds to prepare and a tight time window, I dove in as best I could. Perhaps some other time I can ask Cuthbert the dozens of questions that popped into my head after our ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '09, Day Three: Shigeru Miyamoto Does It Over The Shoulder

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:59:00 -0500

John Teti: Four out of six isn't bad. After making my predictions for the Independent Games Festival award winners in the comments of yesterday's post, I've got to admit, the show became a little more exciting for me, like I had money on it. I wonder what the lines in Vegas were like for Blueberry Garden. Here are the IGF winners—the design and audio categories surprised me: Technical Excellence: Cortex Command (also won the audience choice award) Visual Art: Machinarium Design: Musaic Box Audio: Brainpipe Innovation: Between Grand Prize (Game of the Year): Blueberry Garden The ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '09: Day Two, In Which The Word "Indie" Loses All Meaning

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:45:00 -0500

John Teti: One of the show organizers noted before a talk this morning that 11 of the 19 sessions on the Independent Games Summit track had "indie" in the title. "So we're really on message," he said. OK, but what message is that, exactly? The term "indie" is a little too cute to begin with, and nobody knows exactly where the boundaries of indie gaming are. That problem is creating some tension. Yesterday, the indie crowd was all about warm, fuzzy unity, but today, the seams started to show. The big attraction of the day was the Indie Game ...

Games: Game Developers Conference: AVC at GDC '09: Day One

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:41:00 -0500

John Teti: In an effort to prove that The AV Club's games writers can go to fancy events, too, Chris Dahlen and I are at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. GDC has risen in prominence as other big industry events—especially E3—have faded a bit. Whereas GDC used to be just a nerdy confab for computer programmers, mainstream publishers now break news and unveil new games at the show. But the high point of GDC is the indie scene. The event hosts the Independent Games Festival, the gaming equivalent of Sundance, and it's ...