The last time I went to GDC they served dinner, and had a keynote speech by the editor of Wired. The crowd got rowdy, people get upset. It seemed a younger generation of console developers had moved in on the PC developers and were acting like children. Although the editor of Wired was not a good speaker, I have to admit.
The keynote this time was targeted at that younger generation. There was plenty to be cynical about in Allard's thing. I suppose I could leave that for Greg Costikyan. I will say that when they decided to give away TV's to the crowd I was like, "What the fuck is this? Oprah?" (If I had won one of the TV's I wouldn't have turned it down, though...) And I also have to ask the question, how is a higher resolution TV a paradigm shift? The answer: it's not, but it sure was clever to be able to talk about the shift from "3D" to "HD", because they both have two letters and end in D. Okay, I'll leave the rest to Greg. No, wait, I've got to say one more thing: I'm skeptical about Allard's claims Re: XNA studio. I'd love to have better management software but it's not going to make our management problems go away. And is the company that brought us Project really the company that's going to give us less painful management software?
Ok, now I'll shut up. If Allard ever sees that I may have just doomed the team to a real tough time passing TRC two years down the road...
Let's see, what else? Missed an interview because the Irish pub on the corner took a half hour to get me a hamburger.
The highlight today was the Game Design Challenge: The Emily Dickinson License. Both Clint Hocking and Will Wright were damn funny and had cool ideas. It looked to me like Peter Molyneux strapped an Emily Dickinson license onto an existing engine, though...Clint may have deserved to win, since he came up with an actual game-game, whereas Peter and Will both came up with software toys.
Tomo and my talk went well, I think. Good sized crowd, perceptive questions after. One guy actually wanted to see the slides again later, so I'll have to post them up here somehow, sometime.
I can't say I've learned much today, but it has been a blast.
Maybe someone taped your talk and you could post a vidcap? *nudge nudge*
Slides would be cool too though:)
GDC is one show I need to go to, E3 is just too much glitz and very little substance anymore, and SIGGRAPH isnt my field.
Oh well, hopefully next year I can convince whoever I'm working for to send me out:)
Posted by: Despayre | March 10, 2005 at 12:04 AM
In case my mail doesn't make it through your spam filter -- I didn't get your cell # correct and the innovation session ran long, but drop me a line and we can try again Friday evening.
Posted by: Paul Du Bois | March 10, 2005 at 07:53 PM
E3 was never really the place to be once you're in the industry, except to get a hands-on feel for what the competition is doing. E3 is all about the press, and as a member of the press, E3 is one of those "mandatory" things that we just have to do. I loved E3 the first year I went (back in '99), but that was mostly because I met some incredible people, including Miyamoto. As I drift more and more back into the development side of the industry, it's clear that GDC is the place to be, when it comes to generating relationships. E3 gets all the hype, as well it should, but from this perspective, I can't see why a developer would waste time on it unless they were (forced to be) showing off a product.
Posted by: Rob Stevens | March 14, 2005 at 12:45 PM