GDC, day two

Posted on | March 11, 2010 | No Comments

Gosh, my hotel wireless is slow.

The Paradox people are great and have treated my essentially pointless ass with incredibly courtesy.  They have rented a flat near GDC where they are plying people with free drinks and nibbles(the Paradox special cocktail is rather tasty, the barman skilled and charming) and demoing some games – a team 3ps set in the wild west called Lead and Gold and a co-op action rpgeseque thing called Magika by Arrowhead studios. Magika has a great ‘build your own spell’ system which rather cleverly and innovatively uses the old idea of combining different spell components (fire, air, earth etc) to make an interesting effect. I ended up having dinner with a mixture of Paradox guys and Arrowhead guys(who Paradox publish). Arrowhead are here.

Snippets from day two:

Panels which consisted of several people essentially presenting their CV to the audience and then, though it seemed they might go on to say something profound or interesting, not doing so.

A member of the audience asking a panel whether games should be taught as literature – for their own sake. I wanted to bang my head against something hard -because they are studied in this way, all the time, by many people. However, the panel (mostly academics) seemed to be unaware of this fact and the only person on that panel who mounted a strong defence of academia was from Firaxis (though he also taught -seems Firaxis has a close relationship with its local HE).

An old ‘game’ called Oracle I really should have heard of, but had not, where you ‘ask the oracle a question’ and it emails that question  -without telling you and anonymously  -to someone else playing Oracle, who then answers it for you. I really should have known about this one  -it is very old.

A whole load of presentations of ‘cutting edge’ ideas that were done five, ten or twenty years ago. Of course, that made me feel like some old fogie with a thousand yard stare muttering ‘you don’t know what it was like, man, you don’t know what is was like.’

The expo floor opens today. Blizzard are hiring, apparently: I do not know if you need to provide your own candle.

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