GDC, last day: Will Wright and Bad Writers

Posted on | March 14, 2010 | 2 Comments

Last post from GDC – I have just packed, have a few hours to shop and so forth and then it’s back to jolly old Blighty guvnor, stone the crows if it ain’t.

Last night I went out(shock) and Steve and I visited the aquarium (which was pretty good) and generally bimbled around  -thus the bloggage this morning.

Yesterday featured a visit to a writer’s round table for ‘hints and tips’ on game writing. I received such pearls of wisdom as ‘use the whole environment to tell your story’ and ‘ when people write dialogue they write less than when they write text’, as well as numerous less valid comments. All well and good and comments totally suitable for any first year writing class – for professionals sharing wisdom, not so much. These people seemed mostly to be working as writers on actual game titles and were putting out Freshman comments like they were profound insights.

Ian Bogost hosted a round up of academic papers from the year that he thought had industry benefit – lots of Brit stuff here, hurrah! Included were Alison Gazzard’s paper on warps, Dan Pinchbecks one on FPS characters and Mike Molesworth achievements one. I might try and reference these properly when I get back to the UK – but probably not, as you can google them.

All week I had been looking at this session called ‘The Metaphysics of Game design’ by some called Pheadrus. I was rather naively hoping that it actually was about the metaphysics of game design, but there was  fat chance of that.  When I went to the room, I found a massive que – it was rumoured it was Will Wright under a cover name because he had been unsure if he could attend.

And it was. Apparently, he has left EA to do his own thing and he spoke for an hour or so, flitting around rapidly between topics with style and charisma. He flitted around so rapidly in fact that it was hard to spot that he had not actually explored anything in any depth, nor said anything that was not pretty obvious. He did, however, say it with a great deal of panache. And, possibly, some of those ‘obvious’ things needed saying to that audience – notably the point that technology is difficult to predict, that  a power curve and  an s curves look the same to start with and social gaming is probably the latter not the former.

If I had some more time before taking off I would find some curve diagrams, but the essential point is this: just because social gaming is booming now it does not mean it will continue booming forever and become the dominant force in games. Pretty obvious, eh? Of course, a lot of people at GDC are very excited about social gaming, wanting to cash in on the next big thing – but it is not the next big thing, but the last big thing. Not that there is not a pile of money to be made there, just not a Zynga pile. Still probably enough to wallow in though.

Out of time: I need to finish packing and then off to a retro boardgame shop with Steve and Ian for some retro pleasure.

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