We Make Holes In Teeth

GDC 2011: Getting my act together

Clearly the above title was tailor-made to tempt karmic payback since I managed to delete my entire post within TypePad's form field after several hours of work by ham-handedly attempting to insert a summary break. Oh well. Nobody reads past 140 characters these days anyway.

Short version: GDC 2011 was rad. Go find Mattias Worch's presentation, and as soon as they're available, Clint Hocking's and Kent Hudson's.

Meanwhile, folks have been asking for the slides to my talk "Keep it together: Encouraging cooperative behavior during co-op play". Since this was my first GDC using Keynote, I've exported the raw version as a .pdf and posted them here.

Big plans for We Make Holes In Teeth for 2011. Yadda-yadda. I haven't slept in two days. Enjoy.

WHUMM-WHUMM-WHUMM-WHUMM-WHUMM-WHUMM-WHUMM...

Something stirs.

Now that it's The Future and it's suddenly trendy to dump on LOST, this seems like the perfect occasion to haul out a truly awful metaphor: I am Ben Linus, and I've just turned the big stone wheel and woken up three years later in Tunisia. Wearing a parka.

But it's kinda what it feels like. One moment, I'm just cruising along in the relative calm after Far Cry 2 hits the shelves, enjoying some actual work-life balance and getting ready to present at GDC 2009, not just one, but TWO sessions! (Hey, at least the barks talk was sort of practical. And short.) Somewhere, right around the time I board the plane from YUL to SFO feeling excited about the Next Thing I'm scheduled to work on with Clint and Alex and LP...  ZOT! There's a purple flash and suddenly I'm sitting in a crowded meeting room mostly full of complete strangers and they're all staring at me like they're waiting for me to say something helpful and then my desk has moved and I'm back in crunch and somehow I'm working on the co-op mode of some other thing, and... Oh hang on. Somewhere along the line, I seem to have been given a new job. Oh, and my hair has turned grey. It's like that Jennifer Garner movie you might have watched in-flight that one time.

And. That's how you make a year disappear. A few months at a time, a unit of measurement unique to the game industry, and known by its technical term: Additional Polish.

The cool part is, a game came out of it. Specifically Splinter Cell: Conviction, and its Co-Op and Deniable Ops modes. 

I left my heart in San Francisco. Back in 2008, apparently.

Okay, well thanks to the slight shift in event scheduling for this year's Game Developers' Conference, I can't even make this work out to a perfect one-year hiatus. It's like 13 months or something. <shameface>

So to sum up, since last I had anything to say, I crunched hard on a game, went on an event binge promoting said game, racked up a nauseating number of air miles, hotel nights and roaming fees, pushed my girlfriend's patience and my body's tolerance, closed and shipped the game, finally got to play the game a few times at some point in there (some point being way too late to fix or even really refine about three-quarters of what I had been working on), went on vacation - at least a portion of it imposed by executive fiat - began reacquainting myself with what normal human beings sometimes refer to as "living" and got good and lazy.

But not so lazy, apparently, that I missed the GDC call for papers. Paper(s), plural, being the operative word here. See, at last year's GDC I had the distinct fortune to catch some of the inaugural 20-minute lectures, including Kent Hudson's awesome survey and analysis of lockpicking mechanics, and Scott Rogers' presentation on Boss Fights (a subject for which my disdain turned out to be easily matched by my ignorance; I owe Scott big-time for disabusing me of a lot of dumb biases). After all the stress involved with prepping "Do, Don't Show", I decided than and there that I would sumbit a 20-minute talk for 2009.

Perfect, I thought. This constrained format will force me to be ultra-disciplined in scoping my topic; and the time spent preparing the proposal will actually constitute a significant percentage of the actual research work.

But the good folks at CMP (which I guess is 'Think Services' now; I'm not sure exactly) had other ideas. In the new and improved proposal system, they vet the initial submissions and ask the short-listed speakers to provide additional details. While I was waiting to hear back on my expanded pitch, I received an email to the effect that the Advisory Board was hoping that I could do a full hour follow-up to "Do, Don't Show". Worried that maybe my 20-minute lecture might not make the cut (or worse, that the format had just been dumped altogether), I panicked. Of course I'd do a follow-up. I'd be happy to.

Sucker. I scrambled to put together the additional pitch and emailed it off thinking I'd just about covered my bases. But the bases were loaded, kid. Loaded.

Long story short, I did two talks.

Because I want the folks who asked right away to have access to the visuals for these, and because I know my own weakness, I'm posting both sets of slides as-is, without notes (or many notes, anyway) forthwith. Because I'm giving both these talks internally at the studio in the next few days, I'll strive to get them annotated in short order and replace the naked versions.

In the interim:

Aarf! Arf Arf Arf: Talking to the Player with Barks (~3MB)

Read Me: Closing the Readability Gap in Immersive Games (~4MB)

The Audacity Of A New Hope

This just flat-out makes me smile.

For the uninitiated, the late graphic designer Saul Bass was responsible for some of the most iconic film titles sequences of the 1950s and 60s, notably Hitchcock's Vertigo and North By Northwest as well as The Man With The Golden Arm and the screen adaptation of Leon Uris' Exodus. He also gave us the AT&T globe logo.

Design student and YouTuber 'bhilmers' describes his homage to Bass' distinctive graphic style as what the titles might have looked like "if Star Wars was filmed two decades earlier". He adheres to the common trend of the time of including sly visual references to the discipline being credited. My personal fave is the paper-cutout Max Rebo peering sideways from the edge of the screen in time for composer John William's 3 seconds of fame (although Williams' most famous score is swapped out for a 1967 Buddy Rich track "Machine").

GDC 2008:: Slides for "Do, don't show"

Somewhere around 11pm last night I discovered that Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder has been systematically posting the highlights of the TED Conference. I swore to not look at any of this cool stuff until I'd finished annotating my slides. Not because I'm particularly diligent, but because I knew that watching even one of these visual communciation masterpieces would be utterly demoralizing...

As promised - and naturally, somewhat belatedly - I've uploaded the monster slide deck for my talk at this year's GDC, entitled "Do, don't show: Narrative design in FarCry 2".

In case you're wondering where the actual spoken part is; I've embedded directly into the notes pane of the Powerpoint doc. If that ends up being a pain in the ass, someone let me know and I'll paste the chewy center into a separate Word file. It's a whopping 6+ MB, and that's after I went through all the image compression/cropping wackiness. I'm sorry. Actually, no I'm not. If you can wait patiently through 350 MB of BitTorrent action to pirate the latest episode of Dexter, you can spare me a measily 6MB of your time... Damn you, Dexter.

Dereliction of Duty 4: Modern Slideware

Yeah okay I'm back.

Right now my patented TypePad List Of Posts is littered with the half-formed abortia of various points I had wanted to get across between now and whenever it was I finished Portal and Call of Duty 4, and started playing Assassin's Creed. It was kind of a watershed moment for me, frankly. But apparently I was too euphoric to complete whole sentences and hit the Publish button.

But inevitably, my brief honeymoon with the beanstalk-like Stack Of Games Next To The 360 came crashing to a close at the same time as the Christmas holidays. I had started my time-off giddy, or maybe actually just dizzy, from the announcement that FarCry 2's release date would be pushed from the March end of fiscal Q4 to... sometime I'm not allowed to talk about publicly yet (but soon).

The end of holidays also brought with it the sickening - maybe even self-loathing - realization that I had made sweet singing fuhbleep-all by way of progress on my talk for GDC. Presenting at GDC is one of those rituals that, by virtue of the stress-junkie personalities that populate the game industry, has been inflated into a mammoth and solemn responsibility not to be taken lightly, or even reasonbly, but as some kind of professional scourging ordeal. Like Rat Month at VMI, except with fewer uncomfortable Confederate military connotations.