Ludomancy

I am still trying to gather my bearings again after several days of attending sessions and meeting people at the GDC.

This year’s EGS was unusually big and featured many games of wildly different concepts. Coverage can be found in Gamasutra, so I won’t go over the details.

Personally, I’ve found new exciting fronts for experimentation during the conference:

Games 2.0

Where game meets web by Raph Koster: Mr. Koster really wanted to make an effect in this lecture. He sort of doomed the “mainstream” game industry by stating that content can be generated by the users themselves (like Spore does), and then doomed content creators by stating that “out there is a lot of people better than you are, willing to generate the content for free”. This whole Games 2.0 intitiative has very profound implications on game design and development because the players are also the developers. But I won’t go over it right now; meanwhile you can read a presentation about it in Raph Koster’s blog.

Also I’ve met Justin Hall and his Passively Multiplayer Online Game. I was shocked by the fact that he did almost the exact project I had in mind to make. Damn.

Gameplay-centric Games

This year Rod Humble showed The Marriage during the EGS and Nuances of Game Design session (you can check out a coverage in Man Bytes Blog). It’s a game about the abstracted dynamics of a married couple and the lifetime evolution of their relationship. I got to try it during the GDC, and felt very excited about the possibilities that this kind of games offer.

The point of gameplay-centric games is that they express feelings and situations through gameplay instead of in-your-face graphics, voicing and text. You can’t put representational graphics into them because the elements are abstract and thus can’t be represented. Tufte would be delighted at this.

The upside of these games is that they are very cheap to make. The downside is that they are hard to explain…The Marriage seems a crappy experiment until you sit down and let yourself be carried away by it. These experiences are certainly worth it, so I’ll give a little more thought to it.

Conclusion…

As usual I got to meet new, interesting people like Petri Purho, from Kloonigames (you have to check out this game he made, which made the whole room laugh).

I’m very happy with my takeaway from the conference. It gave me a lot to think about!