GDC 2008, Day 3
It was hard to find any talk of games today at the Game Developer's Conference.
There was a promising session where venture capital firms let five or so startup companies present what they're doing. One of them was Dennis "Thresh" Fong, the Quake master who once won a Ferrari in a tournament. Afterwards I introduced myself, gave him my book, and asked if I could interview him in the future for my next book, which will contain compare several champions in various different games. He said yes and at least sounded excited.
Anyway, the session itself was dreary and strangely not relevant to the conference. It was a session that showed no games, talked about no games, and none of the featured companies were game companies. They were all VC-fundable, yes, but all strangely out of place at the same time.
By far the most notable speaker was the guy behind "I'm in like with you." He cursed like a foul-mouthed sailor and opened by telling us that internet completely sucks in the United States. He moved to Korea for a few years and got a 100mbit connection for 30 bucks. He says everyone plays games there--everyone. Popular, beautiful girls play games, it's the norm. Games are social. Games are all ostensibly free. Korea is moving completely away from the subscription model. Item buying is commonplace and his friends there often gave him items in games as gifts. He noted that he received about $10 per week in virtual items from his friends. Compare that to the 0 here. He also said 75% of item sales are gifts for friends in Korea.
We're so far behind here it's almost laughable. He told us how the CEO and (someone else high ranking) at Yahoo came to Korea and tried to buy every game company there and failed. He met with them and told them how gaming there is incredibly awesome and that Yahoo needs to get in on this way of doing business. The guys from Yahoo said they agreed completely and they'd already been working on this and that it will be out in one year. Then the speaker said that either Yahoo measures "year" differently than him, or that "they are complete fucking retards" because there's still nothing in sight years later.
Raph Koster
It was equally hard to find mention of any actual game at Raph Koster's session. I think highly of Raph and I know there is some small chance he will read this, so Raph, your lectures have so far *all* been entertaining, engaging, and thought-provoking, except for this one.
It was labeled as a "game design" lecture, yet it contained no game design at all. You might argue that your choices about the architecture of Metaplace imply certain game design results, and yeah they probably do, but I still maintain there was no discussion of game design at all. It was entirely about architecture, involving programmery stuff like telnetting, markup tags, cgi scripts, and client-server models. You should have labeled this a programming lecture. I was also disappointed to see no actual game anywhere in this (though yes I understand your platform gives other people the ability to create games). I also bet you'll be very successful.
Sherwood
This Sherwood game is pretty amazing. It's a free, web-based MMO in 3D...that was made by one person (company: Maid Marion). Yeah it feels clunky, untuned, and has terrible combat. But it's an MMO made by one person! And it's 3D in your browser. Not impressed yet? How about this, he has 1.8 million active players (700,000 in Poland for some reason). It's ad supported (an ad at the bottom horizontal strip of the game) and it seems like this guy makes bank.
He did the entire thing in Shockwave using Director and Maya only. He modeled everything (characters, weapons, enemies, buildings, etc). He animated everything. He programmed everything. He designed everything. It uses lots of procedural content and has procedurally generated quests. When you check it out, I know you'll complain about it being too low quality, but let me remind you that one guy made it, that it's free, and that it has 1.8 million players, and that it makes him bank.
It totally blows my mind that you could have a graph of World of Warcraft subscribers and this Sherwood game even shows up on the graph as anything but a dot. WoW.
That was about it. Although the sessions weren't so great today, I made up for it with some of the connections I made.
--Sirlin
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Isn’t it true that, in terms of total online multiplayer games, WoW is totally outclassed by, like, puzzle games and stuff? And that not only WoW, but all “traditional” games? (Regarding Sherwood, that is.)
It seems like we hardcore gamers forget how much stuff is out there that hasn’t been made by Blizzard or another top-tier company…
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
I’m well aware of stuff like Tetris being the best selling game of all time and all that. But Sherwood is an mmorpg. It’s a fantasy-genre mmorpg on the pc. If you told me Chess or some random game grandmas play has more players than WoW, I’d say yeah sure. But another pc fantasy mmorpg that has like less than 1% of the production values or features? And it’s even on the same chart? Don’t pretend it’s not surprising. ;) It’s yet another “what the hell are all of us doing when this guy accomplished all that?” moment.
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:33 pm
For this “next book”
I will be highly disappointed if you don’t get ahold of Johan “Toxic” Quick, probably the only man who has ever come close to Thresh’s standing in Deathmatch FPS.
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Thresh is funny. He had a column in PC Gamer for a while, but all he ever did with it was talk about Quake. Literally it was just a column on Quake, every time. I think they ended it rather quickly.
It’s hard to imagine the Korean RMT model working in the US. Yes, in Korea the games are free and the stuff costs money. But in American culture we hate being nickle and dimed. Some Korean games have come out here and they’ve all done poorly. They tend to all look the same, have all similar features, be pretty middle-of-the-road in every area, total grindfests and you have to pay to do anything interesting.
It’s a revenue model very tied up in culture. Maybe with the advent of things like iTunes people will start to soften up to the idea of micro-transactions but we aren’t there yet.
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Oh, the end of that thing made me forget but: I sure do hope you get Thresh (or a more modern QW player) to do an interview. Have you considered getting in touch with arQon of CPMA? (www.promode.org)
Also, what about a Magic the Gathering player? This is a huge scene, so there’s plenty to choose from. It’s an exciting time, too, as Jon “Magic” Finkel just won another pro tour–making him the first Hall of Famer to win post-induction, aside from the fact that Jon Finkel is back…
Sounds exciting in any case.
February 24th, 2008 at 2:14 am
[…] Read the rest of this great post here […]
February 24th, 2008 at 2:22 am
I’m not ready for any of these interviews for like a year or more. Anyway, my wishlist includes Thresh (and Fatal1ty?), Jon Finkel (mtg) (and Kai??), Justin Wong (fighting games), John Choi (fighting games), Susan Polgar (Chess), Josh Waitzkin (Chess), and Xzin (WoW). I should probably have someone from RTS on there too. I hope these people will even give me the time of day. To do it right, I’d visit their homes and/or competitive environments, too.
February 24th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Sirlin,
Man I’m looking forward to your next book. I just finished reading the excellent book, ‘Now, Discover Your Strengths’ by Marcus Buckingham (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743201140/dexteritysoft-20/) and I’m really interested to hear your take on the general personality trait/talents concept (especially as it applies to gaming).
I’m grateful to N,DYS for teaching me many things, but in terms of gaming, it helped me understand the difference between “skill” and “talent”. Eg. For a long time, I used to play multiplayer games and think, “ok, I know I can out strategise this opponent, but for some reason he keeps beating me.”
It was always frustrating to me that I seemed to think I could win (and this was in a non-scrubby, “I saw that combo coming, but I didn’t know what timing I should use to block/counter it” way), but I actually couldn’t. For ages I tried unsuccessfully to define what “skill” was.
N,DYS made me understand that why I thought I could win was due to my talent — my natural inclination to do something and the way I process information. I probably had equal (and in some cases, greater) ability to win in some matches due to my natural talent and ability to make good decisions, but my my knowledge and skill (habituated knowledge) with the game was lacking, causing the “I saw that coming, but couldn’t do squat!” phenomena I described.
Finding out stuff like this really makes it easier to walk the path of continuous improvement. Sirlin, if you haven’t read N,DYS, I recommend you do before you write your next book. It may help add or clarify some ideas. It’s all based on excessive amounts of research, so maybe you could even quote some statistics to back up your info (or at least, liberally use some quotes like you do in stuff you write — which I think is great and not over-quoting at all since it serves a good purpose).
- Bruce
PS. Found a typo in your article. Ctrl+F search for:
which will contain compare several champions in various different games.
February 24th, 2008 at 11:08 am
PPS. Sigh. I have to remember that links mess with the formatting. Sorry about that. Why Wordpress doesn’t come with a default, reasonable edit feature is beyond me (I think they once said that it would be unintuitive… *rollseyes*). I should suggest to Wordpress that they hire you for consulting. Ha!
PPPS. If/when you do add an edit feature, keep in mind that if you let people edit too much, they can go back to stuff they’ve written and edit it out completely, messing with the integrity of any reply comments people have made to certain comments. At the Pavlina forum that I moderate, we use a 24 hour edit limit. People can fix their typos, etc, but after 24 hours, your posts become part of the permanent records. If we didn’t do that, people tend to delete or liberally edit their posts after they post something personal, which isn’t so great if lots of people have already replied to it. Something to keep in mind.
(Btw, yes, I know not letting people edit their posts after 24 hours is bad, but we haven’t figured out a better way to do it. We try to be open as possible about the fact that you need to be responsible for what you post — it says it in the rules. It’d be nice if we were a bit more explicit with specific details, but that can lead people to gaming the system. But then, most forums are pro-community instead of pro-individual, so, while undesirable, it seems silly to try to protect user rights when that isn’t the goal, even if it probably should be.)
February 24th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I think the message boards in the Basecamp software (not related at all to my site) let you edit only 15 minutes after you make a post. That seemed fine to me, so 24 hours is pretty long. I wouldn’t worry about it being too short.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll look into it.
GDC has given me some opportunities lately, but with opportunity, comes a lot of work. I actually think it sucks that I can’t just say what most of this stuff is, but writing a book (not to mention C#) have to take a lower priority.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Now, telling us how to get some of these “great connections” by going to GDC. That would be useful. :D
February 25th, 2008 at 10:28 am
If you want to learn networking skills, the very last person you should consider asking is me. My associate Thomas Grove’ (hmm, I don’t know how to type the accent in his name) at lion-gv.com is much better. I just wait around hoping somehow someone will have heard of me, while he goes up to strangers and talks to them. Sometimes he introduces them to me. That’s how I talked to Okamoto of Gamer’s Republic, for example.
February 26th, 2008 at 1:47 am
Xzin seemed like a friendly and fairly accessible person, but this was a couple years ago when he was really on the WoW gaming radar. I haven’t heard much news about him since the expansion was released.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:40 am
heads up on the syntax error in paragraph one sirlin, “…asked if I could interview him in the future for my next book, which will contain compare several champions in various different games.”
February 26th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
If you’re looking for someone to interview on RTS, there’s no better candidate than Nick “Tasteless” Plott of Starcraft fame. He currently lives in South Korea, shoutcasting (in English) pro-level Starcraft matches over there.
http://www.sclegacy.com/content/interviews-6/interview-with-tasteless—to-korea-with-love-52/
February 28th, 2008 at 10:08 am
[…] […]
March 11th, 2008 at 3:59 am
[…] It was hard to find any talk of games today at the Game Developer’s Conference. There was a promising session where venture capital firms let five or so startup companies present what they’re doing. One of them was Dennis “Thresh” Fong, the Quake master who once won a Ferrari in a tournament. Afterwards I introduced myself, gave him my book, and asked if I could interview him in the future for my next book, which will contain compare several champions in various different games. He said yes an source: GDC 2008, Day 3, Sirlin.net Your source of shocking insights on game design […]