To be honest, I didn't quite know what to make of this session when I frist stumbled across it back in February as I was putting together my schedule, especially when I read the description:
Rant: To rave in violent, high-sounding, or extravagant language; to be noisy, boisterous, and bombastic in talk or declamation Every year at the GDC, if you listen carefully, there are subtle rumblings beneath the happy audience applause and brisk tradeshow traffic. Every year, in the subtexts of the keynotes and panel discussions, a handful of important issues surface. Are licenses killing games? Are development companies becoming sweatshops? Why does the public think games are bad culture? Where the hell is the indie game industry? Burning Down the House: Game Developers Rant brings these important issues out of the shadows and into your face. Fasten your seat belts and prepare for excruciatingly strong opinions from some of the game industry's most distinguished and dissatisfied personalities. The invited panelists, each a veteran from the trenches of game development, will be delivering a no-holds barred rant on topics of dire interest to game developers. Expect industry-shattering manifestos, shockingly candid outbursts, and cut-to-the-chase commentary. Hosted within the IGDA track, Burning Down the House will be more than just a blast of hot air. Panelists and the audience will have a chance to respond to each others' rants. Topics will address issues of concrete importance to game developers. Come to this session prepared to have your assumptions questioned and your sensibilities shaken. You have been warned.
Well if that doesn't pique your interest, you obviously don't care much for the solid brick wall that the industry is heading towards. In fact, you probably shouldn't be in this industry at all, since you're obviously one of those people contributing to our downfall. Hey, I can rant too right? But I'll save my comments for my own time, and instead let you ponder over the issues raised by the following panelists: Greg Costikyan, Chris Hecker, Brenda Laurel, and Warren Spector. Eric Zimmerman has always been extremely outspoken about his views on the industry, so I wasn't surprised to find him behind this panel, poking and prodding the panelists into a rage as yet unseen by us all. But it was a good thing, and if the attendence in the room was any indication, people were genuienly interested in what was going to be said. The room was packed solid. No, I mean solid, with people sitting on the floor all around the speaker's stage even. In fact, when Eric gave his introduction and spoke about the burning issues, Jason Della Rocca quipped how it would be ironic if the Fire Marshal paid them a visit, becase they'd all be in serious trouble for packing a room so full.
Disclaimer: Strong language follows
Warren Spector kicked off the party by defining our industry as "hopelessly broken" and that we're all "doing everything wrong". Games nowadays "cost too much and take too long to make". One of his main rants was the huge lack of alternative distribution channel adoption in the industry compared to others. In fact he asked if anyone had bought Half-Life 2 at Wal-Mart, and for those people to just get up and leave the room - he didn't want to talk to them. "Leave!" he said, pointing instead to Valve's Steam as the proper way to purchase the game. Getting out of the Retail Rut, however, was only one of his rants, which also included dumping publishers for additional sources of funding, such as patronage, in order to sever ties from the companies sucking the very life from our games. He was about to continue, but by now his time was up, and Eric Zimmerman had to intervene, causing Warren to toss his notes in the air as a gesture of futility and hide behind the lecturn. It's obviously hard to convey the passion and animation with which Warren presented his rant, needless to say there was much arm waving and finger pointing, in addition to very fast talking.
After Warren came Jason, and his rant began with talking about how game developers are pretty much all apathetic. he stated how many are too busy with the Daily Grind to work any harder to help improve the conditions they work in. However after stating this he rescinded it, looking to all the obviously non-apathetic people packed into the miniscule room, and instead changed that rant to the fact that the GDC never assigns proper rooms to sessions that are most likely going to be packed, which brought about a round of laughter and applause. His next rant was how the industry is way too xenophobic - no one cares for external resources, like from the software development world. Tried and true practices that prove products can be created and shipped on time, under budget, and with minimal impact in terms of crunch work. Sure, he said, game are unique, but so are other software applications. Hell, if a game crashes it's just a minor inconvenience, if a medical application crashes, someone could possibly die. The fact that we see ourselves as creative and that we don't need formal processes needs to change, as well as our association with academia. All these guys do is come up with new techniques to doing things better and more efficiently, and release this information pretty much for free. Got a problem? Hand it off to a graduate student to figure it out! That's what these people do - use it!
Greg Costikyan took to the podium next, and delivered the most scathing rant of the entire panel. He tended to speak very very fast, so it was hard to follow him at times (only Chris used slides), but the general gist was easy enough - it's time to start anew. Games are getting bigger, but are they getting better? Where did all the innovation go from our mainstream titles? Will anyone want to play Grand Theft Auto: Ad Infinium? As he defined it, "genre: one hit game and its imitators". He quickly ran through a brief history of gaming, way back to his involvment of paper gaming in the 70's, and compared current computer gaming with research he did into the history of paper games, noting how creativity was the well spring of the industry, and how it's now pretty much over. Games that cost $200,000 to make in the early 90's now cost $5 million to make today. Publishers are all conservative bastards that only want to remake games that have been proven to be successful. We need a revolution! As for the current state of affairs however, he had just this to say in the end: "My friends, we are fucked." In addition to that, another heated comment he made was at Nintendo, saying " Nintendo has the heart of the gamer, I just wonder what poor bastard's chest it ripped it from." I really wish I could provide contextual detail for that statement, but he really needed to talk slower - I can't take notes that fast!
I'm going to skip Brenda's rant. It was highly philosophical and my brain was still reeling from Greg's deliverance - I barely got the gist of it, and I don't want to screw up her viewpoint by trying to guess what she was talking about. She was obviously caught up in the moment along with the rest of the panelists though, and liked to refer to certain stereotypical people within the industry as "these fuckers". Yup, I'll just move right on to Chris' rant. He had slides :)
Chris' rant was short and sweet, entitled: "How Sony and Microsoft are About to Screw Your Game Design". He started with a few slides that visually defined how games were, are and should be:
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"Not really!" Came a shout from the audience - Chris apologized sarcastically for not having more than a few minutes out in the lobby on his wifi to find a better picture |
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Chris then went on to explain the reasoning behind his rant, along with the fact that he was probably about to break a few dozen NDAs - but that it was okay since he never signed them. He admits that his talent is loosening the tongues of people who aren't really supposed to be telling him things. He revealed that Sony and Microsoft may possibly be releasing "in-order" execution on their Cell and Xenon multi-core processors, rather than the current "out-of-order" execution used on modern CPUs. OOO processors make bad code run fast by allowing average code to really dig into the processor without the programmer having to be an ASM freak - which really annoyed the ASM coders of course. IO processors are very well-suited for physics and graphics, but not so much for AI and gameplay code. Chris's comment? "This sucks!". He then went on to explain how gameplay code will get slower and harder to write in Next Gen hardware, revealing that early "rumors" indicate 1/3 - 1/10th performance at the same clock speed for current gameplay code. This means that a 2GHz IO processor is like a 700MHz OOO processor (i.e. xbox 1 is 733MHz, xbox 2 is ~2-3GHz). What can be done? Not much, except to be prepared and maybe hope that Nintendo still uses an OOO processor. You could also think about batchable designs and simulation-y systems, but simulation can only do so much. You could do PC games, or you could cry, or you could rant! Which he did.
After Chris's rant, Eric opened he floor for questions, and there was a veritable scramble for the floor mike, made all the hard by the amount of people packed into the room. One of the questions about whether students could still make it in such an industry starting off on their own sparked a response from Jason, saying that first of all students need to stop cloning games for their school projects. He hates seeing how almost every student, when given an asignment to create a game, makes some damn Brickout or PacMan clone. Sure, they can't do anything hugely new, but this is really their chance to innovate and try something that's not the status quo. Another question about legalized piracy set off both Chris and Warren, who both beleived strongly that piracy isn't as big an issue as people crack it up to be. Chris was all for seeing the current industry tank so that we could start a new, and henced urged everyone to "pirate on!". He was obviously concerned about the kind of piracy where people are pumping illegal copies out of warehouses, but "giving a free copy to my sister? I doubt stuff like that is hurting our bottom line". Warren had simply this to say: "Anyone who worries about piracy is full of shit." The rest were a bit more conservative, saying how a real study should be undertaken in order to find out whether the industry was really being seriously hurt by piracy, and not by the business people. Of course that's what they want to find. I think everyone kind of kept glancing over at Jason as they were saying this. IGDA advocacy? Hint hint?
By now the session had run almost 30 minutes over time (even though I hadn't noticed) and one of the conference assistants was poking his head in and giving some kind of "you're done, get out" signal. The crowd booed him and the panelists heckled him. Brenda turned motherly hennish and made shooing noises from the speaker's stage. However it was pretty late, and so Eric conceded, informing everyone to get up, get online, get active, and start fighting back.
My take? The whole thing was quite a fiasco, but a highly surprising and enjoyable one, with real issues presented. I've never seen these developers, most of who I've known to some degree or another over the past few years, become so passionate and animated. Hell, Warren even cursed at the end. "See Jason? I said shit". I can only hope that they and the rest of us can put our money where our mouth is however. That's always the hardest part isn't it? |
