Paris GDC’08: Day One

Yet another journey into Gameland

And the journey began with my arrival to the hotel. A clean 23 square meter room with a double bed, a small kitchen and a safe box, that’s all I need to feel good. As I'm writing this, I try to imagine the sessions that I will attend tomorrow and the day after. Yes, we're on Sunday evening, and all I can do is to prepare the coming days.

And the preparation is not that simple. Let's be clear: I'm alone, and I have to select a few lectures among 56 sessions in 5 different rooms. That's tough. If I have to cover another conference this year or next year, I'll try to get some other gamedevver involved in order to cover more stuff. But this year, I'm alone. Which is a bit frustrating (again).

So what's coming tomorrow morning? At 9 am, Ralph Baer's history of video games is concurrent to an optimization-minded conference by Nicolas Thiberioz. The Media Molecule keynote follows – as far as I know, they're going to present their work on Little Big Planet. After that, I have to attend the press conference. Okay, I would prefer to attend the research session about procedural generation of content by Eric Galin, or even Howard Marks' presentation about free games. But I have to attend the press conference, so I'll do it. Hopefully, it will not last too long, and I'll be able to attend the end of one of them. And then it will be lunchtime.

The afternoon begins with two concurrent sessions about optimization – one is sponsored by Intel, the other deals about multi-core platforms. At the same time, Guillaume de Fondemiere et al. Are speaking of team management. 3:10 PM is the worst time for me: I'd like to attend 3 of the 5 lectures that take place at this time. Unfortunately, I lost this power a few years ago (when Romans crucified me IIRC) so I have to choose between Jeremy Vikery's sessions about light and colors, McShaffry's MS Project talk and Servan Keondjan's lecture (this one looks good: it tries to imagine what our future will look like). After that, the day will a bit smoother: I will attend ID's Matt Hooper talk – no way I'll miss that – and Chris Rock's session about Bioshock history – again, the only reason why I would not attend this one can be summarized in two words: « my » and « death ».

And day one will be over.

Day 2 will be as hot as day 1. It begins with Sten Huebler of Crytek who will speak about level design in Crysis. At the same time, the research session of Samad Ahmadi deals with the implementation of AI algorithm. Ben Cousins' keynote about Battlefield will follow. At 11:40 am, the programming session of Franc Hauselmann deals with game engine enhancement, while Jason Della Roca et al. will describe the intimate relation between producers and developers. At 2 pm, Diarmid Campbell will discuss camera-based games and Sean Kane will talk about IP rights. Adam Moravansky's high level physics talk will concurrent Vincent Scheurer's lecture about digital distribution.

Sadly, and because my train leaves Paris too early, I won't be able to attend the last keynote of Rob Pardo from Blizzard. In fact, I may also miss Nicolas Thiberioz's second session about tesselation in a low poly word using the GPU.

All in all, there are too many things to see, and not enough time to do it. Which, again, is a bit frustrating.

Ralph Baer