One person's view of the 1994 Computer Game Developers Conference 1994, Santa Clara California
Reported by Deep Note1994 heralded a record year, with a whopping 1400 people attending this conference dedicated to computer game developers - and the hopeful wannabees - within a 72 hour stop at a local hotel. More wanted to attend, but the limit had been decided on - as is, the walking "traffic" was murder some times. Spills, chills, a few thrills and a lot of boredom were the mark of the conference.
Certainly the bulletin boards, with their ads for workers or work, were in demand. Companies like Accolade, Stormfront Studios, Activision, SSI, Sir- Tech, and many others were all looking for talent.
One of the hot topics of interest was Disney's apparent restriction of any discussion of Virgin's "Aladdin" cartridge game, based on and licensed from Disney's movie. There was planned a lecture on the making of the Sega car- tridge. However, Disney corporate policy is that all aspects of Disney business is proprietary. Thus, said lecture was severely frowned upon by Disney on the basis of fear of proprietary information being lost. A few more companies with that attitude and the conference will be little more than marketing flacks showing each other released games. Fortunately, very few other companies hold the fanatical 1950s attitude represented here..... for now.
Sound card vendors were doing their utmost to entice developers at the show. Logitech hosted the opening night "open bar", endearing themselves to many of the participants during what may be considered the most significant deal-making time of the conference....human bowling, samurai wresting, velcro bouncing and other current yuppie barroom games didn't hurt either. The next evening, Creative Labs hosted a meet n' greet at one of the restaurants to promote their new AWE32 sound board, and Gravis kept the music hopping in its suite on the 5th floor while talking about their new Ultramid card. It seemed to me like most of the vendors in the small vendor showroom used Doom as a demo.
Speaking of the showroom, Diana Gruber of Ted Gruber Software (Fastgraph graphics library) was there promoting her upcoming book: "Arcade Adventure". As with Chris Lampton's "Flights of Fantasy", I applaud Diana for coming forward and sharing her 'secrets' of game design. The book, with C code examples, a functional game that can be ripped apart, a game editor and a 3.5" disk, delves into 256 color VGA, scrolling, artwork, and even info on market-ing and packaging. ISBN 1-883577-06-3 and published by Coriollis Group Books, this is bound to be one of the very few books about the industry itself, rather than just a textbook. She was also a lecturer this year, on the topic of alternative marketing methods for games.
Speaking of Doom (well, I was earlier), probably the most impressive use of Doom was by Microsoft. Their Cool Wave Windows DLL had Doom running in a true Windows window. If that turns out to be a royalty-free module, we could see some quick updates available for folks wanting DOS games to run (well) in Windows. Microsoft is currently recruiting beta testers (developers only, folks) on Compuserve - that should hasten Windows development even more.
The CGDC Survey for 1994 dwelled on the topic of game ratings. Rather than the "Easy", "Standard", or "Expert" ratings of Infocom's heyday, these ratings are the ones the U.S Congress wants established for computer/video games to help protect the innocent (whoever the heck they are). The results, from those that had responded (22.8% of registered attendees as of the publishing of the data) are that 80% feel that entertainment (books, movies, games) can indeed be harmful, 83.2% believed that the industry should adopt a rating system (better internal that having the government do it might be one reason). This will, naturally, add just one more confusing factor to a non-American publisher trying to break into the US market.
In between stuffing ourselves with donuts, fruit, mexican food, pop, and tankards of coffee, there were some lectures available.
Apologizing again for LGOP2, William Volk of Activision stated that the text parser was not dead yet - it might re-incarnate with the advent of voice recognition technology. Continuing on with the design started with Return To Zork, he felt interfaces should be designed to be ignored or intuitive. Ideally, one uses the screen picture as the interface - such as in Doom. Music and sound effects should be designed as clues to upcoming events as well as traditional uses. Best quote of his lecture: "Great thing about standards is everyone has one".
Noah Falstein, late of 3DO and LucasArts, tried to synopsize the roles of various game company employee titles, with partial success. Obviously based on a television/movie company metaphor, the definitions were obviously from the producer point of view rather than the grunt workers' point of view. An entertaining, even if unbalanced, attempt at labels that constantly get redefined in this industry. Best quote:"Leading programmers is like trying to herd cats.".....think about it.
On the subject of Interactivity, Revolution, and Pain, Chris Crawford came equipped with props such as spears, whips, and _very_ large knives. His topic was the coming revolution (evolution?) in game design and the winds of change that will accompany it. Amazingly enough, he advocated the insurgence of the "Hollywood types" - a successful company would be able to merge the old (current game design) with the new (Hollywood's storytelling ability). I remain unconvinced that Hollywood really wants in and isn't just playing with some new toys - the market for computer games is ridiculously small compared to box office counts from even really bad movies. Still, Chris has that Robin-Williams-wannabe showmanship that made the lecture a must-see for a change from the pedantic lectures held otherwhere.
Scott Kim (puzzle designer and artist) had a wonderful presentation on Puzzle Games and How To Design Them. The first part was a bit slow, but he had a Mac with an overhead projector attachment and showed some of his puzzles from "Heaven and Earth". This really got the crowd involved as they spoke up to suggest ways of proceeding, only to be shown the right way by Scott - amid oohs and ahhs. Some of his comments had heads shaking or some quick partner-conferencing amid the attendees, that's for sure.
Only an Adventure aficionado would have known that Scott's lecture and Bob Bate's (Legend's Eric the Unready and Timequest) Puzzle Game Design Round Table were not the same thing. This was my first roundtable and once again I saw the advantages of a dictator - the discussion during the hourlong talk drifted over topics, staying only on them long enough to launch itself again.
The most interesting thing about the Jenny Martin's (Maxis' art Director) lecture on Pixel Envy ( a wannabe session for artists ) is that it seemed like half the audience were artists curious about what the industry required for entry-level work.....and the other half of the audience were art directors from other companies looking for potential artists. People were there from Virgin, Activision, Humongous, Papyrus, and other companies. Almost all said they used Electronic Art's DeluxePaint - oft called DPaint - and that experi-ence with Autodesk's 3D Studio was a plus. AXA was an exception, a high resolution paint/animation program used for the upcoming Jungle Book. There was disagreement over whether prior art experience was necessary and to what level - one art director insisted that the artist must "love" computers.... a mixture Nature never intended? The advice that Jenny gave out to hopeful artists all seemed very sound and hopefully led to some new hiring (after all, that's one of the reasons for going).
Making Games for Both Genders was a rather misleading lecture title as the lecture was really about writing game stories for females, not both genders. Heidi Dangelmaier (RGA Interactive) certainly had the air of a researcher about her in her presentation, but she did bring the focus onto an interesting philosophy about what females (it seemed to be focused on girls rather than women, but maybe that's just me). There was a bit of bristling from a few females ("Hey, I like those type of games!") when Heidi mentioned certain games as male-oriented, but overall the audience seemed to relate to at least part of what she said. One very interesting scenario Heidi used, to illustrate the gender difference in games is rules: boys adhere to them like gospel, girls don't. In her example, when boys play a game and a question or problem comes up, they turn to the rules and abide by them regardless of the "fun" factor for the group - if someone gets removed from the game, so be it. If one girl is to be ejected, the rest will just ignore the rules so that everyone can have fun. Another point she made was that while boys might want to be knights or cowboys or space rangers, girls might prefer to explore an old castle converted to school. She ran such a possible scenario, with help from the audience that sounded a lot like a teenage romance novel, to me. Not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose....
Due to other commitments (most of them at the hotel bar), I didn't get to see much more that these, but there were discussions on game music (Rob Wallace, The Fat Man, Donald S, Griffin), the proposed audio VESA (Media Vision's Doug Cody) several lectures for game developer/designer wannabees, and education-al/home games (Dani Bunten, Joyce Hakansson, Jeff Haas, Ellen Guon, Gano Haine, Annie Fox, and Ken Goldstein), and a diverse group of other topics. Both sound and educational/home games seem to be very up- and-coming topics, pulling in full capacities. An indication of the future, perhaps?
This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by Deep Note for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.