Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

A few notes from the GDC Recap at SXSW.
Warren Spector & Rich Vogel speaking. Brad King moderating.
Sequels can hurt & help. Depends if developers listen to comments it can be great. Or it can suck if the same thing is done over.
Even difficult subjects, like Scooby Doo, can be good if the gameplay and concepts are good.
Costs are spiraling, sales haven’t risen. Expectations are rising. Risk is escalating dramtically. They minimize risk by going with known quantities.
Online Gaming – What is the role of online games in consoles. Rich says that it will be the second gen consoles that will really enable it. Today it’s a little to difficult for most people. The inclusion of a keyboards is essential.
Persistent World vs. small group gaming – There’s a difference.
Disagreement over online games. Sims Online is an example of bad design, but not entirely. Warren & Rich disagree on why it’s not successful. Warren says most people don’t want to play online games to the degree hoped for. The audience is loud and excited, but it is small.
Warren wants next game to sell 5 million. Will there be enough hardware to run it? In consoles? Yes.
Mobile gaming – Lots of discussion at GDC. Phone games mainly used to kill time. Different in Japan where there is a phone gaming community. Discussed the failure of Majestic. Scary to regular people, not enough content.
“You won’t see EA or Eidos or Microsoft making phones games. Other small developers will make them.”
At GDC they discussed education. They talked about the role of games in education. In Star Wars Galaxies there will be connections to the game via phone, IM, web, etc. Many things to add access to the games.
The reason Warren hates online games is that they are not satisfying. He doesn’t want interact online, he wants real world.
Rich says they are great because you can live in the alternate universe. You can do thngs you can’t do in RL.
I just told Warren to play Neverwinter Nights.
I just thanked Rich for making Ultima Online.
Question about why dungeon master role hasn’t come to gaming. The guy doesn’t know about Neverwinter Nights.
At TSR in 1988, 15 million people ahd played D&D. Estimate 1/2 were gamemasters. 10% any good. How many could use a toolset 10%? 80,000 people worldwide? How many can make things and do a good thing?
The FPS mods are must simpler to create content/levels than roleplaying games.
Warren wants to find a way to provide episodic content. He wants to develop better methods of interaction with NPCs. The ability to interact with the AI needs to be more immersive. They both stress the importance of bots expressing emotion & mood.
The next step is probably from Valve. Halflife 2 will have very cool stuff. In Deus Ex Invisble War they have a new conversation system that will be reflected in the avatar. So will Star Wars Galaxies.
Warren speaks heresy and says framerate is not important. (OMFG. Burn him….)
There.com is a virtual world where emotions and expressions are well done.
Warren says UO, EQ & DaoC are “not games, they are fucking chatrooms”.
The importance of good writers is key to games getting better. “Writers are writing code, not prose.” Warren is finding programmers who can write. He doesn’t want to teach writers how to code anymore.
Developers need to get two hit games under their belt and then they are allowed to experiment. Creative stuff that people don’t get are hard to market.
They both seem focused on detail in the games. Things like limping in a football game are examples of good stuff. (I disagree completely)
Closing remarks – GDC this year had a theme this years. Lots of online discussion. Process of game development is an issue. Formalizing the design process. People may not like games like GTA3, but it is the best balanced game on the market. Online games allow balance and creation of new games. The GDC is getting better because it’s more aobut gamign and less about technology.
End of session.
A note on Warren Spector: Warren has been described as arrogant and offensive. I didn’t find that. He is clear in his opinions and firm in his stands. People may disagree with him (like me) but he’s not mean to simply be mean. He is simply very open with his views. Many aren’t comfortable with people that don’t hide their thoughts.

I had three good days wearing my contacts here at the show. My eyes have been giving me trouble lately and they get sore if I wear the lenses too much.
After the 2 PM session, I had to go take out my right lens. I was hurting and it was distracting me. I went into the men’s room and whipped out a bottle of saline and a lens case. Publically plucking a lens from my eye drew more than a few stares. Fuck it. It’s only a contact lens.
So now I’m half blind. The right side of the world is a blur. Hopefully after a little rest and Muro 128 tonight and I’ll being seeing fine tomorrow.

My employer did something right!

I’ll make an attempt at live reporting via the weblog.
The session is a panel with Google talking about organizing the web.
Google’s Mission:
Organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful.
Nice, broad, and ambitious. Gotta like that.
After describing in detail how Google manages indexes, he says, “Managing all that is a little on the tricky side.” Understatement of the day.
Page Rank: A query independent measure of value for each page.
Linking to many pages lessens the ‘value’ of page rank that yor page has. The fewer links you have, the more emphasis on your links.
Designed on the concept that everyday machines are going to die. For scalability and reliability, they have 10s of thousands of machine constantly working. Considering consumer grade MTBF, they get plenty of failures and actually buy substandard RAM to save money.
Demo of https://labs.google.com and https://www.google.com/zeitgeist
Content-Targeted Advertising -Using the search words to choose appropriate advertisement to display that may be much more effective.
Google News – Auto-generated news from 4,500 news sources arranged in an unbiased, objective way.
Froogle – Aggregates products via page rank and relevance. Google makes no money from the products themselves, but they do advertise on the page.
Intro of Evan Williams of Pyra/Blogger/Google – “Blogger is now a Google product.”
Lots of speculation and theories as to why the purchase happened. What is the secret plan of ‘world domination’? No secret plan…
Plan:
Blogger and Google Join
Blogger services remain unchanged
Building a better Blogger
Help people find blog content
Commitment to unbiased, objectve search results
“Google is one of the few web giants that values personal opinion.”
What is desperately needed is enhanced ability to search blog content. Increasingly difficult to find intersting content. Google’s expertise in searching is the key to help find the intersting content.
Reading the assumptions would make you think there are now hundreds of people working on ‘Bloogle’. Not true. Same people, but the food’s much better. A couple new guys. Still constrained by people inside Google. ‘Never enough people, all the hardware they could imagine.’
After stablization of Blogger within Google, they can work on new ideas.
There is no interest to bias Google searches in favor of Blogger. They want to help the blogger community in general. They want to work with Radio, Movable Type, and other tools.
I just asked Evan, ‘How much did you get?’ He didn’t answer and said ‘Did I mention how good the food is?’ I didn’t expect that I’d get a number, but someone had to ask…
Metatags are problematic, since the page is telling the viewer one thing, and tells Google somethign else. For this reasons, Google doesn’t use meta-tags.
Google Answers – This is not a highly public site for Google, but the usage and popularity is rising.
Google Toolbar – Future directions (asked by Anil Dash) – They may get around to a Mozilla client since Google people all use linux.
Wireless oppurtunity – They have WAP and low bandwidth services, but they are not utilized much. Pages are proxied to reduce non-mobile content.
Google has systems for local country results to allow graphics to be displayed correctly. Blogger would like to take advantage of the global reach to provide a higher service level.
Natural Language Search – Yes, they are thinking about it. They aren’t clear that keyword searches alone won’t suffice. Once voice interaction with computers is more common, they see the rise of natural language searches.
Semantic Web – Any plans? ‘Nice idea, but not now.’ They do it partially with Froogle, not in a concerted effort.
End of session. Whew.

I looked at this page and realized I had a bunch of “I’m doing this…” posts. Not a lot of analysis going on here.
I made an attempt to get up early and transcribe my handwritten notes to the weblog, but alas I have failed. It’s about 25 mintues until the first session and I haven’t started. Mea culpa.
So while I am currently content-free, now is the time for you to create some and post it on your weblog. Do It Now….

The Fray Cafe was a lot of fun. At the urging of Michael, I signed up for the open mic.
To heighten the butterflys in my stomach, I ended up getting on stage at the end of the night when everyone was tired. I told the story of Zoe’s fever due to the cooties. The story was quick and I got a few laughs, but I’m not sure how well everyone liked it.
It’s late, and I need to sleep.

I’m inside the Mercury on 6th street in Austin.
The Fray Cafe is just getting started and my laptop is being used as the light for the sign ups.
I guess It’s spoken word for a few hours, we’ll see won’t we…

Keith at UnrelatedNews is the shizznit!
He’s been making video weblogs. Go check out his first set here.
The next two clips are also funny. Stop Drinking and Spring Chinese Dude.
I desperately need a digital video camera. But then again, you all would be subjected to videos of me at IHOP rather than just text & pictures.

Google, you should check out cloud.com
I just got out of a session where they revealed cloud.com a method to coalese (sp?) content voluntarily. Intentionally building the sematic web.
Not much to read on the site, but in Slashdot form, I’m attempting to first post. 🙂

Made this recording yesterday.
audblog audio post