Second day at the 2010 Montreal International Game Summit
MIGS' second day started slowly, with people still waking up from yesterday's parties. Without any coffee to be found and less movement than yesterday, the excitement was nevertheless present, the people didn't want to miss their favorite talks or the new opportunities in the job market.
The first talk, and also the second keynote of the conference was given by Ron Carmel from “Indie Fund” and “2D boy”, about the history of indie games and the direction the video-games are moving. He explained that video games have a long history, almost as long as TV, but while TV can be found everywhere and have gone through a long history of producing bad, mediocre and good programs, video-games are still twenty years behind, and we still haven't witnessed a masterpiece of video games. He also showed the opening scene of The Wired as an example of TV's masterpiece.
The topic of Indie Games is one of the hot ones in the conference, and after yesterday's talk made by Scott Jon Siegel, we find a similar topic with a different approach. Apparently nobody wants to define what is indie exactly. Carmel tried to find some common characteristics of indie developers: Apparently the independent developers are in their majority people between 20 and 30 years old, with children, and are educated male caucasians. Pretty much the same profile that the main stream developers.
What balances the similarities are the differences: a big percentage of indie developers never worked in a big company and don't know the process of working with big groups, they work alone or in small teams, they usually support different projects and companies allowing cross-politicization of ideas. They normally have to assume different roles inside their companies, from PR to sound designers.
Finally we observe that indie games push the medium, they are risky, not really profitable, and they have a lack of infrastructure, but at the end there's not an actual difference between the two groups, so he proposed to create two different categories: Design Studios vs. Commercial Studios.
With this problem solved, Carmel tries to guess where the masterpiece of video-games will appear: this will be in a medium size design studio, that controls or has eliminated profitability issues, but at the same time that is big enough to bring the best people in every role, so the developers won't need to do everything by themselves.
He found two companies that have this structure and that are closed to crate that masterpiece: One is “Team ICO”, the creators of Shadow of the colossus, and “That Game Company”.
Shooting Zombies in Augmented Reality
The second talk of the day was given by Tony Tseng, professor of Savannah College of Art and Design, and was about Gaming in Augmented Reality. This is a topic that is being used around a lot, but mostly as a novelty, or a tool for marketing campaigns but nothing serious for the game industry. He is trying to fix that.
First we had a quick overview of the equipment needed for an actual Augmented Reality Game. In hardware we need a two part construct that can define and view the location and then render the virtual world inside it. This means: Sensors and Display. The machine has to be powerful enough to be able to track information and render the additions in real time. This was a problem for a while, but now the technological challenges have been resolved mostly thanks to the industry with the smartphones. Now is the turn of game designers to came out with something really special.
As a professor, he worked with students to develop strategies for creating video games that can relate both to designers and programmers. There are problems inside those two fields if they work separated. If artists work alone, they tend work without knowing the limitations of the technology and make good looking games that don't work or that are boring. Meanwhile, the programmers work around the technology without caring about the design or even the gameplay itself, creating games that work but that are ugly. The point of view of the game designer is important in order to develop not only AR video-games but any kind of game.
He presented some software that is already out there to create this kind of games, and some examples of games he encountered in his classes, and new projects for different companies. He showed how, sometimes, just trying to reinvent or innovate an already exiting video game can create something completely new, and if you throw the AR into the game you can come out with something really exiting. I am sure that future video-games will be using AR, and this technology will be as common as any other kind of video game today. He showed a cuple of exiting concepts like ARhrrrrrrr.
How to place your bets...
I think many people would change their minds after the revealing presentation by David Edery. He is somebody that understands digital platforms and the process that follow. With experience in XBOX Live Arcade and his new releases for Kindle, he can talk about the beginnings and triumphs of digital platforms, and he managed to come out with a graph of the evolution of those platforms:
According to him, video-game platform follows this path:
- Uncertain Beginnings: When nobody knows if the platform is going to be a success.
- Early Success: Big success for the first developers caused by unbalance between offer and demand.
- Inevitable Misery: The end for many developers caused for an overabundance of suppliers.
- Triumphant Return: Finally the platform will arrive to this stage, but the hole structure will be hit-driven, that's it, only the top games will manage to generate revenue, and the money invested for them will be also high.
His advices are pretty much to enter the game in the early stages, not to panic when the Inevitable Misery arrives and finally rise the level of the games when it is the moment of the Triumphant Return, and also not to invest in a platform in the later stage if you are not prepared to invest a lot to make a hit.
He found one example that doesn't fit in this design, mostly because of its size: Facebook. Here the top positions are secured by the big companies, and nevertheless is still possible to create successful games, that won't compete with the top players, but still do good.
Finally he revealed the secret of success on Facebook games: lower barriers to customer entry and not a purchase model. Same elements for any Flash game, a technology that can arrive to millions of possible customers, and right now that is still in the early stages of its life.
His final advice is not to follow his advice (on Facbook or Flash) but to understand how the technologies work right now, and not to try to guess where it going to be but invest in the projects that work right now.
Collaboration and big names
The next talk of the day, was given by Terrence Masson on the collaboration between Video-Games and different industries like movies and special effects. The talk didn't present something that we didn't know, the importance of cross-politicization between industries, and the experience, every day more common, professionals from different fields working together or moving from one field to the next. But what was interesting was his own experience in the industry and his participation in many big projects both in films and video-games. The talk was fill with personal anecdotes of grate movies like Star Wars, and the continuous developing of the video-game industry to re-use and re-invent technology used in the big studios, and how that collaboration is happening today in the universities and under different programs. He explain how his home town Boston, is becoming a true hub of communication between different fields and the video game industry.
The writer as hero
The last talk of the day, and personally the most interesting, was Rafael Chandler's about narrative and video-game writing. He used to explain the writing process one of the classic narrative structures: The Hero's Journey. How the writer is the Hero in his own story and the development of the script is the adventure he is facing. He reviewed the different process and challenges while writing for video games, and the strong technical aspect of this job.
Although short and clear, this talk revealed some of the process that appear before the programmer or designers start working in the video game, and shows the difficult relationship of power between the different teams and the writer, and how the later has to be really clear in what is writing, and understand that his audience is not the player, but all the people involved in the development of the game. The video-game writing is a sort of contained writing experience more related to technical writing to the literary one.
Conclusions
That was the last talk of the day, at least for me. Right now Twitter is still full of comments and discoveries, and more articles and reviews of the two day event will appear. There are still more things to tell, more stories and discoveries, but all that will be in the closing article of this series.
