Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2457



GDC Coverage: Wrapping it Up


The Expo

This year's GDC was filled with an incredible depth of technical and artistic information pertaining to game development. As AnandTech's only representative at the show, there is no way I could cover it all, but I certainly had a great time trying. Next year we'll gather up a couple more people and hit more of the deep under the hood game development stuff. GDC is on the level of IDF in terms of technical detail and it combines this hardcore techie focus with the artistic nature of game development and design. On top of that, it seems that GDC serves, in a more professional manner, the necessity of connectivity and networking that E3 used to fill in the industry. There was a heavy focus on both the careers of individual developers as well as the relationships between game development companies and publishers.

The expo floor was filled with wonders. There were stereoscopic displays, unique input devices, new game development tools and software, and a multitude of games by independent and corporate developers alike. The following contains some of the highlights of the expo which was light on fluff and heavy on content.

The Independent Games Festival

In addition to the conference and the expo, the GDC plays host to the Independent Games Festival. We stopped by to check them out, and we would recommend taking a look at Audiosurf and World of Goo. Here's the site to check out for more details on these games. We tried to get some pictures of each game, but the crowds and technical difficulties got in the way. Here's what we've got:

X-Play

In addition to the expo, there were some other cool goings on. X-Play happened to be filming in the North Hall every day, and we stopped by the set to check it out. For those who don't know, X-Play is perhaps the only good show (aside from Ninja Warrior) left on the G4 TV network after it merged with TechTV and simultaneously destroyed the integrity of both channels by turning it into something more like Spike TV than either a techie or a gamer network. But there's no use being bitter, and it is what it is. Besides, we've got Revision3.com for all our real television needs.

I did get to meet Adam and Morgan at the X-Play reception on Thursday night (along with some of the behind the scenes guys: Rob, Matt, and Wade). Adam was … well, a lot like you would expect him to be: very over the top and friendly.

Morgan seemed a bit preoccupied with how difficult it is to keep all the little geek hands off of her backside during conventions. I suppose I'm not unsympathetic, but I was really shocked to learn that the traditionally introverted group of people who would be into a video game review show could be so forward. And then I remembered that they are the same group of people who tend to be socially ostracized because they don't think anyone can see them picking our noses in public or smell them when they don't bathe. And I do have quite a few friends who seem to think a woman's eyes route through her breasts during a conversation. I suppose it's a short step from there to thinking something like "she won't notice if…" but luckily none of our readers are "that guy."

 

We also happened to see Victor Lucas as he stopped by to say hi to the folks at X-Play. He was responsible for the show "Judgment Day" (another video game review show) before G4 took it off the air.

 

Other Than the Expo and The Sessions …

Some of what we did at the show was quite boring and useless in the short term. We have recently been getting involved in game reviews (sticking our toes in the water really) and we spent a lot of time talking with publishers, getting contact info for PR personnel and going about setting up relationships for the eventual acquisition of review product. The end goal, of course, being to have game reviews go live on the day they game is launched. This is quite a ways out, but we were able to make a few good contacts at some of the smaller publishers.

We also searched for some useful technologies to make our hardware testing easier. It turns out that there is a company (called Replay) that specializes in recording input to a game and playing it back. This is not just user input, but all communication into and out of a game (including system and API calls, clock tics, and time data). The goal of these guys is to help developers reproduce bugs and optimize their code.

Of course, it might be good for us if the overhead is low enough and if we can get it working with a good number of games. There is an issue in that they can only record and playback functions that they know about, and there is some lead time on when they are able to support new games. This could produce data that is both real world and perfectly reproducible … Of course, if a game uses different code paths for NVIDIA, ATI, Intel or AMD hardware we could run in to issues as well and it certainly wouldn't work between different operating systems. It's certainly something we'll be playing with though.



The Future of Gaming (And Life as We Know It)

The major highlights of GDC 2008 for us were the keynote by Ray Kurzweil and the session on Fable 2 by Peter Molyneaux. Much of the unspoken context of the conference was on emergent gaming and on adaptive, evolving systems. These two people are certainly at the center of any such discussion, and the power and impact of their presentations was not lightly felt.

 

Kurzweil focused on the exponential growth of things. Not just on Moore's law, but on the exponential growth of everything leading up to it and everything that is to come after it. He puts the "the end is near" doomsayers to shame with his comprehensive analysis of the growth of technology and the audacity of the predictions he makes for computing. He talked about how billions of years ago it took millions of years to reach paradigm shifts in development, but today major changes and advancements happen on the order of hundreds and even tens of years.

 

Because the advancements of the present and future are built on the advancements of the past and today, things happen much faster due to the base of technology we already have. An example is that the first computers were developed with pen and paper over quite a while. Today, computers millions of times more advanced are developed in a fraction of the time using other computers, which will be used to help design the computers of the future, etc.

 

As for the end of Moore's law, Kurzweil predicts a paradigm shift. He points out that there is a sort of S curve in the advancement of technology where the slow down of one method of doing things puts pressure on the world to come up with a new way to do things. The way this translates to our current situation is that the Moore's law might start to slip and the pace of computing advancement may slow down as the physical limits on transistor size in silicon approach. But even if there is a short term slow down the over all trend will not stop and a new paradigm in computer design will take over and push exponential advancement forward.

 

Kurzweil talks of future technology as if it is already fact, and it's quite astounding what he says we'll be able to do in only the couple decades. These are things like matching the compute capacity of the human brain by 2013, and being able to completely model the brain a decade or so later. He points out the fact that detractors of the human genome project were so focused on the fact that when half the time had gone by only a small percentage of the project was complete. Linear thinking limited their ability to understand exponential growth, and the problem is compounded by the fact that exponential curves appear linear initially.

 

When we look at where we are and where we could go, the possibilities, not only of advancement in gaming but in the advancement of life as we know, it are staggering. Projections of the impact of fossil fuels on our economy and planet in terms of the next century are absurd in light of the fact that new technology will make energy cheaper and cleaner than currently possible. Replacing red blood cells with engineered alternatives could not only offer cures for diseases, but could also improve the functionality of the human body on a fundamental level (imagine being able to hold your breath for orders of magnitude longer than is currently possible).

 

We have already been able to model the part of the brain that handles hearing. We are already genetically engineering plants, and now that we have the human genome, we will be able to update and improve the source code of our own bodies. Kurzweil points out that a genetic cure for type 1 diabetes (as well as obesity) is currently possible (at least in animal studies) and even bigger things will follow.

 

In a live demo, Kurzweil showed of some technology that really brought home his points. In the late 1970s, he invented the first machine that could convert written text to speech in order to aid the blind. He was able to predict, based on his exponential models of technological advancement, when he would be able to shrink this machine down to the size of a handheld device. This handheld device would need to be capable of much more than just scanning in a document and converting it to speech, as it would need to be held by a blind person and pointed at all sorts of strange angles at signs and books in order to be of any real use. Using a prediction of when this would be possible, Kurzweil was able to start designing the software and systems to perform this functionality in a way so as to time the finish of the project with the emergence of technology that would be able to support it.

 

He showed off the technology in the form of a cell phone that was able to read text it was pointed at while the angle and distance from the device to the text was in flux. The demo was quite impressive, and the usefulness to the blind community is at once obvious and astounding.

 

Thinking non-linearly can be difficult, but I honestly hope that Kurzweil is accurate in his predictions. They sound pretty freaking cool to me. The bottom line: fully immersive virtual reality through nano scale technology and full simulations of human intelligence capable of passing the Turing test before 2030.



Making Gaming Compelling: Fable 2 Discussion

 

Whether you can get on board with him or not, Kurzweil is amazing in the simplicity and grandeur of his take on the world. And if anything, Peter Molyneaux is Kurzweil's analog in the game industry (with the exception that Molyneaux's reach sometimes exceeds his grasp). Games like Black & White and Fable really stretched out there and challenged the way the industry and society view games. Maybe a little more excitable and overreaching than Kurzweil, Molyneaux is once again preaching revolutionary ideas and amazing concepts for Fable 2. Some of the fundamental ideas behind the game really push back against traditional game design practices while trying to achieve basic goals that make games (and indeed all creative content) great.

 

Some of the details revealed about Fable 2 include the fact that the combat system is incredibly simple. All you need to do is push one button and you'll be able to do a variety of things to kill people. To make it interesting for advanced gamers, additional actions can be taken with other buttons that exponentially increase the experience you gain from a battle. For instance, one button may control your sword and all its moves. Pressing it once might do one move and subsequent presses would do different moves that are context sensitive. But then imagine pressing the sword button followed by the gun button to knock an opponent off his or her feet and shoot them before they hit the ground. This is they type of combination of simple actions that leads to what could be a truly engaging complexity for the seasoned gamer.

 

Co-op mode will allow gamers to visit each other's worlds. And the host gamer will be able to set limits on what the co-op player can do. For instance, a gamer can adjust the scale on which his or her co-op partner splits gold and experience in the game. The idea is that giving a gamer more control over what a co-op player does in their world will help protect gamers from the potential adverse affects that letting someone else in your house could have.

 

The additional incentive in Fable 2 to play co-op is that there are no gold drops in the game, and all money must be made by working for it. It just so happens that co-op players can make money by fighting for someone else and then take that money back to their own world to spend as they please. Essentially players will be able to really act as mercenaries for hire to other players. This was underlined as the most important new aspect of the game, but even with incentives to play co-op it just won't appeal to some people. If they pull it off well, it could certainly be the start of something bigger in co-op play, but the same could be said of a lot of Lionhead's more edgy gambles.

 

The final key that Molyneaux talked about (which he addressed first) is drama: a good compelling story and experience that really draws the gamer in. This is the thing that so many writers (for movies, games and books) go after but fall short of, and Peter thinks he and Lionhead have it figured out. They're gonna cheat.

 

First, he said that the story will be loosely based on dark European folk lore. He mentioned that this would probably involve lots of violence and sex, and underlines the fact that they had sex before hot coffee (of course they blanked the screen). This will continue in Fable 2, and you will be able to have children as well. At the mention that the screen would again be blanked when teh sex was happening, the entire audience sighed in disappointment. He paused for a moment and the said: "Don't blame us. It's you Americans: there's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany I'd be…" something about dancing around naked on stage that I couldn't quite catch through the laughter.

 

In any case, in order to "cheat" and tie the gamer into this world, Fable 2 will help show players that they are appreciated for what they do in the game. This will be facilitated through a dog, a family, and the world itself. The dog is there as a constant companion who will like the same things and people the player likes and will evolve with the player. Additionally, the dog will help warn of danger and point out areas of interest. Which brings us to a certain to be controversial topic. There will be no minimap on the screen (as Molyneaux notes, "minimaps are shit;" a comment which received uproarious laughter), and instead the gamers will be able to turn on and off a trail of bread crumbs that leads them to their destination or to areas they've been before. The dog is there to help pull the gamer off the bread crumb trail if there is something interesting to do near by. This doesn't sound very compelling to me, but we'll reserve judgment until we actually play the game.

Children in the game will tend to take on the traits of their parents, and there are many issues that can arise from procreation (like killing the other parent and orphaning a child) that the game does take into account. The deeper it goes in this area, certainly the more involved in the story it can pull the gamer.

Beyond the dog and family, decisions the gamer makes can affect the world itself. It won't change the story line per se, but things the gamer does will have an affect on, for instance, the capitol city of the world in which the game is set. There weren't many details here, but, depending on how far they take it, this could be a very cool thing.

Aside from saying that the co-op mode was inspired by Lego Star Wars, Molyneaux said he wanted to make it difficult to be good. Most players do end up taking the path of good in games like this, and adding to the drama by making it difficult to make certain choices on the path to being a good character should really draw the gamer in. The goal, Peter stated, is to build a scenario where the gamer must put down their controller and really contemplate what they want to do; whether they are willing to sacrifice something important to them to continue to play as a "good" character. I wish them luck in this endeavor and I look forward to seeing what they do here.

For those out there wondering about the other aspects of the game, Molyneaux gave a loose list of the features of Fable 2. He underlined the fact that we shouldn't take this as literal, as some things may be plus or minus. This is a general list of the types of goals they had when building the game.

 



Final Words

After an exhausting trip to San Francisco, we hope to have brought you at least a little taste of what it was like to be in the thick of it. We are absolutely looking forward to next year when we'll try to bring along a few more team members to help get some really good in depth coverage of the bleeding edge of game technology.

There are other smaller game developer conference events throughout the year and around the globe, but we won't likely make it to these. We will try our best to cover other major gaming events, and we certainly hope to develop our relationships with publishers a little more to help facilitate and speed up game reviews. In the mean time, stay tuned as we will continue to roll out our coverage of the game industry over the coming months. Here are some pictures we snapped of Fable 2 to help tide you over.

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