Stories From GDC 2010

The 2010 Game Developers Conference was last week and here are a few of my favorite stories that came out of it.

• First, the real story you all want to hear about from Tim Schafer’s Twitter. That’s right, what does John Romero’s business card look like? If you guessed made of metal and capable of cutting an apple, you would be right.



• Speaking of Tim Schafer, he did a panel on comedy in games along with Rhianna Pratchett (Writer on Overlord) and Sean Vanaman (Writer/Designer at Telltale). Justin Haywald covers it at 1UP.





• Gamasutra, whose parent company organizes GDC, always has great coverage of the event. This one is a baffling tale of one developer’s experience with Apple’s App Store.





• Richard Leadbetter of Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry does a great techincal analysis of Sony’s new motion controller the Playstation Move. Although he comes to the same conclusion as many, it is still a great look at the tech behind it.





• Michael Abbot over at The Brainy Gamer provides a fascinating summarization of the ‘What Color is Your Hero?’ panel covering race representation in video games, a topic too often dismissed.





• More from Gamasutra, this time Sucker Punch talks about the surprising tricks (like only having two cars models) they used to create an open world with a small team.





• Joystiq covers the weird-virtual-reality-spherical-cage-thing on the show floor with a video.





• Chris Hecker talks about a "nightmare self-fulfilling scenario" that comes from extrinsic rewards—rewards that aren’t intrinsic to playing the game, like achievements/trophies. He makes an interesting comparison to slot machines.





• Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilization IV, spoke about the separation of game mechanics from themes—how the mechanics define what the game is about rather than the theme. It is all explained very well with great examples.





• Akira Yamaoka, most renowned for his musical work in the Silent Hill series, gave a panel about some of his various audio techniques.





• The always engaging Peter Molyneux had a talk about the "Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design" in regard to changes from Fable II to Fable III.





• And lastly, the Game Developers Conference and Independent Games Festival (speaking of the IGF, Kieron Gillen at Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviewed almost every nominee) both have their award shows and Joystiq covered them with a nice clean list and pictures.

What was your favorite thing that came out of GDC last week?


Ben