#gdc 2015

[hopeymchope]

I have no idea how it's possible that I've never made a post about this on my Tumblr, but I sure can't seem to find one. So...

If you're like me and you adore how Kazutaka Kodaka's writing, his GDC 2015 panel titled "My Ordinary Process for Crafting Extraordinary Stories" is a must-watch.

[finalfantasytrivia]

SAKAGUCHI

Mega64 made a video for GDC 2015 to be premiered during awarding Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy) for his lifetime achievement – starring none other than the man himself.

Watch the “TOTALLY TRUE STORY of how Hironobu Sakaguchi achieved his most prized accomplishment”! (with possible FFIV, FFVI and FFVII spoilers).

…and “behind the scenes”:

[spewagepipe]

On Matt Boch's GDC 2015 Micro-Talk

Following up on my last post about the GDC "Micro-Talks": Just to start, I want to reiterate that Matt Boch's suggestion – that video games should try to ape the procedural, perma-failure mechanics of roguelikes as a way of handling dating and romance with NPCs – is a very good idea. This post is just about his claim that those mechanics can correct for the problem of "toxic entitlement", which they cannot.

The example with Sera totally destroys the very case that Boch is trying to make, because Sera – a traditionally authored, deterministic NPC – actually does a fairly effective job of challenging and denying player entitlement. Boch advocates for social "permadeath" mere moments after explaining how his friend was was forced to restart the game because his choices were incompatible with Sera's sexuality.

Boch also goes out of his way to falsely present Sera as "finding all female-identifying Inquisitors irresistible", and that she is "admiring you in secret, pining away, just waiting for you to finally notice her". But neither of these are true. Aside from the fact that she is strictly homosexual, Sera doesn't display any attraction to the Inquisitor unless they either initiate the romance, or happen to be qunari (a species that Sera finds physically attractive). Sera is also fairly bigoted: she disdains mages, ethnic elves, and anyone who vocally promotes the interests of either (even the Inquisitor).

Sera is written to expect potential romantic partners to appeal to her physical and social preferences, and at least one of those preferences is an absolute deal-breaker that results in permanent romantic failure. She is the ideal example of exactly how an NPC should be, by Boch's standards. Players can't simply manipulate Sera to suit their whims, they have to conform the Inquisitor's body and behaviour to Sera's liking. By restarting the campaign, Boch's own friend sacrificed multiple real-world hours of his real-world life for the sake of catching this fictional woman's fictional attention.

Is that entitled behaviour?

Let's imagine an alternative, procedurally-generated Sera. When Boch's friend googles her, what will he find? Strategy guides outlining the probabilities of her preferences, explaining how to determine what she likes, how to reliably manipulate her based on minimal info, and how to most quickly decide if she is going to be adequately obliging – or if you should just restart in order to roll a less picky version of her. Sera's mind has been made more complex and unpredictable, but her thought processes are still laid bare on the internet. The rules have changed, but she's still a trophy, and the players still feel entitled to win.

The extent to which a game encourages or discourages entitlement is a matter of content more than mechanics. It depends on the characters actually demonstrating their agency in dialogue and action, on them denying the player and asserting their fictional "inner lives". They can do this regardless of being authored or procedurally generated.

[spewagepipe]

GDC Microtalks 2015: One Hour, Ten Speakers, Games and Play, and Us

The GDC Microtalks returns with ten short talks about the philosophy, history and futures of the design, art and culture of games and play,

These micro-talks from GDC 2015 are all mind-expanding. If you, like me, missed it at the time, these talks still have a lot of relevance now. More thoughts across the break.

Emily Short (5:58) provides a who's who of the tabletop story game scene circa 2015, all of which deserve the attention of anyone who sees games as a medium for narrative. I think it would be very challenging to adapt any of their mechanics to video games, since they all rely on human intelligence to generate, and then build upon, story beats – and video games can still only respond to player inputs in very specific, limited ways.

Lisa Brown (12:05) describes a way to increase a team's productivity and efficiency. In the process, she unwittingly provides a scathing indictment of the way capitalism alienates workers from their own work. Her experiment demonstrates, in a vivid counter-example, that connecting a worker directly to the intrinsic social value of their work is powerfully motivating.

Matt Boch (18:06) thinks that RPGs, dating sims, and the like, should try procedurally generating the priorities and preferences of their NPCs. The player would then develop general skills and strategies for interacting with NPCs, rather than memorizing deterministically "correct" interactions (or referring to guides to obtain the same info). This is a great idea! Unfortunately, his reasoning behind it is so bad that I needed to write a whole separate article about it.

Naomi Clark's (24:37) talk was hard for me to parse, but it contains a useful reminder: when you prototype a game, it might fail to live up to your design goals – but it is worth considering whether it is able to instead fulfill a different set of goals than the ones you had in mind. Sometimes, very valuable innovations are made by accident, and your "failed prototype" might be an ingenious solution for someone else's design problem.

Tim Rogers (30:36) gives a winding, entertaining anecdote before boiling it down to a thesis I saw once before from Robert Yang: "Isn't criticism just a design document for a better game?" Spoiler: Yes, it is.

Holly Gramazio (37:24) rattles off the rules of 21 simple games that she invented for her talk. It looks like a fun exercise for game designers, but there's no evident thesis to the talk itself.

Celia Pearce (43:36) gives a brief art history lecture about how the Dada and Fluxus movements have involved games, but she never actually answers her title question: what game designers can learn from those movements?

Cara Ellison (50:08) attempts to explain "intersubjectivity" by way of listing various examples of emotional moments in games. I watched it twice, but I still have no idea what the word means, or how to use it to create those emotional moments.

Rami Ismail (56:19) describes, with blistering speed, the way that language barriers are used to oppress and marginalize groups both within the medium and the industry. He also includes a call to action for the industry to do better, with suggestions for how.

[360sanalgerceklik-blog]

Sanal Gerçeklik başlığına KOKU maskesi piyasaya çıktı

Sanal Gerçeklik başlığına KOKU maskesi piyasaya çıktı

Sanal gerçeklik ile gerçek dünyayı sanal dünya’ya taşındı.Peki bu teknoloji ile daha neler yapabiliriz ki? Gerçek dünya’da yapamadığımız şeyleri sanal dünya’da yapabiliyoruz. Örneğin, oturduğumuz yerden farklı bir ülkeye gidip gezebiliyoruz veya eğlence parklarına gitmeden oturduğumuz yerden adrenalini yaşayabiliyoruz.

“Peki daha ne kadar ileri gidebilir ?” sorusuna sanal gerçeklik başlığı ile…

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[ansiklomedia]

DirectX 12 Olgunlaştıkça Hızlanıyor Microsoft yeni DirectX 12’yi ilk kez tanıttığında, bir önceki sürüm olan DirectX 11’e oranla iki kat daha fazla performans sağladığını iddia etmişti.

[ansiklomedia]

AMD R9 300 GDC Fuarında Boy Gösterdi Amerika’da yapılan GDC 2015 etkinliğinde Nvidia’nın yeni Titan X ekran kartı hayli ilgi çekti. Crytek, Oculus, Unity, Valve ve Epic Games tarafından hazırlanan sanal gerçeklik (VR) gözlüğü demolarında yoğun olarak kullanılan Titan X resmen gövde gösterisi yaptı diyebiliriz.

[stevebuckythyla]

I’M SCREAMING!!! 

Right so I’ve posted about Nelo before. It’s the video game my best friend and her fiance designed that they won a grant to create from GDC 2015. 

They’ve been auditioning voice actors for the role of Nelo and Todd Haberkorn (voice actor - Natsu from Fairy Tail, Watanuki from Tsubasa/xxxHolic, Italy from Hetalia, Allen Walker from D. Gray-man, Haruka Nanase from Free!, Hikaru Hitachiin from Ouran, Death The Kid from Soul Eater, Shiro Iori from Kill la Kill, etc.) was chosen as the voice and he posted about it on his facebook.

I’m like highkey so proud of them both rn and lowkey super jealous lol.