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Game Developers Burn Down the House
Plenty more excellent writeups to share as the Game Developer's Conference comes to an end. Gamespot has The Dark Spirit of Silent Hill, discussing how to craft the spooky survival horrors. Alice has worked her fingers to nubs writing on the Wonderland blog, and offers up Can MMOs Develop Mass Appeal?, and Burn the House Down, a ranting session between Warren Spector and some other surly curmudgeons. From the post: "But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We're doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you're gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice."
Wow, the next time someone says "Don't pirate that game, download the demo and if you like it, buy it!", just point them at that "Burn the House Down" rant. Here are gaming's top people, all saying "Pirate my software!"
[o]_O
It might help that his games are huge bestsellers, but I much prefer this attitude to the "count every copy as a lost sale" mentality that the BSA uses in there numbers for the cost of piracy.
In this DRM headed world, how long before the media companies get congress to declare a "war on copyright infringement". Maybe we can start locking up people for an illicit copy of Doom 3. I guss they could hang out with the busted for a joint crowd.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
No amount of imagination will make your game's AI better. What you need is enough processing power to be able to traverse and modify pretty complicated data structures that represent your agents. This kind of AI code is choke full of branching and random access to memory. It's the huge cost of systems like this that makes most modern's games AI weak. Physics are so 'in' that we spend all the time makign a car feel 'real', while the AI still goes on wheels.
If we make in order operations easier, all we're doing is make it even easier to go down the physics and graphics road. If every 1000 cycles you spend on AI can be transformed into 10,000, it's going to be tough to convince the publisher that AI is worth it.
For example, in the next Gran Turismo for 2006/7, do you think that Poliphony will spend the extra resources of the PS3 on realistic AI drivers that can overtake properly, or on damage modelling and an extra couple of layers of effects in the car's surfaces? My guess is that the AI will blow, as it does today, and all of the extra HP will be spent on graphics and physics.
Greg Costikyan was a firebrand and I thought he was insightful overall. A little cycnical, but that was in the spirit of the talk.
I felt bad for the guy in the mohawk who tried to related Blockbuster rentals with piracy. He got 100% owned by the panel. However, I think aside from Warren (who essentially said that anyone who worries about piracy is delusional, because those who pirate wouldn't have bought the game anyway - I agree), all the piracy comments from the panel were unbelievably stupid. Yes, we know you guys are militant anti-corporate whatevermajiggers - but that was pure grandstanding. You can try and get all artiste on us all you want, but you're all smart people and you have to realize that sales of your products are what fundamentally allow you to continue with your pursuits. But, that was at the end of the talk and I think they all just might have gotten carried away in the spirit of the moment.
Brenda retardowhatsits went as far as to say we need to get away from the "bad idea of publically owned companies". Back to Berkely with you, comrade.
Chris Hecker did indeed come dangerously close to breaking NDA with some of his talk. Even though he claims he never signed an NDA he clearly was on board with some of the more recent tech missives from the next-gen console companies. I half expected to see Blue and Green ninjas burst from the ceiling and kill him on the spot.
The rant session was a fun capper to the overall GDC experience. It would have been a 100% grand old time if that Brenda chick hadn't come in with her unwelcome ultra socialist rants (here's another clue Brenda : you were all excited about announcing you just got a job with Sun! That's completely inconsistent with your anti-male, anti-corporation rant. You hateful fucktard!
I just read the Burn the House Down article. It brought a tear to my eye. I follow Spector and Rocca closely and I email Costikyan everyonce in a while. We all pretty much think that the development and distribution is broken.
I've contributed to two books about the subject. The first book I talked about implementing a total quality assurance system to the game industry that's been in use for decades in the auto industry. The second book was built around ways to prevent bug defects which include eliminating the counter-productiveness of 80 hour work weeks.
The game industry is totally insane. There's no way I'd ever go back unless I could have total control over quality, which means we don't ship until QA has final sign-off. (Yeah, I'm going to get a smartass reply saying "That'll never happen then" but I've got a system and it works.)
I know work in the health/medical field and deal directly with the Food & Drug Administration. The quality controls I deal with put anything in gaming to shame. Why the gaming industry doesn't use established practices in other industries is a mystery.
Well, actually it isn't. The problem is that managers have really never truly managed a large scale project outside of the industry and the developers and artists have never worked anything other than games. Gaming is too insulated and is becoming inbred. This practice is slowly making an army of retarded game developers who will shortly implode.