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The Best Of GDC
Gamasutra's Question of the Week has been asked and answered, and from around the game industry there were brought forth opinions on The Highlights of GDC 2005. Overwhelmingly, people saw the "Burning Down the House" and "Spore" presentations as the most interestng, with a few other folks digging other parts of the conference more. From the article: "I think Nintendo's keynote speech was the most interesting moment for me. Coming a day after Microsoft's keynote, it highlighted the clear divergence between these company's platform strategies moving forward. If you're a gamer at heart (and have the heart of a gamer) root for Nintendo, as they seem to be more interested in gameplay innovation than making an uber-media-micropayment device. (HD-gaming be damned!) - Anonymous" The Puzzle Pirates and Game Atoms talks were probably my most amused moments during the conference. After all, Raph's talk had little monsters and the pirates brought rum.
Remember when Nintendo said try using a dead pixel DS for a week or two, and if it is too annoying, then we'll replace it for you free of charge?
Well, except for the fact that Nintendo never said that! Nintendo has, from the start, maintained a consumer-friendly policy with respect to their hardware. Sony has consistently tried to foist the problems off onto their users. (Like with the dying PS2's)
As the GDC yellowshirt volunteer who did the data entry for the paper evaluations they hand out for Burning Down the House and the Spore presentation, I can verify that this Best of List is quite likely correct.
For Burning Down the House, numerous people wrote in 6's and circled those, writing in comments that their only complaint was that it didn't go on long enough. A handful of people dinged certain speakers point-wise. But for each person who saw fit to ding Laurel or Zimmerman, many more sang their praises. In talking to people I heard that Laurel had a certain wry humor that was lost on some people who might have taken her too literally, and a handful of people thought Zimmerman interrupted too much. But the mean was 4.67 out of 5 or higher for all speakers. It would have been much higher if our data entry system accepted numbers higher than 5, as significant amounts of people wrote in 6's. The mean overall score for the session was, if I remember right, 4.90 out of 5.
Here's a transcript of Burning Down the House if you want to read for yourself what was said. It can't quite capture the energy of the discussion though.
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03
As for Will Wright's talk on Spore, well, it was overwhelmingly positive. His score was a mean of 4.98 out of 5 with 212 received feedback forms. Numerous write-ins of 6s and 10s which just get counted as 5 by us yellow-shirts. Overwhelming positive comments also, including many people making liberal use of f* bombs in comments such as "f***ing great!!!11" or "f*** me!!!". ; -) Only negative comments were, of course, that no room is large enough to hold the audience Will attracts and we all want him to talk for hours at a time instead of just one hour.
I'll have to recommend a google search for "Spore screenshots" if you want to know more about that, as EA immediately went into info control mode and even shut down the movie theater re-broadcast immediately after. This was received with groans, grumbling and one person shouting "Challenge Everything!"
But the consensus that these two talks were among the highlight of the GDC is supported numerically. I didn't do the numbers for it, but I'd also suggest that the Experimental Gameplay demonstration was extremely excellent as well.