Also, apologies for being so sparse over the holidays, but expect me to be back to posting more regularly!

The first thing that popped into my mind when I heard the word ‘preservation’ was the fate of my NES. I remember it all too vividly. The Nintendo 64 was the hot new console, and I had been begging my parents for one for the past year or so. All of my friends had one of the fancy new game machines, and whenever I visited their houses it was all I wanted to play (with them or without them!), and torture to go home and leave it behind.

When I finally got one of my own, I was obsessed. I tore through Ocarina of Time, marathoned Diddy Kong Racing and drowned myself in Super Smash Brothers. I played my Ninetndo 64 exclusively for a few months until someone mentioned something that triggered a memory of one of my favorite NES games – I think it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I don’t remember for certain. Give me a break; I was about ten years old.

What I do remember is what my Mom answered when I asked her where she had put my NES: “Oh, I threw it away. I thought you didn’t need it anymore now that you have your new one.”

A practically mint condition, perfectly-functioning NES. The memory still haunts me to this day.

But personal trauma aside, I think that preservation is an interesting topic in relation to games. I could talk about some of the more obvious points such as the whole bizarre-yet-awesome video game museum phenomenon that seems to be popping up, how the move towards digital is affecting our need and ability to preserve, or even how the aforementioned Nintendo 64 is now considered a vintage console. But I’ll try not to make you feel too old reading the Student Perspective column.

What I really wanted to write about is why I think preservation is valuable – more specifically, how I think that looking to the past can help us to determine the wants and needs of the future. Everyone these days talks about the future of games and where we’re going next and of course these innovative thinkers are a vital part of the games industry. But just as important as these visionaries are the more grounded folk who can look to the past and really hone in on what it has to tell us.

In one of my graduate classes at Carnegie Mellon, a professor said something very simple yet very insightful about innovation; first seek out a need and then create an appropriate response to it, don’t just create something in a vacuum and then try to find a need for it to fill. It sounds obvious, right? Well, it is – so obvious, unfortunately, that it’s easy to forget on daily basis. It’s easy to get wrapped up in cool ideas like the ability to play a game with 3D graphics, or a super complex new achievement system. But if these features are all ‘vision’ with no eye towards what history has to tell us about what gamers actually want from a gaming experience, there is a chance it could end up missing its mark.

The same thing goes for sequels, and for rebooting IP. It’s plain to see that the industry is becoming more and more sequel-driven, partially due to rising development costs and the risk associated with developing a brand new IP. But there’s no reason that this is a bad thing as long as it’s done right. One of the best sequel ‘rules of thumb’ that I’ve heard is the following ‘recipe’: 1/3 old, 1/3 improved and 1/3 new. This one resonated with me because it really forces a developer to be responsive – to go back and honestly ask:“What was the best part of my game that is worth keeping? What were some of the biggest complaints that I can try to fix this time around, or do to create an even better overall experience?”

The ideal approach, I think, is to use clues that the past has left for us in order to inform and inspire innovation. To clarify, I’m not arguing that metrics and sales data and other such hard evidence should rule the creative process. I’m arguing that reflecting on the successes and failures of the past can lead to some fascinating insights, the variety of which I believe has the potential to inspire some of the most perceptive, original and creative ideas imaginable.

Reflecting on the past won’t bring back my NES, unfortunately. But it’s still valuable.

Yes, I’ve seen the movies and I do like them. I’m aware that this ride is the favorite of many of my friends, and that most riders happily wait in line for over an hour for this 3-4 minute experience. But for whatever reason, this ride just didn’t do it for me. I felt the same way this summer, but after my second trip, I was able to pay a lot more attention… and I think I’ve been able to hone in on some of the specific reasons. Feel free to check it out under the cut.

What is all boils down to, I think, is that the ride doesn’t feel as interactive as most of the other rides at Disney. The ride is thrilling (if, like me, you like rides that are bumpy and jerky – in a good way), but it feels more like you’re on a ride rather than part of an Indiana Jones adventure. It’s pretty passive.

So why is this? In my opinion:

It’s too atmospheric.

While this might sound like a good thing, I say that it’s too atmospheric because so many areas of the ride are atmospheric at the expense of having memorable focal points. They might have been realistic or a great reference to the movies, but there were too few things that ‘popped’ or caught your attention. For example, I can probably describe to you 1/4 to 1/3 of the different ‘beats’ from the ride – the rest were either forgettable, or too bland to describe effectively.

The room full of skulls is the epitome of this. It sounds pretty bland, doesn’t it? It was actually pretty phenomenal looking, but all in all, it was pretty bland, and that’s why I couldn’t describe it to you very well. All of the skulls looked like all 0f the other skulls, they were all the same size, there was no full skeleton anywhere, no story being told… just lots and lots of skulls that all blended into each other. And I remember being bored less than halfway through the room, on what was a pretty quick visit to begin with. It’s because the room was too atmospheric for it’s own good, with no focal points or distinguishing, attention-catching, or otherwise evocative aspects.

The existing focal points are timed poorly. 

What comes to mind first is the giant snake; it’s not fun at all. It moves way too slow, especially for the quick speed of the ride, and doesn’t nearly move far enough forward to make the audience actually react to it (rather than perhaps smile at the reference to the movies, but wouldn’t we prefer to startle or spook them a little bit?). Another moment that exemplifies this is when a skeleton comes forward out of a cavern as the car is racing by – and I literally missed it completely the first time I went on this ride, it went so slow and moved so little.

Likewise, there are several moments that I think could have been drawn out, such as the crossing of the bridge over lava and the escape from the giant boulder. In the former the car slows down, but barely enough for it to register before the moment is over. In the latter, while it didn’t particularly bother me, my friend said that he really wanted more of a chase sequence with the boulder, and I do think it would have been easy to get a lot more leverage out of what is unequivocally the most famous moment of the IP. Both of these moments could have been drawn out for a lot more benefit, I thought… not to mention that varying the lengths of the moments would have helped it seem a lot less formulaic and a lot more exciting.

Too much of the ride is in darkness. 

It may sound stupid and I didn’t realize this one until my friend mentioned it, but way too much of the ride is in darkness. The bumpy motion of the car is exciting and the idea of ‘not knowing what’s next’ is totally viable for this ride, but it’s way overused in this experience. There were quite a few moments where I had time to stop and think to myself, okay, we’re in a cave, got it, are we there yet? Or worse yet, let my mind wander. Perhaps this just means that that the dark moments were too long, not too numerous (I would argue both, but will reserve judgment until I have a chance to pay closer attention).

The ride does use shadows to pretty cool effects one or twice, and realistically, it’s appropriate for the experience. But there should never be a moment when a rider get bored, and with nothing by the fun-yet-white-noise-esque bumpiness to concentrate on in some of the dark periods, it can most definitely happen.

All in all, Indiana Jones wasn’t a bad ride. I happily went on it this second time, and it had a lot of highlights – I really enjoyed the moment when Indiana swings from a rope overhead as if he’s going to jump into your car and join you, and the lava aesthetics were pretty sweet. But overall I would call it one of the weaker rides at Disneyland, especially after all the build-up from friend’s recommendations.

Though please keep in mind that this is like calling out someone as the worst player on the Steelers, or the worst show on Broadway. It’s still incredible, it still got there in the first place, and is still better than 98% of everything else in its category. It simply doesn’t shine quite as brightly from the shadows of the 2% surrounding it.

What are some of the nifty new things in my life, you ask? I’ve had a lot of thoughts that deserve their own posts recently (expect them soon! I’ll have more time to write while I’m on winter break), but there are two that are relevant to games and worth mentioning here.

The first is the Blizzard Holiday party. I was invited by one of my friends from this summer, and it was pretty incredible. The first half of the night was dinner at the Disneyland Hotel, and the second part of the night? They opened up half of California Adventure Park just for Blizzard. We didn’t have access to everything, but they did have the Tower of Terror operating, both of their karaoke venues open, and two showings of the ElecTRONica laser show (oh, and an open bar!).

The best part, however, was the private viewing of their World of Color show. This is because afterwards, they had a 5-minute Blizzard IP-themed show. No joke. It was one of the most epic things I’ve experienced in my entire life. The video doesn’t do it justice, but it’s still definitely worth checking out:

Amazing, right? I don’t think I dorked out this much since I found out I would get to be working there.

The other item (which doesn’t really hold a candle to that one but is still worth mentioning) is that the IGDA is starting a Student Perspective column in their monthly newsletter, and my submission was chosen to be the inaugural piece. It’s a little higher level compared to how I usually prefer to write – meaning it’s more theoretical and potentially ‘Ivory Tower-esque’, not more advanced – but it’s got a decent point behind it that I think I communicated well.

And it’s kind of exciting. The IGDA site gets a collective 6k+ unique monthly viewers, and while I don’t know how many of them go for the newsletters, it’s still a neat feeling. I’ll post it here when it’s actually published if anyone cares to check it out.

The highlight? The study sounded extremely poorly done and inconclusive, and even the LA Times, a non-gamer outlet, says in the last paragraph, “While controversy over the neurological impacts of video games has been widespread, there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative effect on players’ brains, according to a statement provided by the Radiological Society.”

That’s pretty neat.

My own opinion is that, a) people gravitate towards things that their natural tendencies already predispose them towards, and b) people can get dramatically different things out of the same piece of media.

That was a fancy way of saying that games aren’t worse than any other kind of violent media, that violent people will seek out those things because they’re already violent, and that the majority of players are in it for the social/competitive aspect, or for the satisfaction they get from the dexterous skill it requires, or even the story. They’re not going to come away thinking about actually killing people in real life.

Maybe your girlfriend will, if you spend too much time playing them. But that's why I personally believe that gamers needs to stick to dating other gamers.

As for the “long-term” (one week?) brain effects? What they’re doing is putting the subjects in a certain mood and then measuring the effects of that. When you’re in an abnormal mindset, you emit certain hormones and your brain activity changes.  It’s as simple as that. If you’ve ever taken a psychological test like Myers-Briggs, they tell you not to take it when you’re particularly happy, depressed, anxious, et cetera… in order to avoid exactly what this study is exploiting.

This article makes me giggle more than anything else, but I thought I would share. It’s encouraging to see the changes in the attitudes of the general public in the space of just five years.

Anyway, here’s my take in a nutshell, although I do plan to write more in-depth on it at some later point: I think that the F2P model is essentially the future of gaming. Some high-end games will still follow the blockbuster pay-$60-when-it-launches model, but that more and more games will turn the way of Riot and Turbine and focus on monetizing players after they’ve already been playing.

I think this is a good thing, although it’s extremely, extremely important that companies figure out how to do it right. Not many are right now, and it’s giving the whole model a bad rap. The idea of releasing essentially half a game and requiring players to pay for the other half is a terrible trend, and I hope it dies a fiery death. It’s a surefire way to piss people off.

The key is to design something with a focus on quality, and with monetization in the back of the mind. It should offer non-payers a full and genuinely compelling experience that motivates them to want to pay, not a teaser of an experience that makes them feel tricked into paying in order to experience what the game was originally intended to be. I think that Riot Games does this perfectly; non-payers can enjoy a complete game, but serious players are pretty motivated to pay (a reasonable price) for access to their favorite characters. Which are sometimes available for free. It’s essentially convenience.

With all this in mind, here’s a sort-of relevant paper that I wrote for one of my classes. It’s short because it was only supposed to be one concise page, and it focuses on piracy rather than business models. But I make the argument that, with the way that F2P models are taking games anyway, it allows many more options for games to overcome piracy creatively until a true technological solution can be determined.

I promise it’s more interesting than that probably sounds. Click ‘Read More’ to check it out!

 “Becoming Piracy Resistant in the Modern Entertainment Industry”

This picture was not actually in my paper when I turned it in, but I can't resist THIS pirate. OH! SeewhatIdidthere?

While more and more entertainment has become available to the modern consumer at lower prices and with greater convenience, the desire to pay less and less for it has remained strong. Out of this has come piracy, a very real problem for the entire entertainment industry. In this paper I will give a brief overview of the impact of piracy on the entertainment industry, and then present what I believe to be the next steps in safeguarding oneself against this problem in the games industry based on current strategies for similar issues and evolving technologies.

It is no secret that piracy has become a mainstream method of accessing entertainment, especially in the younger crowds. It has become a household term, and in a 2010 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey on digital piracy, over half of participants said they believed that ‘everyone did it’[1]. As a result of such widespread piracy, music and film companies estimate that this has decreased national annual revenue by $16 billion[2]. In the games space, Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 sold 11.9 million copies in 2009, according to the Top Global Markets sales report. Over the same period of time, TorrentFreak claims that 4.1 million copies were pirated[3] for a loss of over $270 million – for a single game in a single year[4]. Piracy is clearly no small matter for entertainment – and the industry has yet to find a lasting method of hack-proof digital rights management.

One way to approach this is to draw inspiration from the creative ways in which companies are dealing with the revenue lost from secondhand sales. Although this practice is legal, the revenue from used content by companies like Amazon is, much like with piracy, revenue that the content creators never get to see. The games industry has a particularly tough time with this, with stores like GameStop who specialize in the resale of video games – and unlike for films, there is far less protection for the content creators. For example, GameStop sells discounted used copies of the same games that it also sells new, and there is no window of time they are required to wait before reselling a used-but-recently-released game[5].

The most effective tactic in monetizing used games so far seems to be a dual focus on both physical sales and the ability to access downloadable content (‘DLC’), and treating games as a service in order to add meaningful value[6]. The former tactic is exemplified best by Electronic Arts’s (EA) Ten Dollar Project, in which only some of a game is guaranteed with the disc. New games come with a single-use coupon allowing the buyer to access all of the DLC, online play, et cetera. Secondhand buyers will have to pay an additional $10 or more to access the same content, which goes straight to EA and mitigates the revenue lost[7]. The notion of games as a service is exemplified by online games that provide regular patches and other additional content; these kinds of game can afford to miss out on retail sales because they primarily rely on post-sale monetization such as subscription fees or microtransactions[8].

All sectors of the entertainment industry can learn from these approaches when it comes to piracy, even the games industry itself.  With piracy as culturally ingrained as it is, traditional methods such as suing random offenders are very hit-or-miss, and newer proposed methods such as asking internet providers to dole out penalties might be too easy to quietly endure – and are not necessarily any more thorough. By focusing less on ‘catching’ specific offenders (which has proved itself extremely difficult) and focusing more on monetizing consumers on the cloud after the content itself has been installed – regardless of how the content was acquired – the games industry can essentially steel itself from the brunt of the economic effects of piracy until a more permanent solution can be found.

For the record, press releases are a lot harder to write than you’d think… especially when you’re not given nearly as much information as you should have been (not the case with Atari at all, for the record, they were terrific about that).  They’re an unintuitive mix of promotional and succinct, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. Without further ado, go ahead and check it out under ‘Read More’.

Atari’s Asteroids: Gunner Readies, Aims and Fires onto iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

LOS ANGELES – November 10, 2011

Atari, one of the world’s most recognized publishers and producers of interactive entertainment, announced the launch of Asteroids®: Gunner today on the App Store. Asteroids: Gunner is a free-to-play, dual-stick action shooter for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, developed by Fluik Entertainment, the minds behind Office Jerk. In the first original sequel to the genre-defining arcade gameAsteroids, released in 1979, players will journey across multiple galaxies in search of valuable cosmic crystals and exciting asteroid-blasting action. A turn-based multiplayer Challenge Mode is due for release in the game’s first update, expected to hit later this year.

Take on the role of the Gunner on a journey across the galaxies, blasting his way through deadly asteroid fields and alien fleets as he works his way to the top of the gritty crystal mining industry. With three different ships under his command and three dangerous galaxies with 150 total enemy waves to crush, players will have a literal and metaphorical blast as they gain rank promotions and collect cosmic crystals in order to buy upgrades that will transform their space crafts into undeniable asteroid-destroying machines.

Features include:

• Three all-new galaxies to explore and conquer, with 150 waves of asteroids and alien warships to obliterate
• Dual-stick controls for firing and movement, perfect for non-stop blasting action
• Access to three unique space crafts to pilot: the Miner, the Bomber and the Dart
• Legions of power-ups and upgrades to customize your ship and turn it into an unstoppable force
• Earn Crystals and purchase Space Bucks to unlock new galaxies and powerful upgrades
• An extensive achievement system that lets you earn ranks… and bragging rights
• OpenFeint and Game Center integration

“The successful launch of Atari’s Greatest Hits this summer exceeded our expectations for the iOS platform, garnering over 3 million downloads to date,” said Jim Wilson, CEO of Atari. “Asteroids: Gunner capitalizes on the innovation and potential of the app store and sets the path for more great games based on our legendary franchises while launching new original titles that meet the expectations of our dedicated fans and broader consumer base.”

To download Asteroids: Gunner from the App Store, please use the following link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id474572720

Head over to the official Asteroids: Gunner Facebook page and “Like” it for future updates:www.facebook.com/AsteroidsGunner

For more information about Atari games and the latest news:

- Visit our website: www.atari.com

- Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/atari

- Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/atari

A press kit for Asteroids: Gunner may be downloaded with the following link:www.triplepointpr.com/dl/atari/Asteroids_Gunner_DPK.zip (20MB)

For more information please visit: www.atari.com

For those of you too indifferent to click the link, here’s the gist; Ubisoft signed a deal with Sony Pictures to adapt Assassin’s Creed into a movie, and is getting unprecedented creative control (“even Steven Spielberg cannot get this kind of deal”) because they’re putting up the vast majority of the money.

Considering AC is one of the most valuable video game franchises ever – and Ubisoft is putting up so much money – I don’t think this sounds particularly insane. Sony Pictures is literally paying a fraction of what it normally would for a film, and for an absolutely epic IP with a large, loyal pre-existing fanbase. It’s virtually zero risk, and almost guaranteed success.

Hey Steven, you want that deal? Go find an IP with as many millions of fans as Assassin’s Creed and then finance 80% of the film yourself, okay?

In all seriousness, I’m really excited to see how this turns out. There are some video games about which I would cringe to hear this news, but Assassin’s Creed is a great, story-and-character-centric game, and the creative obviously have a good grasp on story. If anyone can do it, it’s either these guys or Naughty Dog.

[Note: seriously, watch the video linked above if nothing else, it’s hilarious.]

Either way, I think that the success of this movie is going to have huge repercussions on the whole game-turned-movie phenomenon as a whole. The genre has traditionally been pretty lackluster anyway, but with a deal like the Assassin’s Creed movie has, I foresee the potential to either solidify this as The Way Video Game Movie Deals Are Done, if it rocks… or entirely kill them altogether, if it bombs.

Either way, I’ll definitely be watching (pun not intended).

I wrote a paper earlier in the semester, part of which involved summarizing a script. In one scene a bunch of reporters were waiting eagerly outside of a police department, waiting for a certain person to emerge. In my summary I wrote that, “the reporters camped the building.”

…apparently forgetting that ‘camped’ doesn’t mean the same thing to non-gamers. When I got the paper back, my poor confused professor had written in the margins, “You mean to say they ‘camped out in front of the building’?”

Camping Versus Camping

I literally laughed out loud, and went up to my professor to explain the confusion (he hadn’t graded me down, so that wasn’t the issue). He half seemed to understand what I was explaining to him, but got the concept that ‘it was gamer-speak and made sense in context’, and laughed along good-naturedly, though still  a little confused.

This is also the same man who, when I told him I wanted to go into video games for the first time, got really excited (think ‘little kid at a candy store on Christmas’) and asked what my favorite games were. I listed off a few and then, with equal enthusiasm, he exclaims, “I have no idea why I asked, I don’t know anything about games. But that’s so great!”

I’ll write another time on how amazingly supportive and flexible Carnegie Mellon has been about my goals. I think it deserves a post.

Now go play Skyrim and distract yourself from my lack of lengthy content this week.

More about the story (and more pictures!) below.

I’d never been much of a con junkie, although I liked the idea. I cosplayed back in 2006 once at Katsucon, but never had the time to really get into it. I made more costumes, but my availability just sucked and eventually my enthusiasm just tapered off. I’ve been nerdy video game characters for Halloween and such before… but if you’ve ever been to a con, you know that it’s an entirely different vibe. Here’s a picture of me as Selphie from back when:

Anyway, I discovered Comikaze through Livingsocial; there was some deal for cheap tickets on there, and since I knew I would be busy with class/life on Saturday, I bought an all-day ticket for Sunday and inspired my roommate to do this same. This was 2-3 weeks ahead of time. In that span of time, I promptly completely forgot all about Comikaze.

Until my roommate mentioned it on Friday. She asked if I was still planning to go, to which I replied, “OH. Right. That. Sure, let’s go.” It wasn’t until a mere 3-4 hours before the event itself that I realized, oh my god, this was a CON and I could DRESS UP IF I WANTED TO. I had a massively nerdy moment. I had dragged my un-debuted Tifa costume around with me like a hoarder for 6 years now, from southern Virginia to DC to Pittsburgh to Orange County to Los Angeles, and I was finally getting a chance to show it off to the world. My roommate promptly threw on her alternate Halloween costume that she didn’t get to wear this year (Sweet Pea from Sucker Punch), and we were off. Here’s a picture of us at the event:

So, yeah. I could talk more about the event itself – it was fun, there was a pretty heavy Steampunk influence, more comic book-y than I’m generally into, but also lots of Firefly (which I can never get enough of) and lots of cool cosplaying in general. One dude even asked to take a picture of of him carrying me – which I don’t have a picture of yet – and then gave me a peck on the cheek before running off, saying “I’ve always wanted to do that to Tifa!” It was adorable.

But I’ll be straight with you. The main purpose of this post was to gush about getting to cosplay again. Tifa is my all-time favorite female video game character, and it was so much fun to dress up as her and really feel like I finally got to do her justice. Here’s me fighting Ryu.

And completely unrelated, here is a really cute picture of one of those pictures that you can stick your head through, again with my roommate.

Totally made my weekend, and inspired me to want to cosplay again more seriously. I think my next costume will be either Inara from Firefly or Chell from Portal… though I’m open to suggestions! Let me know if you guys think of anything you think I could pull off well… and in the meantime, enjoy the pictures. I know I had an absolute blast!

I have to say, I had a blast and I am so thankful for this opportunity! Since the first three days were scrum certification for the professionals, the scholars instead went on studio tours of a bunch of Los Angeles and Irvine development teams. This was perhaps my favorite part, and something I’ll dedicate an entire second post to in the next couple of days.

The conference itself was really interesting too, of course. It ranged a wide variety of topics from the changing role of game designers to the dangers of some producers who try and achieve that fabled “100% efficiency.” While it clearly catered to producers (which I didn’t mind at all, obviously), there was definitely something there for every kind of leader in the industry.

Two talks in particular brought up points that compelled me to respond to them here; the first was Brenda Garno Brathwaite’s opening keynote, and the second was Jesse Schell’s Friday morning keynote. More on my thoughts below!

Brenda’s talk was provocative to me for one line in particular; she said that ideas are the most important thing that a company has, and to protect them. And immediately after she said that she has a million every minute. At first this seems pretty contradictory, but it struck a chord with a quote by Stewart Brand from an article I had to read for my Business Development class:

“Information wants to be free. On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. Information should be free, but your time should not.”

I actually don’t like this quote very much because I think it’s way more confusing than it needs to be. But I think the point is interesting; that information should be free, but that convenience and cultivation should not be. The word ‘idea’ can encompass all of those points, however, which I think is where the apparent contradiction lies.

Think about it – why do people pay for things like dialing 411? Lack of preparation, or time… all of which can really be boiled down into convenience. The information may be free, but the cost of your time is more valuable than the cost of the information. The real kicker in this scenario, however, I believe would be the cultivation of an idea. After the keynote I overheard two people discussing it, and one man claimed that he disagreed entirely, and that ideas were a dime a dozen. Execution, he argued, is where the value is created. Look at League of Legends, or any game that was originally labeled a clone of another but then dwarfed it in popularity because it was simply better.

I instinctively agreed with this, but then realized – what is it about execution that can make it so valuable? It’s not purely time or convenience, because the price of time can vary quite a lot from person to person. I guess one could say that it’s skill, but I would argue that a more accurate descriptor would be the strategy behind the execution… which I think can also be labeled an ‘idea’. Concepts might be a dime a dozen, sure. But the swarm of ideas that build upon each other to bring a concept to fruition are what truly make a great execution of a game concept valuable.

[Disclaimer: Not to say that this is necessarily more valuable than skill - I don't claim to know nearly enough about game development yet to make a strong argument either way. I just think that these kinds of ideas are the only kind that could hold a candle.]

In this way I think that I agree with Brenda, although I didn’t originally think I did. But I do think the caveat about different kinds of ideas is necessary.

The other most noteworthy item from the IGDA Leadership Forum, in my opinion, was the whole of Jesse Schell’s speech. While he usually speaks on game design, this time around he spoke on information flows at development studios. His talk consisted of a lot of really interesting case studies, psychological principles and his personal observations at his own studio, Schell Games.

While he joked that a lot of the information in his speech was obvious – and on some level, it was – it was still really illuminating to hear him point out astute little observations such as the dramatic effect of slightly different desk layouts amongst teams. What it really came down to was a well-thought out study on how to develop trust, respect, comfort, et cetera, within a studio and a team, and how to understand and leverage the emotions of the people involved in order to increase both happiness and productivity.

One example that he gave was of a struggling team that lacked strong communication. Jesse added another ‘less talented, but very likeable’ person to the team, and suddenly people were confiding their problems in him, and all these invisible little emotional issues were surfacing and getting fixed. The difference in productivity and happiness was noticeable within weeks, even if the team newcomer wasn’t contributing much in his official role.

This reminded me of the very first class I took in grad school, called Organizational Design & Implementation. It’s a big fancy name, really, for social network analyses within workplaces. A pretty good high level overview of some of the ideas from that class can be found here. I’d be happy to discuss it further if anyone is interested, but I think I’ll leave it at that on my blog.

I don’t have any qualms with Jesse’s talk; I just wanted to recap it for anyone interested. I’m absolutely fascinated by personality theory and strategies for interacting with different kinds of people, so this speech was an absolute pleasure for me to listen to – in addition to Jesse being a hilarious and fantastically entertaining speaker to begin with.