GDC’S BEST SESSION (according to Next Generation)

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http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9261&Itemid=2  By Colin Campbell	P
There have been some very fine conference sessions here at GDC, but with respect to organizer CMP the best session of all took place off-site, in a hotel suite, with just 20 people in the room. Next-Gen was there.
Gathered in the room were six industry luminaries, all of whom carry enough reputational and intellectual gravity to land a heavyweight keynote. They sat together for just under two hours to debate the most crucial, stimulating and controversial issues facing our industry. In attendance, and surely rapt, were a handful of games journalists. Though none require it, for the sake of form we’ll identify the bigwigs. They were Phil Harrison (Sony); Raph Koster (independent game designer), Neil Young (EA); Peter Molyneux (Lionhead); Chris Taylor (Gas Powered Games) and David Perry (Acclaim et al). Game Theory podcast co-host Gary Whitta moderated. The group freewheeled between a number of subjects, but they can most decently be summed up as ‘what we make, why we make it and how it’s changing’. Here are a few snippets (presented as separate quotes – not as a conversation). Next-Gen will be posting a full transcript at the weekend. ON GAMES TODAY Neil Young: “Everything is being repeated, at least to some degree. Games with upsized visuals have outperformed new games that tried to do something original. That speaks mostly about the nature of the consumer who, perhaps, isn’t ready for things that are 100% new.” Raph Koster: “The new games in this generation are really Xbox Live achievements or Miis. It isn’t the graphics that define the next generation – they are just the two liter bottle instead of the one liter bottle. It’s the connectivity that is making games cut across all kinds of platforms and games.” Phil Harrison: “The market has grown but the paradigm hasn’t changed. Next-gen isn’t characterized by graphics or storage issues but by servers and connectivity. The coolest things aren’t what we make but what operates in the spaces between. They things that emerge.” Peter Molyneux: “This is an incredibly exciting time and great things are happening. But I wonder how consumers see all this. Do they see Wii Sports, as we do, as representing next generation, or do they see the drama and visual excitement of Call of Duty 4 as the real next generation? Isn’t it interesting, when you compare today’s games with the early games, that it’s no longer about how many people you shoot but the experience of shooting itself.” On Wii Phil Harrison: “You have to give them [Nintendo] credit. It’s frustrating for me to experience, because I’ve been saying for years that playing games together is the future, but the guys in Japan [Sony] said that people just didn’t play that way. The Wii ads show the perspective from the television – of people on the sofa having fun together – which is very clever, so how pissed off am I?” Neil Young: “We [EA] had to scramble to get up to speed on Wii. Our first set of efforts involved taking PlayStation 2 games and transferring them to Wii while modifying the interface. But we understood quickly that we had to organize our games around the interface so, sure, you’ll see EA staples with modified interfaces but you’ll also see us trying new things. The economics on Wii are such that you can afford to take a risk.” Phil Harrison: “But your addressable market is only 40% of the installed base because Nintendo’s own products are taking the first 60%. How do you work with that?” Neil Young:“Games like Smarty Pants [a family quiz title] don’t cost too much and have a fast round trip time. In some ways, it’s like an Xbox Live title. Commercially, it’s pretty successful.” David Perry: “I think if you ask people what the next generation console is, they’ll say it’s Wii! While I respect and admire what Nintendo have done, none of the games that I personally want to play are on Wii. They are on the other consoles.”
ON THE DEATH OF PC GAMES Chris Taylor: “I am curious to learn how we can reach Peggle-like audiences of 200 million. I think a lot of it is down to the idea of simplicity; the [false] idea that depth and simplicity are different or that simplicity is something merely ordinary. Look at World of Warcraft. On level one the screen is completely clean. By level 70 it’s amazingly complex. That’s absolutely right. The success of that game shows that the design works. Look at the most successful companies in PC gaming such as Nvidia. They are proof that people are playing PC games, they just aren’t buying them. Everyone is a player now. There was a sharp turn in the road, and we missed it.” Peter Molyneux: “The press are forever saying that PC gaming is dead, but I don’t believe it for a minute. I fear though that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact is that PC gaming is changing; the gamer and the business models are changing.” SOLID MEDIA Phil Harrison: “There is a generation alive now, at school, who, in aggregate, will never buy physical media. They are the first who won’t buy physical atom-based media.” Raph Koster: “I went to a web conference recently, and they called up some random young people. Someone asked them how often they used their CD player. One kid says, ‘what’s a CD player?’” The audience gasped. Neil Young: “I think there will always be some people who want to keep and collect their content on disks.” Phil Harrison: “No way. This is a living thing, a community, on a server. It cannot be confined on a disk. It’s not static. It’s dynamic.” SOCIAL NETWORKS Raph Koster: “Iteration speed on the web is insane. The base assumptions on pace are astounding. The web can test and iterate in matters of hours; Flickr is patching every 30 minutes. Web analytics is something we can’t do and on top of this games are very hard to make. Unlike the web guys, we can’t afford to make six different versions of a game to see which one works best.” Peter Molyneux: “Shouldn’t we be making our own social networks [as games and as platforms]? I see what those guys are doing and I think the mistake they are making is the one that we took 20 years to fix; they are mistaking complexity for depth” Raph Koster: “The fact is that those guys are learning our tricks much quicker than we are learning theirs. They are gamers. They understand the things that we are good at, like interfaces and they learn fast.” Phil Harrison: “We already make social networks. MMOs are social networks but with a narrative.” Neil Young: “At EA we’ve been playing around with creating applications and releasing them and watching them go viral. It’s incredibly fast. If you are making games right now and you don’t understand this stuff, you won’t be around for long.”