Things to Note From GDC 2012

Unfortunately I was not able to get down to GDC 2012, but I was following some of the chatter online and spoke to people upon their return. I’ve compiled a few things that I think are noteworthy and one should keep an eye on. If I was at the conference itself I’m sure the list would be quite different.

Industry stuff:

Problematizing women-focused initiatives in the game industry.

When the Consoles Die by Ben Cousins. About a half hour and worth the watch:

When The Consoles Die, What Comes Next?

View another webinar from Ben Cousins

Technology stuff:

A procedural world generator called Outerra that can put Minecraft to shame .

It also looks like the world of mind reading is improving with a game of mental tug of war.

CryEngine, which powers the Crysis series and military simulators had a new tech trailer on display and it looks impressive – would you expect anything less? The new tech trailer for CryEngine3 can be seen on GameTrailers.



March 14th, 2012 by Adam

Tetris Can Help People Deal With Trauma

This post is copied and pasted from Things Are Good:

Playing games is tons of fun and enterprising people are finding ways to better humanity through gameplay. I just found out that Tetris can be used to help people deal with traumatic experiences – cool!

Research tells us that there is a period of up to six hours after the trauma in which it is possible to interfere with the way that these traumatic memories are formed in the mind. During this time-frame, certain tasks can compete with the same brain channels that are needed to form the memory. This is because there are limits to our abilities in each channel: for example, it is difficult to hold a conversation while doing maths problems.

The Oxford team reasoned that recognising the shapes and moving the coloured building blocks around in Tetris competes with the images of trauma in the perceptual information channel. Consequently, the images of trauma (the flashbacks) are reduced. The team believe that this is not a simple case of distracting the mind with a computer game, as answering general knowledge questions in the Pub Quiz game increased flashbacks. The researchers believe that this verbal based game competes with remembering the contextual meaning of the trauma, so the visual memories in the perceptual channel are reinforced and the flashbacks are increased.

Read more at the University of Oxford.
Hat tip to Reddit.



March 12th, 2012 by Adam

Getting Women in Games Development

The ever-excellent Mare Sheppard from Metanet and the Difference Engine Initiative gave a talk on the trials, issues, and complexities of integration of women-only events focused on women gamers at GDC yesterday. Gamasutra has a good write-up of her talk.

Another reason for the underrepresentation is pervasive stereotypes, which are automatic, misleading and often ingrained. Stereotyping “underscores the feeling echoed throughout our culture that women are abnormal, unusual and different,” she says. “This feeling that they don’t fit or don’t belong keeps many women from entering game development and similar fields.”

Sheppard says people are less likely to make eye contact with her or to shake her hand than they would be to engage with her male colleagues, especially in groups of people where she’s the only woman. People interrupt her more frequently in conversations and express doubt that she’s a programmer. “This certainly doesn’t happen at all times or with all people, but it happens a lot.”

I really wish I was able to see this talk, the word on the internet is that her talk was crowded and some people couldn’t get in!

Read more at Gamasutra



March 9th, 2012 by Adam

ZED.TO: An Immersive Narrative Experience

ZED.TO – an immersive biotech adventure from Trevor Haldenby on Vimeo.

ZED.TO is a really cool project that is exploring the boundaries of modern entertainment by simulating the destruction of the world over eight months. They’re in the middle of their IndieGoGO campaign and just announced that they’ve added some more treats to people who fund them.

This project looks to be inspired by everything from interactive theatre to alternate reality games to the concept of gamification.

From their project description:

ZED.TO is an attempt to make theatre more relevant in the age of digital media. We want to use the tools of interaction and immersion to turn audiences into participants, and bring them into the story.

Immersive theatre has been around for years, but we feel that particularly in Toronto, its potential has not been fully realized. Unlike most other immersive productions, ZED.TO lets you have influence on the story. You’ll have the ability to make moral decisions that affect the story and events in real-time. Read this post on our blog for a more thorough discussion of our motivations.

ZED.TO Official site
ZED.TO on IndieGoGo



March 8th, 2012 by Adam

Adoption Rates, or Why iOS Over Android

When my iPhone 3G got insanely bogged down by poorly-optimized code in iOS 4 I got frustrated with Apple and decided to look into an Android phone. The results were horrendous, and I ended up getting the 4S to maintain my sanity. My temptation to go into the world of Android was dashed by Android and the mobile-makers that use it.

When I get an iPhone I know it’ll just work and I don’t need to pay attention to annoying numbers that only somebody who spends too much time with computers would know. I know what these numbers mean and I understand them, I just don’t want to deal with it – it’s a personal preference to not have to think about mHZ or cycles anymore. Android’s version naming after pastries* doesn’t help make anything clearer either. I’d rather think about what cool apps I can get instead.

Essentially I got turned off of Android because all of a sudden I went from thinking ‘phone’ to thinking ‘complex technology’ and had to pay attention to not only phone manufactures but what version of firmware that phone had on a carrier. No thanks. I know that people will think that I was lazy in my search and you know what I was.

If I saw a solution that clearly provided the most recent Android version and was a good build I would’ve got it. Instead every time I got close another ad, article, blog, would raise doubts and I suffered choice paralysis as a result.

That’s just my experience though, and a rant at that.

The reason I’m even writing this is that a recent investigation into adoption rates of new software makes Android look, well, not too good.

Essentially Apple has it’s users upgrade quickly and Android users take longer. This results in a clear OS version to build on for Apple whereas on Android you’d have to develop for multiple platforms.

This graph sums things up well:

Fortunately for us, the folks at The Next Web can summarize the findings with far less ranting than me. Their dissection of the above information can be found in their article about why developers love iOS.

They got a choice quote from a developer on why the developer dropped support for iOS 4 on the iPad.

Tapbots recently launched a new version of its popular Twitter app Tweetbot for the iPad. This was offered as a separate app from the iPhone version, allowing developer Paul Haddad to choose which
OS he would make the minimum requirement. Tweetbot for iPad launched with iOS 5 — the latest major version — required.

“iOS 5.0 works on all the iPads, there’s not much of a reason to support older iOS versions,” sayd Haddad. “There’s a few people who are still running iOS 4.3 on iPad but that number is minuscule compared to the folks who have upgraded. It makes very little sense to spend the development effort support 4.x on iPads.”

The gamble paid off too, with the app reaching #1 on Apple’s top iPad Apps chart and Haddad says that “we’ve gotten two people complaining about it, so it was a pretty big win.”

*I know it’s in alphabetical order, but that’s not very intuitive when they are listed in a seemingly random order throughout the net.



March 7th, 2012 by Adam
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