Random thoughts from Wednesday at GDC…
I was deterred from attending Sony bigwig Phil Harrison’s keynote by the long lines outside the auditorium, which is a shame, because apparently Sony is jumping on the same games + Web = awesome bandwagon that I and everyone else seem to be on these days. Luckily, more diligent attendees were there and taking notes, so we can all pretend that we know what’s up with Sony’s Xbox Live/Second Life mashup Home.
I don’t know why I’m surprised by this, but I actually saw some stuff at the conference that’s directly useful to my job. The upshot of the Dynamic Difficulty talk given by Ken Harward and Aaron Cole of Ritual (now Mumbo Jumbo) was that gathering statistics on AI performance — and, by implication, on player performance — can only lead to good things. Their message was that these statistics can be fed back into the AI engine to tune a game’s difficulty in near-real time to adapt to the player’s skill level. My own reaction was to feel better about all the obscure metrics-gathering code I’ve been sneaking into the AI drivers at work.
Usually, when gamers talk about “accessibility,” they’re referring to expanding the market past the usual core demographic. At the Accessibility Arcade, though, they were showing off games that use the term in the more universal sense, with interfaces that are usable by people with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments. And just like in the Web and desktop software worlds, guidelines for making games accessible to people with disabilities can also have a side effect of improving usability for everyone, regardless of their abilities. Also: audio-only games? Just plain cool.
Damion Schubert led a roundtable discussion on potential next-gen MMORPGs, with the goal of finding a way away from the “men in tights” fantasy genre that dominates the field. Perhaps tellingly, most of the other genres and licenses that people posited as potential subjects for an MMO — Firefly, Cyberpunk, Westerns — had large and obvious holes in them, while the list of reasons why Tolkienesque fantasy works so well kept growing longer and longer. A sample:
The big takeaway from the roundtable was that if you’re going to branch out from the typical fantasy-themed MMO (or if, lord help you, you’re going to try to compete in the fantasy space), you need to make sure that your game captures all these qualities (or at least has very good answers to them).