I’ve been working with Peter David… okay… let me repeat that… I’ve been working with Peter David! (Have I said recently what a lucky guy I am? Oh, yes, I am.) So I’ve been working with Peter David and some really talented artists on comic stories for a while and can’t wait to talk about it.

If you’re planning on attending San Diego Comic Con be sure to stop by our panel on Saturday, July 24, from 4:30-5:30, Room 9. Here’s the description from the Comic Con website:

Disney Epic Mickey— Warren Spector (creative director, Junction Point — Disney Interactive Studios) and Peter David (award-winning comics writer and author of upcoming Disney Epic Mickey comics) share their insights about bringing the world and characters of the Disney Epic Mickey video game to life in two media — video games and comic books. Warren and Peter explore “Wasteland,” a world of forgotten, retired and rejected creative efforts from the Disney archives, and discuss the joy and challenges associated with writing for Mickey Mouse and his “brother,” Walt Disney’s first cartoon star, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The panel includes discussion, gameplay demo featuring never-before-seen areas, concept art, previews of comic pages and Q&A.

There’s been some talk about doing autograph sessions, too, but I don’t have any details. Hey, I can’t imagine the Comic Con crowd wanting my autograph but Peter David? That’s a different story! And we might have some art talent with us, too. Anyway, I’ll post something when I know more.

I’ve never attended Comic Con before as anything but a fan. This is going to be fun!

I talked to so many people – easily in triple digits – and got to see even more playing the game in the booth (as I ran from the Disney area to somewhere else). And by the end of the show, we’d been nominated for at least 22 awards – won 15, lost 2 and there are still, as of today, 7 we’re waiting to hear about. Go Mickey! Go Junction Point team! I don’t want to brag (too much!) so, for a full rundown on what happened – and to stay on top of what’s to come – check out the Junction Point and Disney Interactive Studios web pages or, maybe even better, go to the Facebook pages for Disney Epic Mickey, Junction Point and Disney Interactive Studios. Oh, and there’s even a Disney Epic Mickey You Tube channel, and of course David Garibaldi‘s stuff, too. Tons of cool stuff to see!

Finally, before I forget (as if!), this year’s E3 will live on in my memory as the E3 where I GOT TO MEET SHIGERU MIYAMOTO AND STAN LEE! IN THE SAME WEEK! I’m pretty sure I jibbered like an idiot on both occasions – definitely had to put my head between my knees briefly on meeting Mr. Miyamoto… and I vaguely remember telling Stan Lee I was NOT a stalker at least 15 times… which, of course, branded me as a stalker immediately. Sigh.

Both gentlemen lived up to my expectations and then some – in my experience, heroes usually do. (It’s what makes them heroes, I guess.) These are guys who changed my life – Mr. Miyamoto’s work pushes me to do better in my own… And Stan Lee introduced me to a world of heroes and villains I still live in today. I remember vividly buying Fantastic Four #13 (The Red Ghost issue) and Spider-Man #2 (The Vulture!), back in 1963 and having my 8-year-old mind blown. Getting to tell Stan Lee about that was priceless.

(BTW, if anyone who was at the Nintendo Press Conference rehearsal took any pictures of the magical – if embarrassing – moment when I was introduced to Mr. Miyamoto, please get in touch. I’d sure love a photographic record of a real career highlight!)

So that’s it. My E3 experience. All I have to say is this:

Best.

Week.

Ever!

If you feel like it, let me know what blew YOU away at E3 this year – remember, I saw almost nothing!…

• No glasses required!
• No image degradation or color saturation loss compared with 2D displays!
• Parallax control so viewers can adjust the images so the 3D effect is perfect for them, not for some average person with an average distance of 2.5 inches between his/her eyes.

But that’s just based on the basics, as I said. Wait, there’s more. I was backstage at the Nintendo Press Conference on Tuesday, June 15th, and as each new 3DS feature was described, my jaw got closer and closer to the ground. It’s a game machine… it’s 3D… it has a gyroscope and accelerometer built in… It has Wi-Fi connectivity and shares data with other 3DS’s in the background… It has a 3D CAMERA!… and it PLAYS 3D MOVIES WITHOUT GLASSES!… I swear if they’d said it was a phone, too, I would have dashed back onto the stage and snatched the prototype and run like the wind! I half expected to hear it would tuck me in at night!

When I got my hands on the 3DS at the show, I was blown away again. The feature set sounds good but the proof is in the pudding – in the product. And Nintendo’s got some mighty tasty stuff coming. Pilot Wings – incredible. Nintendogs – even cuter than before and more engaging. Kingdom Hearts, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid – gorgeous. Kid Icarus is coming back plus there’s a Mario Kart, plus a new Zelda(!!!!!)! Not a bad set of games to brag about as you’re launching a new piece of hardware. And there was a tech demo, shooting game that was probably my favorite thing of all. The movie trailers were outrageous – best 3D visuals I’ve seen. Tangled looked great and How to Train Your Dragon was a revelation. Both were sharp, clear, convincing. Every title – movie or game – was a hardware-selling brand, each one looked cool and each was genuinely enhanced in some way by the 3D effect.

The 3D effect is basically perfect. I mean PERFECT. And the games and movie trailers shown on 3DS were stunning, enhanced and flat-out cooler than they could possibly have been in 2D. I was on the fence about 3D when I entered the Nintendo booth. By the time I left, I was floored.

I was completely wrong about 3D. Not a fad. Not going away. Here for good – and that’s a good thing. Nintendo deserves to sell a gazillion of these things. And I want the first one off the line!

As a consumer, I’m in. Sign me up. Price no object (or not much of one). As a game developer, well, sign me up for that, too. How do you design a game that really exploits stereoscopic 3D? Beats me… How do we take advantage of a 3D camera built into a gaming device? No idea… How do we integrate gyroscopes and accelerometers into control schemes? Got some ideas but nothing solid… I mean, how could anyone NOT want to play with this tech?

I’ve been hoping something like this would come along since Origin and Looking Glass supported VR headsets in Wings of Glory and System Shock back in the mid-’90s, but I never actually believed it would happen. Well, it’s happened. The Nintendo 3DS changed everything for me.

Please, please, let it be the success it deserves to be. And all you TV manufacturers out there (or Sharp at least), get with the program and let me buy a TV that’s as cool as Nintendo’s little game machine. I know there are issues with view angles on parallax barrier technology, but come on, get cracking, solve the problems and let me give you a bunch of money so I can have my 3D, okay?

I should stop. I know it. But the 3DS is – seriously – the coolest hardware I’ve ever seen at E3… It’s nothing short of magical, both in the effect the stereoscopic stuff had on me and in the way the tech works. Not that I really understand how it works – not yet anyway! The 3DS was – dare I say it? – almost Disney-like in the magical feeling it evoked in me and I suspect you’ll have a similar reaction when you get your hands on it. And note that I said “when,” not “if.” That was no accident. Trust me – you’re gonna want and you’re gonna get a Nintendo 3DS.

Okay. Let me catch my breath. Two more things tomorrow and then I’m outta here and onto other things. (I’m really going to try to keep this blogging thing going from now on!)

The show itself was a lot like Monday. I spent right around twelve hours each day (obviously, I started before the show opened and kept going after it closed!) in a room in the back of the Disney booth or a room over at the Staples Center – hence the title of this post. Get it? Two rooms… Eight walls… Running from one room to the other. That was my E3…

(And, may I just say, being in the Staples Center during the NBA finals was both cool and frustrating – cool, in that I could look down on the court and contemplate running down there for a quick pic and a probably takedown by a security guard, frustrating in that I was constantly reminded about the hoop fanaticism of which I would NOT be a part later in the day – no finals tickets for me!)

Anyway, 12-ish hours of interviews and demos each day on Tuesday and Wednesday. No breaks. Ate breakfast and lunch with cameras in my face. All I saw of the show was what I could see running to the rest room or running to some on-camera interview in someone else’s booth.

Just to be clear, I’m not complaining! The fact that I was so busy was a reflection of how well-received the Disney Epic Mickey game was. I haven’t experienced anything like that since Deus Ex.

Okay, so I’ve explained the “Two Rooms, Eight Walls” part of the title. What about the “coolest thing ever?”

Easy.

Nintendo 3DS!

Holy cow.

The last day of the show, I actually got out of the Disney Interactive booth around 4:15. I knew I was only going to get to see One Thing at E3. And I knew it was going to be either Deus Ex: Human Revolution or the 3DS. Though it pained me to make the call, the 3DS got the nod.

All I can say is “Wow!” Okay, I lied – I can and will say a lot more than “wow.”

The 3DS changed my life. Seriously. I can be pretty stubborn and when I decide I know something or I’m right about something, I don’t often change my mind. Well, I just want to say I’ve been completely wrong about 3D all my life. I never got it before. Until now. Until the 3DS. Check back tomorrow and I’ll tell you all about it.

Monday, the day before the show opened, I could have walked around the show floor while everyone was setting up, but instead I found myself doing a couple of interviews (including one two hour, on-camera thing that was a ton of fun. I can’t talk about that one yet…).

But the big deal that first day was a rehearsal for the Nintendo press conference at the Nokia Theater. Talk about a thrill!

First, just walking out on that stage, where American Idol finalists sing for 7000 people and all, was fantastic. You don’t want to know how many times I was asked if I was nervous or scared. The honest answer is “no.” I love talking to people about games, whether it’s one person or thousands. It was just an incredible scene and ended up being as much fun as I expected it to be.

Frankly, one of the reasons it was so exciting and fun was Nintendo. Everyone at Nintendo, from the very top of the organization to the guys in the trenches, was incredible. The feeling of family, the sense of being on a mission, the development-centered culture was palpable. I have no idea what it’s really like to work at Nintendo, but if the outward projection of the company’s culture is anything like the working environment… well, let’s just say I have a richer understanding of why Nintendo games look, feel and play the way they do. Joy and positivity in the environment must translate to similar quality in the work, right? I should be so lucky as to create an environment like that at a studio of my own someday!

And the really cool bit? Everyone I met that first day at the rehearsal made me and Adam Creighton (the Junction Point producer, who drove my demos), feel like a part of the Nintendo family and contributors to the company’s mission. That was really special.

Anyway, from the Nintendo rehearsal, it was over to the Disney booth to rehearse for our own on-stage demos – two 15-ish minute demos a day, followed by a show by Disney Fine Artist, David Garibaldi.

Meeting David at the Disney rehearsals was over the top cool. I have some of his artwork on my walls at home, and I’d already seen some of his magical dance/music/art shows on video (you just have to see him in action for yourself to get a sense of how incredible his work is…). I guess what I’m saying is I’m a fan and was really pleased to meet him and be able to tell him so. It’s hard to imagine anyone better-suited to the task of bringing some of the Disney Epic Mickey characters and locations to life in new ways. He outdid himself!

From there, it was over to a theater to catch a sneak screening of Toy Story 3. Yowza! There was much laughing and crying… I definitely steamed up the ol’ 3D glasses, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Just pick yourself up and see it yourself, if you haven’t already.

That was Monday – interviews and rehearsals and Pixar’s latest. Day over. Saw nothing…

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the show itself.

The word is out about Disney Epic Mickey, and in a big way. I couldn’t be happier. This week, I’ll try to tell you why.

Here’s the story of my E3 (or, at least, part one of that story, with more parts following the rest of this week):

Man, what a show! Though we announced Disney Epic Mickey, officially, at an event in London last October, and the good folks at Game Informer ran a big preview feature around the same time, this E3 was our debutante ball.

And what a ball I had!

The Disney Interactive Studios folks put together a killer booth – not just for Disney Epic Mickey, but for all the upcoming titles. I thought everything showed well – Disney Epic Mickey, Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned, Guilty Party, TRON… I hope this shows the gaming world We Mean Business!

But, obviously, I was especially pleased about the Disney Epic Mickey area and the response to the game. First, a shout-out to the guys who put the space together. The Disney Epic Mickey area looked like a Mickey-fied version of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Classy and appropriate. I loved our space.

There was some terrific artwork by a variety of artists hanging from the walls and Disney animators were in the booth drawing original sketches for people (and, man, you should have seen the lines for that!).  And, of course, David Garibaldi was doing the amazing art/dance/music thing that only he can do. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Apparently, neither could gamers! The place was packed all day, every day. I brought about a dozen people from Junction Point to man the booths and they did me, the game and themselves proud. I can’t tell you how much I love the Disney Epic Mickey team. The talent, passion and commitment the guys and gals showed at E3 was incredibly special – and completely typical of what the entire team delivers on a daily basis. Definitely one of the top teams I’ve worked with in my career.

As for me, well, check back tomorrow and I’ll explain what I was up to and what the title of this post is all about.

Frankly, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response. I don’t know why, but I expected to get more grief about making a Mickey Mouse game. Nice to see that, for the most part, folks are open to the idea — even enthusiastic!

As a result of all the press, I’ve been bombarded with emails asking me weirdly personal questions about my favorite Disney things — theme park rides, characters, comic book artists and writers. Figured I’d just post some answers here to settle things down a bit. (And if you’ve read my earlier posts about compulsive list making, you know I’ll take any opportunity to make a list of my N favorite things!) So here goes:

FAVORITE RIDES

If you’re expecting anything earth-shattering here, forget it. I love the traditional favorites:

• Disney Animation Academy: Come on, they can even teach ME to draw Disney characters. How cool is that?
• Fantasmic!: What a great show – exciting, romantic, technically amazing, and it’s as close as Mickey’s gotten to being a hero in years. Plus, the music just does it for me. Great, great score…
• Haunted Mansion: Grim Grinning Ghosts, the stretching room, changing paintings. I’m in.
• Imagineering Blue Sky Cellar: I love behind the scenes stuff. What can I say? I only wish this were bigger and even cooler.
• Indiana Jones Adventure: Best. Disney. Ride. Ever. I ride it every time I go to the parks.
• Mickey’s PhilharMagic: Great 3D and it’s genuinely funny.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Do I have to say anything?
• Space Mountain: A mostly horizontal roller coaster? Count me in. I’m not wild about vertical g’s but horizontal g forces are great. And it’s in the dark. I love it.

COMIC BOOKS

I’m only talking Disney here, right? I’m a huge comic geek (about which I guess I’ll blog some other time), but as far as Disney artists go, here’s my list. Not many surprises here — well, it might seem odd that Paul Murry isn’t on the list, but I’ve just never really loved his stuff. And Romano Scarpa’s books are fine but, again, just never did it for me. Anyway, here are the guys who DID make my cut:

• Carl Barks: Best. Comic. Writer. Oh yeah, and Artist. Ever. End of discussion.
• Floyd Gottfredson: The Mickey guy for over 40 years. While the animation studio was reducing Mickey to straightman status, Gottfredson always treated him like the hero he should have been.
• Noel Van Horn: My favorite Disney artist and writer working today. If you can find a copy of his story, Shadows, you’ll know why I love this guy’s work so much. He takes Mickey places most artists wouldn’t dare. And while his art style is simple, it’s so damn expressive. Love it.
• William Van Horn: Like father like son, I guess. William is Noel’s dad and talent definitely has a genetic component! William Van Horn’s duck stories are over the top, action packed, slapstick at its best.
• Don Rosa: The heir apparent to Carl Barks and many people’s favorite Disney artist/writer. I like his stuff a lot, but find his art style almost TOO detailed and his reverence for the Barks canon a little too constraining. I admire Rosa’s work a lot, but reading it is a little too much work for me to flat-out love it.
• Carson Van Osten: I’ve had the incredible pleasure and honor to work with Carson and, man, can the guy draw! Holy cow. His personal take on Mickey Mouse was hugely important to the Disney Epic Mickey game. And he did a bunch of character design work for us that’s mind-blowing. His comics work from the 70s on ain’t bad either! (He tells great stories, too! And played bass in the band The Nazz! What a guy.)

CHARACTERS

Again, don’t expect a ton of surprises (other than that I’ve never been much of a Goofy fan… and I thought the introduction of Launchpad McQuack into the duck universe was unnecessary and kind of unfortunate).

• Scrooge McDuck: Filthy rich, adventurous, fearless, softy at heart (but don’t let on!). He swims in the coins in his money bin. Coolest character in the Disney family, easy.
• Mickey Mouse: Um. Hello? He’s the Mouse!
• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: Funny, funny cartoons. Complete anarchy. Does completely impossible things, constantly.
• Donald Duck: I’ve never been able to understand a word Donald says (sorry Ducky Nash and the rest of the Donald voice artists…), but who cares? When he gets red in the face and explodes with anger, it’s great fun. (If you haven’t seen the cartoon Donald’s Crime, find it.)
• Ludwig Von Drake: I think I learned more from him than I did from many of my teachers! And that accent made me laugh every time when I was a kid.
• Stitch: Easily the best of the recent Disney characters. The writers and animators really let loose with him!
• The Aracuan Bird: The most trouble-makingest Disney character ever. As close as Disney ever got to creating something that would have fit right in in a Tex Avery cartoon.
• Chernabog: Scary, scary, scary!
• Maleficent: Scarier, scarier, scarier!

That’s a start. Let me know what your favorites are.

First thing I did was hit Hideo Kojima’s design keynote.

Solid Game Design: Making the “Impossible” Possible
Hideo Kojima

I was introduced to Hideo Kojima once, at a restaurant where we both happened to be dining, but he was pretty into his sushi at the time, and I was anxious to get to mine, so I don’t suppose he even remembers. I certainly didn’t get a chance to talk to him and, so, figured I should take advantage of the opportunity to hear what he had to say this year. It ended up being a pretty interesting hour.

His key point was that game design is the art of The Impossible Possible — an idea I find pretty appealing. The talk was about the road he takes to make that happen. For him, making impossible things a reality takes an understanding of Hardware Capabilities, Software Capabilities and what he called Design Ladders (or what others might call “Raw Creativity” or “Designing Around Hardware and Software Constraints”).

In describing his creative process, Kojima talked about identifying a problem (e.g., Get a Character Over That Wall) and then coming up with a bunch of ways the problem could be solved. Eventually, he settles on the coolest solution and executes that solution. I was dumbstruck that he goes to the trouble of thinking up all those answers but then limits the player to only one. In other words, the concept of choice belongs to developers, in Kojima’s world, not to players! Pretty much the same approach I like to apply to design, but applied in a completely different way. My thinking is, if you’re only going to offer players one way to solve a problem, well, for starters, maybe you really want to make a movie… But, if you’re going to go to the trouble of thinking up a bunch of ways to “get over the wall,” as he put it, why not attach some consequences to different wall-climbing approaches and let players in on the fun? Clearly, you can’t argue with the guy’s success, but I can’t help thinking how much players are missing out on…

Anyway, the talk was structured around the history of the Metal Gear series. Pretty fascinating. He talked about each game in the series and how he tried to set a new, impossible goal for himself and the team with each one. Reminded me a lot of how Richard Garriott approached things when he gave me a crash course in electronic game design back in the day. But instead of Richard’s “scrap everything and build from scratch” approach, Kojima takes a careful, incremental approach to innovation, introducing just one new thing each game, building on the foundation of earlier games.

Pretty interesting talk, but I’ve let too much time lapse and that’s about all I remember. Have to listen to the audio to refresh my memory!

Next I went to a talk about “physical play,” not so much because I’m all that into the topic (in fact, I wasn’t even sure what the speaker meant) but because I was intrigued to hear what a guy from MIT’s Media Lab might have to say to a room full of game developers. Turns out, it was a swell talk.

Physical Play: Siftables and Other New Forms and Formats for Interaction, Collaboration and Creativity
David Merrill

Merrill, an MIT Media Lab researcher (http://web.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/siftables.html), talked about alternate control mechanisms (alternatives to keyboards or switches), from the Theremin to the mouse to multitouch screens to the Wii remote. The most interesting observation in his historical overview was that nontraditional control schemes work much better when there’s force feedback involved. Guess that makes sense.

The bulk of the talk revolved around Merrill’s own project – something called “Siftables”  (http://siftables.com/). Siftables are little square blocks, each with a tiny screen, motion sensors and proximity sensors. Each Siftable can perform simple functions on its own (displaying a word or a number or a mathematical symbol or a face) but — cool! cool! cool! — can respond to what other nearby Siftables are doing. (At the trivial level, think of the opening of the TV show, The Brady Bunch. A set of Siftables can recreate that people-in-a-tic-tac0toe board sequence and look at and respond to each other…)

The possibilities inherent in the Siftables idea are incredible. I want ‘em. Now. Merrill talked a lot about the educational possibilities and all but the “board” games you could create with these things would be incredible. Check out the website and you’ll see what I mean. We should all just start brainstorming now so we’re ready when Siftables take the world by storm!

Experimental Gameplay Sessions
Jonathan Blow et al

Okay. Have to calm down. Take a deep breath. Be rational. There. Better.

This was easily the high point of the show, for me. I was completely blown away. The level of creativity on display here was amazing.

First up, Jenova Chen (That Game Company) talked about the iterative prototyping process that led to the creation of Flower (a game that’s totally worth playing if you haven’t already). Like all of us, the Flower team tried all sorts of things — all sorts of mechanics and goals and challenges — before settling on their final, leisurely, nearly goal-free game design. If anyone doubted that iteration was the heart of game design or, at least, of game design in a world of unknowns and new ideas, this talk would have convinced you.

One of the speaker/demo-ers showed off his ”4D game” – Miegakure – a game set in a four-dimensional space, unfolded so mere 3D mortals can (nearly) parse it. I barely understood what the guy was talking about and by the end of his brief talk and demo my head felt like it was going to explode, but, man, do I want to try to figure it out! Proof positive that there are whole universes (maybe literally) of new ideas to explore in gaming!

Some guys from an outfit called Hazardous Software showed off ”Achron” – which looked to be a gen-u-ine time-travel RTS. Incredible. I’ve been wanting to do another time travel game since I worked on Martian Dreams but didn’t know how to pull it off. These guys seem to have done it. Just go to their website and check it out. Really cool.

I won’t bother with all the details (this is already going on too long) but I have to say I was especially inspired by Shadow Physics, Closure and Unfinished Swan. All of the presentations were terrific (and I hate to leave anyone out) but these three really did it for me on the gameplay, aesthetic and creative levels. The ways in which each used lighting, physics and rendering as gameplay tools should provide all of us non-indie gamers a little kick in the butt to ratchet things up, creatively. Simple, beautiful and at least potentially incredible games….

Basically, the whole indie scene is killing me right now. Something changed in the last year. If this session, and the IGF booth proved nothing else it’s that the indie game movement is really on the move. It’s not just  a bunch of guys fooling around or building their portfolios — it’s a bunch of talented, dedicated, professional developers making great, polished, playable games. I don’t know whether to root for them to get publishing deals (so they can keep making their own cool stuff) or whether to root for them to fail to get a deal (so I can hire them all!).

Frankly, as a player, I’m really drawn to indie games these days. World of Goo… Flower… Braid… Just great stuff. Everyone in the mainstream of games who attends GDC should try to squeeze into the perenially-sold-out Experimental Gameplay session — if not to be inspired than to be scared witless by the creative guys who are going to be stealing all our jobs if we don’t up our game dramatically!

(On a related note, there were a ton of games on display at the Independent Game Festival booth (http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html) worthy of note. Tag: The Power of Paint… Pixeljunk Eden… The Graveyard… Night Game… Blueberry Garden… Feist… Musaic Box… Amazing stuff!

Oh, and if you want to read more about the Experimental Gameplay Sessions (and find links to a bunch of games I didn’t get into here), check out this article from the Guardian by Aleks Krotoski. Reminded me of a bunch of games I neglected to mention that you ought to check out. Too many games, not enough time or space to blog about them all…

So that was day 2 — quite the inspiring day, actually.

I did manage to attend a few talks on day 1, though. Here’s the scoop on those:

Discovering New Development Opportunities (Nintendo Keynote)
Satoru Iwata

I was a little surprised that much of this talk was about Shigeru Miyamoto’s development style — not disappointed, but surprised that someone other than Miyamoto himself would discuss it. Anyway, from the sound of it, Miyamoto seems inspired by the things in his life (as are, I think, most successful designers). Starting with an idea you think is “marketable” or “niche-filling” or any of the other myriad starting points for projects seems foolish to me. Great games come from personal passion, not business objectives. Someone burns to do something and they do it with dedication to quality that goes as far as anything can to ensuring success… Anyway, I was not at ALL surprised that Miyamoto’s games come from a personal place… From what we heard at the talk, once a subject’s been settled on, the approach is very methodical, very iterative, very into defining the essence of fun with a small team (and often for a very, very long time) before expanding into a real game and a real (for which read “expensive”) team. We could all learn from that!

Iwata also talked fairly extensively about how Nintendo wanted to be friendly to developers of all types and went to some lengths to make clear how important hardcore gamers are to Nintendo. This was all great to hear. But what floored me were the sales stats he talked about — notably that the Wii Balance Board has shipped nearly as many units as the PS3 has total! Wow. I mean, it’s pretty common knowledge that Nintendo has surpassed both PS3 and 360 in units sold, but to hear there are — what did he say? 15 million-ish Wii Balance Boards out there. That took me aback. That starts to sound like a peripheral more people should be supporting. (Of course, that was probably EXACTLY what Iwata hoped the audience would leave believing, so I’m feeling a little used right now…)

There was some talk about the DSi and camera games and all, which looked kind of cool. (Now that I have a DSi I’m a LITTLE less excited than I was before, but still a nice little device.) A demo-er came out and showed off a camera game and a simple animation toolkit that looks like it’ll allow users to create some lovely 2D cartoons. Can’t wait to get my hands on that.

But the best came last – video of a new Zelda game for the DS is coming “later this year.” Woohoo! Bring it on!

And then everyone who attended the talk got a copy of Rhythm Heaven for the DS – a variation of Rhythm Tengoku, one of the best DS games ever, but never shipped in the US. If you don’t have it, go get it. Great little game.

Lighting with Purpose
Jay Riddle (Disney Interactive Studios), Paul Ayliffe (Blackrock Studios)

Okay, I admit I went to this talk mostly because Jay and Paul are Disney guys I like and respect a ton, but I’m hugely into lighting these days and wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out on any pearls of wisdom because I work with these guys and assume I’ve heard all they have to say on the subject.

As it turns out, that was a really good idea. The talk was really nice and did touch on some stuff I hadn’t heard them talk about before about how to use lighting to achieve aesthetic and gameplay effects. Jay was nicely conceptual while Paul was nicely concrete. I love that Jay comes at things from a film background and was able to show examples from movies as well as games. And I’m always blown away by what Blackrock does graphically and take advantage of any opportunity to learn how they do such amazing things, vusually. Frankly, I need to get both of those guys to give those talks at Junction Point some time.

Next year, a follow-up that gets into even more specifics, particularly with regard to how lighting can create specific moods, and how color plays into things would be great.

David Perry’s Lunch with Luminaries
David Perry, Gary Whitta, Brian Fargo, Rob Pardo, Will Wright, Neil Young (and me!)

Other than the super embarrassing title of this event it was a ton of fun — one of those things that has me gawking like a kid in a candy shop wondering what I did to deserve being here with all of these guys! There’s been enough online coverage that I won’t go into details, but I got to give Blizzard’s Rob Pardo a (totally joshing) hard time about MMO’s and how much I’d prefer it if Blizzard would Just Give Me Diablo 3 RIGHT NOW. And for the first time in MY life, at least, I actually got Will Wright to admit that I was right about something we argued about — specifically, the big impact cloud computing was likely to have on games and game development. (I think it’s going to be huge and he, at least at the start of the discussion, didn’t think it would change things at all.) I got into a little good-natured sparring with Neil Young as well, about how I totally don’t get the mobile gaming business and development model, and I got to hang out with Brian Fargo (one of my heroes when I first got into the videogame business), all of which, together made the lunch a huge win for me. Hope I get to do it again at some future GDC!

Everything Old is New Again: Using Musical Style to Enhance Storytelling
Lennie Moore, Garry Schyman

I went to this session expecting to hear about music gameplay – a topic I’m intensely interested in. (Not music games per se or rhythm games, but how we can introduce musical play ideas into traditional game types.) The panelists didn’t actually address this topic at all, but it ended up being a great session nonetheless.

What these guys DID talk about was how composers can suss out what developers really want, musically speaking, and how they research and echo specific musical styles and/or the music of specific time periods.

I came away impressed enough by both composers – their working methods, their collaborative process, their musical knowledge, their connections, their versatility and, of course, the quality of their work. A nice surprise, only because I didn’t know either of the panelists and expected the panel to be about something it wasn’t about, yet I learned a ton.

That was it for day 1 of GDC 2009. I’ll be back with whatever I can remember of day 2 soon.

First off, let me just say that this was a weird show for me — good, REALLY good even, but weird. I’d have to go back and check, but I’m pretty sure this year was the first time in way more than a decade  that I had no obligations at the show — no lectures, no panels, no business meetings. I had some lunches planned but that was it.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but GDC is a heck of a lot of fun when you don’t have to edit slides and fret about stuff! I love speaking at GDC, and hope I get the chance to do it again soon, but it was a nice change of pace to be just a civilian.

My week started on Monday, with the IGDA Education Summit. I’ve been involved in one way or another with the IGDA’s education effort for quite some time. Fact is, I’m really proud of the curriculum framework Robin Hunicke, Eric Zimmerman, Doug Church and others (and I) came up with years ago — as proud as I am of just about anything I’ve done professionally. It’s not so much that the framework was so great — that’s something for others to determine – it’s the fact that this year, as in so many prior years, I’ve seen evidence, and been told, that a lot of colleges and universities are using the thing as the foundation of their courses and programs.

And this year’s Edu Summit revealed that there are more colleges and universities offering game development/game studies programs than ever. I spent a fair amount of time hanging with faculty and students at some of these programs and was pleased to meet people who weren’t employed by or being educated at the Usual Gang of Suspects. Lots of places offer game studies and game development courses and degrees now.

Frankly, the people teaching in these programs still often lack professional experience, but there are more and more ex-pros teaching now than in the past. Things are trending in the right direction there, if you ask me. The students I interacted with this year seemed sharper, better trained and better prepared for careers in development than at any time in the past. (This, by the way, jibes with the fact that more and more of the people I hire are coming from academic programs. I always expected this would happen, but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Wherever the academics are coming from and whatever they’re doing, they’re really starting to do it right!)

One of the edu summit panels covered the recent Global Game Jam (http://globalgamejam.org/). The concept of “game jams” is one that seems worth embracing, whether in an academic setting or a professional one – as a way to generate ideas, build team camaraderie, refresh creative juices, etc. All of the speakers had interesting things to say, but I was most intrigued by some comments from Ian Schreiber. Specifically, he talked about the need to impose constraints when “jamming”: constrain theme or mechanics or aesthetics or tech. That’s great advice even when you’re not thinking about a game jam. Constraints are, as we all know, good for creativity in any context. It’s amazing the impact a different set of constraints has on design and the development process (something publishers — and developers — should pay more attention to!).

Jane Macgonigle (http://www.avantgame.com/), who’s affiliated with the Institute for the Future (http://www.iftf.org/) gave a really interesting keynote. I disagreed with some of what she had to say, but it was certainly interesting, entertaining and thought provoking. Basically, she claimed that over the next couple of decades, games would change the world (we’re in agreement there!). She saw games driving educational efforts, moving people to political action, bringing people together across cultures, creating happiness and so on. Game designers, she believes, are going to be the prime movers and shakers of this century.  She wants us to call ourselves “fungineers,” something I refuse even to consider. Basically, I don’t think of myself as a guy who provides “fun” or even “happiness” to players.

I much prefer to think of myself as the pea under the mattress (I hope SOMEONE gets the reference…) or, put another way, I like to think of myself as a provocateur. I want players to think about what they’re doing, as they do it… to think about WHY they’re doing what they’re doing… to have something they can take from their game back into the real world. There’s certainly fun to be had in that sort of thinking activity, but it’s not the first thing I think about.

I also took issue with McGonigle’s idea that games should move people to specific, desired actions or beliefs. Certainly, we’re capable of doing that — we can be a very effective propaganda tool, I’m sure. But I don’t really want to convince players of anything, or get them to behave in a particular way — honestly, I don’t think anyone should aspire to that. If we turn our interactive medium into just another way of selling people on ideas, we’re missing the point. Games should be a dialogue, not a lecture… a discussion, not a lesson. What we should be doing is allowing people to explore conceptual spaces and draw their own conclusions about them. I don’t ever want to be as coercive as McGonigle seems to want us to be.

(As a note, Jane McGonigle was one of three people who, during GDC, spoke about the “science of happiness.” This is a meme I need to investigate…)

Jesse Schell gave the other edu summit keynote, in which he discussed his idea of game design “lenses,” another way (near as I can tell) to say “game design patterns.” Whatever he calls ‘em, Jesse’s take on the design process — and ways to break out of existing molds and old habits – is worth checking out. His book and accompanying card deck are interesting and maybe useful (haven’t finished reading yet, so can’t say for sure…). Check out http://artofgamedesign.com/.

The rest of the edu summit was spent hanging out with students and faculty folks, which was great fun. A nice, relaxing way to start the week.

More on GDC soon…