The season of acronyms…

As the year scrabbles to a close, the steady stream of conferences and presentations comes to an end.

World Congress of Science and Factual Producers

On Friday December 4th, I took part in a speed-networking event at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers.  What was interesting about this was being able to step away from the traditional pc/console space and think about new opportunities to use games and games technology.

In talking to the directors and producers, I had the thought that perhaps games were closer to documentary features than to narrative features.  The topics explored – happiness as a contagion that can be tracked using network theory, or a man who built his own 300-million search-and rescue empire – were built on the film-maker exploring the world, creating theories, and constructing the narrative as they go, which is a clear analogue for what players do in games.

Not to say that there isn’t room for narrative in games, but modelling gameplay & the reveal of narrative in more of a documentary style might prove to be a useful template.

Game Connect Asia Pacific

Or GCAP as it’s less mouthfully known, took place at Crown from December 6th – 8th.  I gave two presentations – one on games and games literacy (which was attended by only 5 people due to a last minute room change) and one on the creative process of writing and how that applies to games.  Due to meetings and general schmoozing (and also pulling together my writing presentation), I saw almost none of the conference itself (other than Tim Stellmach’s keynote & the indie games that I was judging), but came away with the overall impression that from an art & design perspective, the content was unfocused and weak – which is reflected in a single stream that contained all of the art, design, and audio talks.  As design is one of our local industry’s challenges, it would be nice to see an increased focus on it next year.

Details on the presentations after the fold.

Read moreThe season of acronyms…

Collated data from my IGDA presentation

In the interests of transparency, I’ve made available the data from my IGDA talk as a published google spreadsheet.  You can find it here.

To gather the numbers, I used metacritic‘s advanced search restricted to developers (here‘s an example using Torus) and hand-copied the results straight into a spreadsheet.

In some cases, where data wasn’t available on metacritic and there was more than one sku for the game, I used gamerankings.com for a representative value.

To select by ‘unique’ title versus ‘port’ in cases where there was more than one version (both Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes over Europe are good examples) I treated the highest rated version as the ‘unique’ and the other versions as ‘ports’ of that. All versions of Heroes of the Pacific rated 76% so it’s just a function of a sorting algorithm that I took the Xbox version as the original. In the case of Heroes over Europe, the PC version rated 66% compared to 64% on PS3 and 62% on Xbox 360 so that’s treated as the lead platform and the others as ports.

Because of the way metacritic gathers reviews & collates data, there are omissions, so if anyone has additional data, feel free to email it to me or post it in the comments and I’ll update it.

The state of things

Last night at the reboot of the Melbourne IGDA chapter, I gave a short talk on the state of things locally and options for indie developers.  The full presentation is available below, but I thought I’d make the first half – the data on metacritic scores – a bit more accessible.

For more information on the second half – opportunities for independent developers – check out Simon Carless’ and David Edery’s presentations from Film Victoria‘s Digital Distribution Summit:

Simon Carless (from here)

Indie Game Metrics  – October 2009

Western Indie Game Trends

Digital Distribution Summit Video

David Edery

Digital Distribution Summit keynote

A more detailed breakdown of the numbers is below the fold…

Read moreThe state of things

Game Connect: Asia Pacific 2009

Details of the 2009 GCAP program are now up on the website.

My session, What Does a Writer Do Anyway?, is on Tuesday December 8th at 3:35 as part of the Art / Design / Audio stream.

What does a writer do anyway?

Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium.  By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist.  It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.

So, here we are…

I’ve tried to blog / maintain a website in the past, but always failed because I felt like there wasn’t much of interest happening. That’s changed now that I’ve gone freelance because there are some interesting projects on the horizon – most of which I can’t talk about just yet, but soon. I hope.

In the meantime, this site is still under construction, but you can visit some of the sections that were easier to put together than others:

Appearances

One of the reasons I wanted to start this site was to bring together a lot of the random stuff floating around the web that I’d been involved with. This page contains videos of my appearances on ABC2 and at Freeplay.

Conferences & Presentations

Over the years, I’ve done a bunch of conference presentations.  Here’s where you can find the details of the sessions and copies of the presentations.  Most of the new ones are in .mov format because I bought a mac and fell in love with Keynote.

Game Projects – Old ProjectsCurrent Projects

Here you can find details of what I’m working on now and what I’ve worked on in the past.  Sadly, the current project page is a bit quiet because everything’s early days.

Writing

This is where you can find samples of my personal writing.  It’s a little sparse just now because I’ve been focusing on a novel for the past few years.  That should change during 2009.