Hello all of you who might read this.

I am Håvard Christensen, a norwegian boy (or viking if you will), which soon will have to grow up and get my a job.

Back in 2005, I was so lucky to win the scholarship to GDC. I had a great time, and I met some great people, some of which I still have contact with today. What you need to do, dear scholarship winner, is to find someone your age and just hook up. Hopefully, you have managed to somewhat organize so that some of you live at the same hotel/hostel. Then.. (if they still have the party), sneak in to the Western meets Asian party which has an open bar, but closes so early that japanese developers invite everyone to party at the boss’ suite.

Be sure to not drink so much as to make a fool of yourself, just have a good time. Don’t be shy.

Oh, and if you are a programmer, but otherwise enjoy other things too, leave most of the effect-talks to later and visit things that talk about broader principles like engine design or content generation pipeline. Effects is something you implement at home , 3 am in your basement, right?

Also, game design talks are more fun than boring tech-talk, even if you are a techie.

And now, some things about me and where I am atm. .. yeah. well, I’m graduating in June, so I’m working like a dog on my bachelor project. After that.. well, we’ll see what happens. I’m in love with programming though, so my spirit has not been taken :)

Greetings ScholarBlog readers and writers!

This will actually be a substantive update.  With GDC just around the corner, I’d like to invite back previous ScholarBlog writers to give us an update on their progress in the game industry.  How have things been since GDC?  How has the game industry been treating you?  What do you think of GDC now that it’s a year (or two) later!  Remember, there’s a fresh batch of Scholars (and students) going to GDC in a few weeks, and any advice you could give them would certainly help.

In business, with GDC coming, I’m going to try to update the ScholarBlog to the most recent version of WordPress, install Spam Karma, and open up commenting on the blog.  Until then, please give us some info on how the scholars have been!

hi, this is really julia detar not matt, i am pretending to be matt because i guess i can’t post anything, (ugg)..

With GDC still a week away, the wordpress upgrade is complete.  Apparently a lot of new functionality in this WP and a lot of fixes, but I haven’t had a chance to look at them.  Feel free to play though.

I’m probably going to try to upgrade to WP 2.0 before GDC. Please expect some down time at some point this week or next week while the upgrade is occuring.

Also, the first of the 2006 GDC scholars has signed up to post about his experiences. Hopefully more will join us very soon.

Friday
I slept in a little to recover from the excesses of the previous night. I did get out of bed fairly early though and was able to make it to the conference in time to sit in on a roundtable on the Education of a Game Designer. The world of academia is struggling to figure out how impart on its students the necessary skills in order to enter the game industry and to also give them the skills to pursue a job outside that industry because there are currently too many institutions trying to create a game degree that the industry cannot absorb them all.

It was a fascinating discussion, made even more so by the fact that one of my faculty was at this round table talking about my school’s solution to these problems. For all the faults of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, we really do a number of things right. Even though we get hyped as a game institute, nothing in our curriculum pigeonholes us to that industry. The significant things that we learn can be applied in any industry and a fair portion of the students attracted to the program are interested in something other than games. We learn to create a product in a team. We learn to create things in a team on a short production cycle (2 weeks). We also work in a team on projects with a longer production cycle (typically a semester but can extend longer then that depending on the life cycle of the project). We are given a common ground in storytelling techniques from literature and film. We learn improvisation and public speaking. My faculty and I enjoyed exchanging looks as people around the table suggested milder versions of what my school was already pursuing.

Afterwards, I ran into Chris Oltyan, who berated me for missing Will Wright’s talk on Spore. He dragged me to the game theater to watch the recording of it. Unfortunately that recording never appeared. So after watching some segments from G4, I headed out of the conference to eat lunch/breakfast with my brother. I was so hungry from skipping breakfast today.

Afterwards we headed back to the expo floor to look around and see if there was anything else to be gained there. I left to watch another session, while my brother went around the career center dropping off resumes to various companies. My last session was Effective Quest Design in an MMORPG Environment. While most of what he talked about was the standard fare, there were two points that were different. One was that quests could be a finite resource in the game. Only so many people could be on a quest at a given time, a quest could be offered for a finite time, or be offered only after a period of time since the last person accepted it. The other interesting point was on the trading of quests. One player would receive a quest and partially complete it. He would then trade that quest to another player who would do more work on it. Eventually the quest is finished. Rewards are handed out according to how much a player contributed to the quest. That was perhaps the most interesting point he raised and there were several questions about the mechanics of it.

I gathered my brother and returned to my hotel for a nap, skipping the last conference session of the day. I was exhausted.

Aftermath
This grew to be a lot longer then I had intended. I have a fondness for detail and a weakness for journal-work. I’ll turn in something much shorter for the article. I promise. This whole experience has been worth it to me. I’m very glad I was awarded this scholarship and I really enjoyed working with my mentor, Chris Oltyan. Thanks, Chris, for putting up with me. I know I was being a pain. And thanks IGDA for making this opportunity available. The value of this scholarship is more then being able to go to the GDC. It has really helped to validate my struggles and given me a window into this industry.

It was a blast and I hope to see some of you again next year.

Thursday
Today I focused on getting the value out of my Classic Pass. From the time the conference opened to the time I ended I was in one session or another.

My day started off listening to the lead designer of Katamari Damacy. He was amazingly humble and had a very simple approach toward game design. He just wants to make games that are fun and through that make the world a better place. Through much of the presentation he showed video clips and pictures and doodled off to the side.

Next I went into the Nintendo Keynote. The hardware manufacturers are reaching a turning point. Under the current business model, game developers must either make blockbusters or bargain titles for the next generation consoles. Nintendo was the company that established this model and is now receiving a lot of flack for it. Their keynote covered the state of the industry and Nintendo’s response to it. It was depressing in what it meant for the developers.

I hit the Half-Life 2 talk next. There they explored how they put together the animations for the characters in Half-Life 2 and how they used a blending of procedural AI and hand created animations to give them life. They nailed down the tiny details. Characters would lead with their eyes before turning their heads and bodies. Characters would blink and their eyes would either focus on a target or dart around during the idle animations. Scripted sequences blended into procedural sequences where the player controlled the pacing and content of the next event. Very tech heavy, but it makes me want to play the game again and explore their engine to see what kinds of mods are possible.

The panel on why the game industry avoids interactive stories was up after that. All 3 panelists took turns answering 3 questions about interactive stories. Two camps about interactive narrative developed. One camp is the procedural narrative camp. This camp believes that the most effective story is the one that rises out of the player actions and is unique for each play through. It’s the Will Wright camp of giving players toys and letting them decide what their narrative is going to be based on the events that happen to their character. The other camp is the human controlled narrative, or rather narrative crafted by a storyteller or a team of storytellers that uses the game medium as an art form in order to tap the deeper inner emotions. The problem with the later is that nobody is trained to create these kinds of stories and even if someone were to feel that call, the treatment and pay of these storytellers are so poor that they end up being suppressed.

The next session was on the Japanese Game Industry. It was a business lecture on the growth of Capcom. The purpose of CESA. An invitation to CEDEC, the Japanese version of the GDC. CERO to establish a rating system in Japan and the need for a more global rating system. And ACCS to prevent piracy in Japan. The talk then expanded to how the American and Japanese game industries can support each other against rising risk and cost. Since games are reaching a global audience it would benefit everyone to put together global research on games.

The final session of the day was Resident Evil 4. This session was purely art and cinematics. While pre-rendered cinematics are beautiful and a treat to watch they also pull the player completely out of the game experience and turn them into a passive zombie. Real-time movies, and especially real-time movies where the player can take some action to change the outcome of the movie, keep the player inside the game mindset. Since Resident Evil was going to rely almost entirely on real-time movies they wanted to establish a visual quality across the board. Most of the session was on the technological solutions they developed to keep that visual quality up and stay within the constraints of the hardware. Some amazing stuff.

The ETC party
Thursday night is party night. Almost everyone who is going to have a party throws it on this night since everyone is in town and settled in. My school has started a tradition of throwing one of the better parties in order to attract various developers and increase the exposure of the students. The count I heard was that we had representatives from 50-60 different companies go through our party this year. I met only a handful of them. My mentor showed up and introduced me to a few of his friends. I also had the opportunity to speak with a few of my classmates, since I’ve barely seen them since this adventure began. It was an excellent party and my brother and I returned home, pleased and exhausted.

Wednesday
Decided that today I was going to get a real breakfast. My brother and I woke up late and headed to a greasy diner for pancakes and waffles.

I had cobbled together a schedule of the talks I wanted to see but there was so much to do today I couldn’t fit everything in. I was able to get back in time to see the Microsoft Keynote. Last night the two Microsoft employees at the dinner table were really excited to hear him talk so I figured I’d slip in. Ended up standing, crouching near, Zoe Flower. She has a column in the Official Playstation Magazine and numerous other game related media outlets.

The keynote was disappointing. J Allard is a good speaker but what he had to present wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. Many of the people I talked to about the keynote thought poorly of it. Microsoft was trying to win back the developers’ trust and love by giving away 1,000 HD TVs. The idea that they could be bought like that raised their hackles.

Afterwards I slipped into the Game Design Challenge. Clint Hocking took the challenge seriously and tried valiantly to come up with something that showcased the Emily Dickenson’s life and her poetry. Unfortunately it lacked the polish or humor of the other two panelists. Peter Molyneux demonstrated a working prototype of his game idea. While I enjoyed the atmosphere and the way it represented poetry as a condensed expression of events and place, his demo was more about the portal technology he’s developed and the metaclay. Will Wright was trying to lose the challenge with his idea of the USB Emily. However he has such a fan following that no one was going to let him walk away that easily. He easily won the challenge, but later on I heard he declined the offer to return again next year.

It was now time for lunch and a trip to Shaba Games set up by my school. The studio was beautiful and the walkthrough was excellent. Everyone really took the time to explain what they did to us and showed us the tools that they used to accomplish it. I was really impressed by how they set up their animation library and how the game designer could perform iterative tweaks without having to go back to the artists and animators.

After a few hours of exploring Shaba, we headed back to the conference in small groups. I slipped into the expo floor and explored the various booths as the booth crawl ramped up. While there was a lot of prizes, t-shirts and cheap logoed handouts throughout the floor, there really wasn’t that much else to interest someone in my situation. My brother however, loved the place. As the floor started to get cramped my brother and I slipped away. I was exhausted by my busy day and turned in to the hotel early.

Tuesday
No tutorials for me. I left my brother in the hotel and headed down early to make the trip to Secret Level. It was fun to see all the other scholarship winners and to see Jeff and Rudy in person.

I’d been to Secret Level in the past. One of my faculty members was able to put me in touch with a designer there and I had lunch with him when I was in the city in January. However it was still interesting to get the in-depth talks about the company, which I didn’t get during my informal meeting. I enjoyed hearing about their history and the choice to maintain that stability which allowed them to grow in the first place.

Afterwards I went back to the Moscone center to relax and check my email. I saw Chris Oltyan talking at a table and went over to see what was up. I met Sheri Graner Ray, who is pushing to get more women into the game industry and runs a mailing list at http://www.igda.org/women . Afterwards we went to the IDGA scholars meeting. And got all sorts of advice about drinking, exchanging cards, remembering who’s card you have and the circumstances you got it under, the dangers of the expo and the career center, and being willing to change your schedule to maintain a conversation with someone you clicked with.

Galip Kartoglu hooked up with Chris Oltyan, my brother and I as we headed to the Argent to find people who wanted to grab something for dinner. It was difficult pulling them away from the bar but eventually we put together a group and headed out to a Brazilian restaurant. At the table I ended up conversing with a man from Xbox and a man from Microsoft about games and MMORPGs.

We headed back to the Argent. Ended up sitting next to Jeff and talking with him about the art of networking. So much of it hinges around being memorable in some way. My brother and I took off early. I was pretty tired from all the walking I did today.

Sunday
I flew in to San Francisco around noon. I met my brother at the airport and we took the BART to our hotel. My brother graduated from Northeastern University last December. I managed to convince him to purchase some sort of pass and come out to the conference as he is very interested in game development. A lot of my effort was directed into getting him contacts and less so for myself.

Monday
We both got up bright and early and headed to the Moscone Center. Both of us had Tutorial Passes (my brother bought his, mine was given to me by my school). After getting our badge holders and our bagful of goodies, we headed upstairs to discover that they do serve us breakfast (pastries and coffee). After eating we split up and headed to our respective tutorials. My brother went to the one on networking for multiplayer games and I hit the game design tutorial. I sat with Vance (a member of my school and another IGDA scholar). When the time came for us to play test a competitive-cooperative game called SiSSYFiGHT 3000, I was an immediate target as they assumed Vance and I would align. The class was fun though. I took a lot of notes and it was amazing to sit at a table and have people take all of your opinions seriously. Good ideas come from anywhere. During lunch I managed to run into my mentor, Chris Oltyan. He’d found some of my classmates and they were quick to point him out to me when I wandered by. Chris is a charmer. He’s one of those charismatic people who notices all those subtle cues of human communication and utilizes them to get what he wants out of people. In other words, he’s a very good businessman. And my opposite. No matter how hard I tried I could not hope to match him in the brilliance of his business card swapping ways. I am indebted to him, though. He took me under his wing and guided me though many a card swapping encounter. Both my brother and I would not have gained as many contacts as we did if Chris Oltyan wasn’t there to guide us and open the way. After the tutorials, my brother and I met up with Chris and headed to the Final Fantasy concert. The concert was beautiful. Some of the songs and games carry a great deal of emotional impact for me. The chorus was a little weak though. They really needed to let loose and belt it out at times. That rising vocal is what makes your skin crawl during such pieces as “Sephiroth.” Afterwards we headed down to the Argent Hotel which was supposed to be the place for relaxing and mingling with those in the industry. All and all, it was fairly quiet. The rush must not start until tomorrow.