Anyone interested in a catching up for a drink when AGDC is on? I was thinking Thursday night around 8:30pm.
Not being a Melbourne local I don't know the best place for cheap drinks close to Federation Square. Even if you're not going to AGDC it would be good to put a face to the name. Anyone interested and/or know of a good venue?
quote:Originally posted by LiveWire
Biggest news is that the GDAA will be running the conference next year (or an equivilent, even if it isn't AGDC as such), and i heard a rumour that it will alternate between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, with it likly to be Brisbane next year.
I certainly hope the new conference will be brought to Brisbane, although I doubt that it'll be held in Brisbane on its first year.
I feel that Brisbane needs a dedicated event a'la AGDC. Brisbane's game scene has really begun to take off in the last few years, and I think a Brisbane-based games conference would help attract business and awareness from local, interstate and international people/organisations. Additionally, Brisbane is home to a large base of gamedev students - Qantm, QUT, Griffith Uni and Southbank Institute of TAFE cater specifically to games careers, while UQ and JCU (and many other institutions) provide many games-specific or games-related subjects within more abstract study fields.
What do Brisbane-based sumeans think? Would a permanent annual Brisbane-based event be worthwhile?
quote:Originally posted by TheBigJ
Additionally, Brisbane is home to a large base of gamedev students - Qantm, QUT, Griffith Uni and Southbank Institute of TAFE cater specifically to games careers, while UQ and JCU (and many other institutions) provide many games-specific or games-related subjects within more abstract study fields.
What do Brisbane-based sumeans think? Would a permanent annual Brisbane-based event be worthwhile?
Something that's probably worth thinking about if people are interested in a permanent brisbane conference (which I think would be great for everyone up there) is would you people want it to more resemble freeplay or the AGDC? Or something else entirely?
I would imagine somewhere between Free Play and AGDC; an event that caters for the wide audience that we have in Brisbane - students, indie developers, local development studios, as well as the larger multinational studios (such as THQ and Pandemic/Bioware). Ticket prices could be kept towards the lower-end for a standard pass, with additional prices for those executives and high-salary developers from larger companies who wish to attend cocktail parties and other events which most students and lesser-salary developers would not likely bother with.
I think ultimately it would be closer to Free Play than to AGDC, as I expect the new GDAA conference will be catering for the higher-end developers that made up the core of AGDC attendees.
There will be a pannel discussion about the brisbane industry at the start of the evening, so bring it up!
And TheBigJ: I can't think of a strong reason why it wouldnt be held in Brisbane on it's first year. Considering that Brsbane has a far large development and student comminuty that Melbourne, I think it infact has a much stronger case than other states. All i heard was just an off hand comment, so i can't varify it in any way. But considering what i was told by some of the poeple i spoke to, and others that made simular comments or heard simular sugestions, i would say the rumour has merrit, if nothing else.
My reasons for making that comment are merely due to the fact that the GDAA and its affiliated/sibling organisations (AIE, Micro Forte, etc) have a strong base in Melbourne, Canberra and Syndey, with little connection to Brisbane. As I understand things, this is a major reason that AGDC was never held in Brisbane and as recently as 2003, AGDC was expected to be held in Melbourne until at least 2008.
It makes more sense to me that the GDAA would prefer to host the first conference in familiar territory working with familiar organizers (and Victoria's supportive government representatives), at a familiar venue (eg. ACMI or Melbourne Convention Centre).
This is not very strong reasoning, and I may yet be wrong. The rumor certainly has merit :)
Well, i wrote a first draft of my report, but found that it was long and all the interesting stuff has already been posted on various blogs, etc. linked to in the recent news post on the front page, so i don't think i'll bother finishing it. I will however post this section here though:
Gripping Players By Making Games Emotionally Engaging ? David Freeman, The Freeman Group
Unfortunatly this one was on at the same time as both the panel discussing challenges in Next-gen development, which I really wanted to see, and the Valve talk on business and design, which I hear was awesome.
But for me, I'd heard one of David Freeman?s GDC presentations previously, so I wasn?t going to miss this for anything. Undoubtedly the best talk I saw at the conference. I wasn?t going to even bother trying to take notes, he powered through it that fast, and likewise i wont bother attempting to repeat much of it here. He spoke about creating more emotion in games, touching on character development (of both main characters and minor NPCs), emotional choices, emotional scenes, creating interesting dialogue, repeated symbolism, and all sorts of other top stuff. Spoke on how it could all be incorporated into gameplay and showed examples from Batman Begins, paintings, and other sources. Fantastic.
He's holding one of his incredibly popular screen writing classes next year in Sydney too. No details yet but the site is: [url]http://www.beyondstructure.com[/url]
Also, his homepage is [url]http://www.freemangames.com[/url]
Check it out. And you cant help but think that game stories and characters would be so much better if people would utilize his advice...
It seems to me that David Freeman is a man who everyone with an interest in game design has to either love or hate. Incidentally, I do not love him. I attended Valve's talk on Business and Design, which was great. Now, I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I want to say a few things about Freeman. Here's his famous emotioneering painting example (the one he almost certainly presented during his talk at AGDC).
[img]http://www.freemangames.com/idea/images/bookcover/01.jpg[/img]
To me, this painting represents everything that is wrong with mainstream game design. It features a muscled-up crew-cut toting half-wit training his pistol on a very generic looking alien, while his big-breasted female companion hangs helplessly over the edge, concentrating all her mental energy on setting the feminist cause back by several years. Talk about an "Emotionally Complex Situation".
When I first saw the painting, I assumed it was a counter-example of emotion in games; Let's look at what's wrong with this, I expected Freeman to say. Not likely - here are my (least) favourite quotes from his critical analysis.
quote:For the first time in the game, you see that her spirit can separate from her body. Thus we have a mystery. Intriguing mysteries motivate the player to continue moving forward. They're a "Motivation Technique."
quote:Let's take a closer look at her -- and at her spirit, in blue, which is separating from her body, having already "reconciled" to the idea that she is about to die.
quote:The young woman is terrified -- but her "spirit" is serene, and not at all afraid of her impending death. In short, she's ambivalent about dying. Ambivalence is one many ways to give emotional depth to an NPC; it's an "NPC Deepening Technique."
quote:She can't live with the fact that she endangered earth by letting these aliens get a foothold in our world, even if she did so unknowingly. This time, you can't save her with your hand -- you can only save her by showing her that there's still hope.
If you want to find those quotes, go to his website at freemangames.com - although you'll have to wade through many pages of Freeman's self-indulgent promotion and egotistical ramblings.
What he is teaching with this painting is not game design, but [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_communication"]visual communication[/url] - and really awful communication at that. I'd love to hand this in as assessment at any decent undergraduate film school and see what kind of marks it gets. Is this the best example he has of emotioneering, or does it get worse? The quotes all scream Hollywood, where concepts like subtlety are nonexistant; Freeman is a typical Hollywood screenwriter - big on cliched, stereotypical blockbuster stories that are mostly devoid of any real emotional sophistication.
I was not the least bit surprised to read that Chris Crawford had [url="http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Miscellania/AustraliaTrip/Australia_T…"]walked out of his talk[/url] at IE2004.
[:)]
well, i liked it anyway. I agree that the example is pretty cliched, but i think by focusing on that you're missing the point. IT was an example of howto create better emotion in games, and what was shown was just an example, cliched example yes, but that dosnt mean they have to be. And besides, considering the emotion depth in most games (i.e. next to none) a cliched scenario like that would probably do well - it woud be awful in a movie for sure, but who are games to complain about shitty writing in another medium.
Yes, I agree that a system of techniques and theories may be valid despite of one particularly horrible example of their implementation; but this is a tentative issue.
My argument against Freeman's work is not limited to this specific artwork, I just took advantage of it for my critical assessment, which is easy since, well, it is completely fucking absurd.
My real issue with Freeman is the entire concept of Emotioneering - his system of techniques which seems to operate on a purely mechanical level, providing essentially a series of formulae through which emotional enlightenment will be achieved. This is the Hollywood way - formula based scriptwriting is commonplace in the film industry. Why? Because of people like David Freeman, making tons of money running workshops teaching people how to write cliched yet highly profitable scripts. Unfortunately, the games industry is heading the same way.
Solving the problem of introducing non-trivial emotional content into games is massively complex in both abstract communication and the technicalities of low-level implementation (think Chris Crawford and Interactive Storytelling). In my opinion, one major reason that games continue to be emotionally bankrupt is because designers are unable or unwilling to start chipping away at the mountain that is interactive emotional sophistication - but why should they, when David Freeman makes it sound so simple?
mutant_fork: you did? where? when? as much as I tryed to find a meet up, all I could find were some people from qantm and only one active sumea member in the form of sumeacool. We went around to a bar called Hell's Kitchen or something. Lots of red lighting. I met some people from sumea latter through out the conference and at pubs though.
Jacana wasn't around to organise us this year, we were lost without her!
Also, i'm going to write up my own highly oppinonated report of this year's AGDC soon, well, maybe. If i do i'll post it.
Biggest news is that the GDAA will be running the conference next year (or an equivilent, even if it isn't AGDC as such), and i heard a rumour that it will alternate between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, with it likly to be Brisbane next year.