PixelVixen707

So I got through day one of the Game Developer Conference, and it took the whole day to get my bearings. The event takes place in two buildings: the vast Moscone West, where the grown-up stuff like the Serious Games Summit and the tutorials all seem to run, and Moscone North, which hosted all the cool stuff, like the Independent Games Summit, or the virtual worlds thing. I came in with no plan and found myself stumped a few times by the endlessly-long program guide and the giant placards in the halls that listed all the day’s talks. If I see Raph Koster talk about the future of virtual worlds, should I stick around for Habbo Hotel? I like indie games, but do I want to know about indie game sales stats? If I go to a talk in the artificial intelligence track, will they expect me to know Lisp?

I don’t know Lisp. But I’ll bet these folks do. I’m not sure what I expected the attendees to be like, but it’s definitely a straight-laced crowd - lots of developers, lots of business-folk. I struck up a few conversations at lunch and in the halls, and heard a few elevator pitches. People are friendly and eager to network. And celebrity spotting was a hoot. I thought I saw Alice Taylor, one of my personal writing heroes. (And pssst, Warren Spector? I ‘dore your work. Call me.)

But I spent not a little time eagerly hunched over my BlackBerry, e-mailing or twittering - the standard dodge for someone who’s feeling clueless and friendless but wants to look busy.

The talks today were a mixed bag, but one deserves attention: Jane McGonigal’s talk on how game designers can reinvent the future. McGonigal ran through a series of projects that use game-like techniques to make us happy, constructive and enlightened human beings. Game designers have the skill, the ideas and the execution to bring people together, make them happy, and point them toward constructive behaviors, like using a GPS in their running shoes to draw a virtual maze across the streets of San Francisco, or racing a real stunt plane in a virtual jet. The contact lenses with the built-in HUD looked rad.

Plenty of her examples were nutty and speculative and downright weird - fascinating stuff, but maybe not all ready for mainstream adoration. But the difference between a futurist and a mere technologist is that the latter would hold up all these ideas - like the game about folding proteins where you really fold real proteins, and maybe get to cure cancer - and just say, “This is cool,” or, “This could make money.” McGonigal runs them by us and tells us they’ll save the world. Now there’s an elevator pitch we can believe in.

So, off to bed. Plan for tomorrow: a couple of interviews, a few more panels, and the Harmonix party, where I’ll go around telling everyone that Rock Band 2 was the best game of 2008.

(Don’t tell anyone it was really Left 4 Dead!)