PixelVixen707

During my week, I’ve attended several talks that I can safely say represent the avant-garde of the games industry. Alternate reality games? Personal satellites? Theories of games as agents of social change? This is good and fascinating stuff, and GDC is chock full of speakers who give inspirational speeches that put game designers smack in the center of the future. (And I don’t just mean Jane McGonigal.)

But I can’t help but nag myself: does any of this stuff work?If a few thousand people try your game for social change, while millions more clap for the trailer for Modern Warfare 2 - then what impact is the avant-garde really having?

Ask your average NeoGAF’er, and I’m sure they’d think that the serious games summit, the “are games art? No: art is a game” crowd, and anyone who uses the term “geolocation” is seriously up their own butt. There’s an incentive for academics and deep thinkers to sell far-out ideas, since that’s what gets them noticed. If it never comes true? Well, by then you’re on to the next thing.

But that’s obviously a gross oversimplification - first, because some of these far-out concepts are popular (think of Braid, or Flower); and second, because that’s not how the avant-garde works. The avant-garde is there to nudge the mainstream. A radical idea from one guy in a shack trickles down to a fresh prespective in a commercial work. It happens in all fields; if you’ve ever been cornered by a guy at a dinner party who writes jingles for commercials, but wants to tell you everything he learned from Miles Davis’ On the Corner, then you know what I mean.

At this morning’s excellent GDC Minitalks presentation, ten folks gave five-minute talks about a topic that was forward-looking and fascinating. The kids at the Indie Games Rant could learn a lot from these folks; each presentation was quick, concise, meaty and mind-massaging.

I’ll highlight a couple:

Clint Hocking - who comes off as game design’s Ernest Hemingway - gave a quick talk on the absurdity of the 100-point scale in reviews. The point of the scale is to give you a fine-grained evaluation of a product - which is silly in and of itself - yet people gravitate to thresholds, like 80+ or 90+. Quoting one wine critic, Dr. Jan Miller, who argued that “90 is not just 1 more than 89,” Hocking raved that, hey, it is. “I don’t know what you’re a doctor of dude? But you fucking fail!”

Tracy Fullerton gave an elegant little presentation on “masterful play.” She argued that while many games appeal to the middle of the skill range, there’s something particularly special about the highest point of excellence - when “the player is both part of a system of constraints, and free of it.” Great chess games and brilliant basketball plays have gone down in history, and not just the history of the sport. And it’s this masterful play that forms the real bond between culture and play, in a way that widespread dabbling doesn’t quite attain.

(I’m doing her delivery no justice, but if I find her slides I’ll link them.)

N’Gai Croal gave a practical but clever talk about the value of giving players control over their challenge, not just with the dumb front-of-the-game “Pussy/Assassin/Killer” scale, but with on-the-fly ways to make the game more challenging. Think of the variable scale of risk and reward in The World Ends With You, or a boss fight in Resident Evil 5 that gives you the choice to let Shiva handle the flamethrower, or try to take it yourself. Sounded like it would make a good Edge column.

And Robin Hunicke railed against PlayStation Home. When she first heard about the service, she was excited.  Here was a service that could mix the best features of Second Life with the convenience of a console. But instead, she discovered - as did I - that it suuuucks. (I think that was a direct quote, but my notes don’t check out.) She used her talk and her slides to list all the ways that Home could be made fun - almost as much fun as real life. They included letting people climb the walls, or make music, or come up with more exploits, or make way for graffiti. “Banksy can come in and make it look awesome!”

Much as I liked Hunicke’s examples, I guess I’m too beaten down to believe Sony would ever give any of them a shot. Home failed because it’s inherently conservative. It’s an effort to take the appealingly far-out concept of virtual social spaces and turn the whole thing into an infomercial. In fact, if you look at it that way, you can see the avant-garde fail in the face of the mainstream: all the people who saw such potential in stuff like Second Life can now watch Sony turn the whole thing into a way to sell Diesel jeans.

But if even one of Hunicke’s ideas could slip through? This five-minute slice of futurism would help us in the here and the now.