GDC2013 - Microtalks

In this panel, a handful of game developers each had five minutes to talk about a topic of their own choosing.

• Leigh Alexander (Gamasutra, Sexy Videogameland) is a writer who rarely writes game reviews because she believes it's the job of the press to go beyond product reviews.
• She also wants more diversity and initiatives in the triple A space. She hates that marketing is gutting things done by teams.
• "I've heard this game couldn't have a black hero because it wasn't going to sell. You have to basically do what the market leaders do or else no one will buy your game." 
• Marketing sometimes makes stupid decisions like selling Dead Island with a statue of a bloody female torso or promoting bullying with the latest Hitman. We need marketing to sell joy, not sex. Don't just make decisions based on numbers, but support the industry. 
• "We have a serious image crisis right now. Marketing can sell crap, but it's failing to sell truth and joy. We need a fresh perspective. If you work in marketing and you just want to make numbers, please work in another industry. It'll be better for everyone."
• Tom Bissell (Gears of War Judgment writer) talked about storytelling in games.
• Tom wrote some novels before becoming a games writer. Games are low on the list of mediums for writers.
• "Big action video games are not and never will be, a writer's medium. The writer doesn't steer the story, the gameplay determines the story, the player steers the story. The writer contextualizes gameplay and grounds the player's experience in the story."
• In game development, script sequences came from developers. The script had no context, and dialogue moments were written without even knowing where the content would fit within the game.
•  "The problem was we were writing dialogue that took place in environments we hadn't seen, after gunfights we hadn't fought, and assigning them to place during moments we didn't really understand. Nothing in our script felt grounded. As an experience, it felt false. We realized the only way it would work was to allow the player's experience to be our story."
• The developers had a second run where they embraced the player's run as the story. The story has to be what the player does and the writer is a journalist reporting live from the battlegrounds.
• "One of the many reasons video game scripts often feel divorced from what is actually happening on screen is people have this very ingrained belief that game and story are two different things. Our experience on Gears taught me that story and game need to be the same thing. The story has to be what the player does. A writer who is not having a constant conversation with the experience of the player has been put in an impossible situation."
• Kim Swift of Airtight Games talked about how to "not be a douchy boss."
• Listen to your team and trust teammates to help you fill in your knowledge gap.
• Be transparent, disperse information, and don't leave anyone in the dark. Everyone is an adult and can make decisions for themselves, so give them all the information and trust them to make the right decisions. Communication is a give and take.
• Tell them they're awesome and give people credit. Give constructive criticism by giving references and collaborating on solutions. Be pleasant about feedback.
• Empathize and be open to criticism yourself. By being empathetic, it makes you more approachable.
• George Fan from Popcap Games talked about how to choose a theme for your game.
• When choosing a theme for your mechanic, there are four main questions you have to ask yourself.
• Is your theme something you're into? You'd be much more engaged in your game if you actually like the theme.
• Does your theme support the mechanics? In Plants vs. Zombie, for example, plants were chosen because they are stationary and zombies because they wanted a single-screen experience and zombies are slow walkers.
• Does your theme communicate the goal? You need to support immersion and give motivation. 
• Does you theme have both familiarity and novelty? Lightsabers were popular because they were both familiar (swords) and novel (they glow).
• Carla Fisher presented a gamer's guide to parenting.
• Kids are like a game of all genres and requires extensive QA. She suggests to guide children's behavior using lessons she learned from games.
• "Potty training with Plants vs. Zombies." There was an achievement that you received by collecting a lot of sunlight. It incentivized players to play slowly rather than aggressively. Potty training is a similar task.
• "Baking with Left 4 Dead." Left 4 Dead is a game all about teamwork and fosters communication. When baking with your child, give easy tasks to them like mixing flour while you handing the more difficult ones.
• Ben Cervany talked about using the city as a foundation for a game.
• The city is already our biggest game. It presents complex dynamic models like flocking cars and crowd behaviors.
• Employ the latest technologies (fluid media, printed objects, head-mounted augmented reality, media capture, gesture tracking) to create new immersive contexts for expression and bring games to places.
• Some game concepts that incorporate the city - dynamic summoning of infrastructure, play flows across context and devices, party up with players in real space and real time, game time while in transit, putting sensors and outputs in our space, urban planning as a MMOG.
• The city hosts a myriad of fluid games, so start building tools to play the city together.
• Mare Sheppard, president of Metanet Software, talks about their one-hit wonder.
• The company released N and N+, two distilled platformer games all about the feel.
• The game series is functional but it's not beautiful. The team wanted to make the perfect final version, but they were always moving forward and not looking back, so they didn't return to the series. No projects that came afterwards felt as good as N and they were struggling to find a better game. They were stagnating instead of progressing.
• They announce N++, the third game in the series. They want to finish off the game so that they can finally move forward. They need to close the chapter on N. Nobody ever talks about the psychological and emotional side of game development.
• "Everyone is stressed and has problems, even if they're not talking about them. It's part of the creative process, the learning process. Everything about making games is hard, and not just the technical part. I know we aren't the only ones struggling. We felt for years that it was our private hell. It doesn't have to be that way. Maybe we need to talk about the psychological and emotional side making games as well. That's incredibly difficult to do, because it means we have to accept ourselves even at our lowest and most vulnerable points."
• Anna Anthropy talked about gender diversity at tech conferences.
• She asks men in the industry to boycott panels without a single woman.
• "If you're a man and you're being asked to speak at a panel where no women have been asked to speak, refuse vocally. Say, 'I'm not comfortable speaking on a panel where no women are allowed to speak.' GDC has a bit of problem with women. The game industry as a whole has a problem with women."
• "I feel like many of you sitting here want diversity at this conference. You see the value that more perspectives, different perspectives, could bring to inception. It's not enough to have the want, you have to act. Some of you might shrug at the mention of affirmative action. I say affirmative action is action."
• Manveer Heir, designer at Bioware Montreal, talked about his experience playing Minority Media's Papo & Yo, which touched him emotionally and moved him to tears.
• Papo & Yo is a metaphor for alcoholism and domestic abuse. The monster in the game helps you. You can also feed him fruit, but it makes him go berserk and attack you.
• "By the end of Papo & Yo, I was sobbing profusely. I was a grown man breaking down in his living room. I've never experienced that gravity of emotion through media."
• The game made Manveer remember his strained relationship with his younger brother, who was bipolar and committed suicide in 2011. The game reminded him to let go and forgive. Game making should be about putting your own experiences in the games that you work on. Personal experiences and showcasing your vulnerability to the world are more likely to capture universal truths. Emotional resonance is what we look for.
• "Papa & Yo reminded me of something I already knew: the need to let go of my anger, the need to forgive and look towards the future, the need to grow as a person. What's interesting about Papo & Yo is it captures a universal truth... My only current interest in making games are those that have emotional resonance. Games that move players to reflect, consider, and emote in way they do not normally. I hope more of you will consider putting this emotional content in your game. There are those of us that crave this emotional content."