The dream began in Rohan.

King Théoden dead, Éomer and I—his sister Éowyn—solemnly attending his funeral. Within a sanctum hewn from the rock (with perfectly smooth and rectilinear walls of silver), we bore his noble, potato sack-wrapped body to his tomb. Tears streamed down my face. “Bring forth his sword, that he should be clad in splendour even in death,” called the Elven guard. I wasn’t entirely sure why his sword was a Civil War cavalry saber, but we put it alongside the corpse.

“Why the fuck are there pterodactyls in Rohan?” asked Éomer, and indeed, looking up, I could see the great beast circling above, crying the sorrowful cry of the pterodactyl, mourning our common loss. It looked a lot like Mothrakk, though it wasn’t bombing us with fire.

Then the slivery walls of the sanctum melted away and there, on the barren Arctic ice fields, began the shark chase. A single, massive, malevolent shark stalked us, sporadically breaching the ice and swallowing members of our Hawaiian tour group whole. His cold dead eyes watched us as he passed, his sickly white flank the length of a full city block. Watching the great beast, I tripped in my flight, and fell, and knew that I was doomed. But looking up, I saw an apparition: Kevin Bacon walking towards me, across the frigid waters.

“How…how are you walking on water?” I asked.

“Do you doubt the will of Kevin Bacon?” countered Kevin Bacon.

Actually, he was just walking on a shallow puddle, but the illusion was convincing. And with a wink, Kevin Bacon ran into the sunset, distracting the great shark so that I might live. I took refuge in the half-submerged ruins of an ancient civilization—had they been a sea-faring race, or were they simply victims of continental drift? Regardless, to my horror, I soon realised that my shelter was in fact the spawning grounds of the great sharks, and I was surrounded by female specimens of the species, smaller but no less aggressive than their male counterparts. Teeth gnashed, the sea boiled, the predators circled ever closer. I was frozen with hypothermia and terror. But I could end this nightmare, I knew. I had only to disconnect from this Avatar—which would subsequently be torn apart, of course; a great financial loss—and I would wake up elsewhere, away from this cursed place. I calmed myself and attempted to disconnect…

40 years later, a research expedition was gathering to investigate the disappearance of the Avatar, and of Kevin Bacon. They set out, their pack mules burdened with scientific gear, finally arriving at their first port of call: a Vulcan temple in the middle of Central Park. The expedition’s lead researcher, Neil deGrasse Tyson, pored over several recently-excavated artifacts, including a strange tomb covered in ancient Chinese writings and ideograms. He noted a particular design, three circles encompassing various writings—two circles set inside a deeply-cut rectangle, the other without. Pointing out the design to his scholars, he asked them for a translation. This is what they gave him:

“You are quiet and mathematical.”

The moral of the story is that taking Buckley’s right before bed is probably the best idea I’ve had this year.

Confounded old Nicholas Gamgee! I’d lose my own head if it wasn’t bolted firmly to my neck, and remarkably handsome.

In my excitement to conclude my series of GDC09 write-ups, I forgot to actually revisit my abortive post from Day 4 of the conference.

As previously mentioned, Day 4 was quite eventful after the day’s talks, so I missed the opportunity for a recap; however, since my previous post was overly wordy, I’ll keep this recap to a minimum. The day started with a session of “GDC Microtalks,” in which ten speakers each took precisely six minutes each to rant about a particular topic. Great range of subject matter here. Then came “Game Studies Download 4.0,” a look at video games in academia, again covering some pretty broad topics. If I’m overly brief here, just look below for my full notes.

I rounded out the day in the “Experiemental Gameplay Sessions” workshop. Again, I won’t go into detail here, suffice it to say that, if you ever attend a future GDC, do whatever it takes to see this session. Some of the designs left me absolutely floored. So, for no other reason than expedience, here are my top three most memorable games of the bunch:

• “The Unfinished Swan,” by Ian Dallas. This game literally gave me chills. The mood is perfect, and the mechanic is powerful. I’ll be talking more about this game in a post or two.
  
• “Spy Party”, by Chris Hecker. Really seems to capture the intrigue, danger, and more importantly, subtelty in some of the more realistic spy stories…you know, the kind where the spy doesn’t advertise his presence by blowing up most of a city. Really fun to watch players compete in this one.
• “Today I Die,” by Daniel Benmergui. Simple, beautiful game melding poetry with gameplay. And the soundtrack is perfect.

And with that, I’ve completed my write-ups of every day at this year’s GDC. Furthermore, I just uploaded the collection of notes I took during each lecture/session; you can find them here. Some of them may be overly vague or confusing, but feel free to send me any questions you may have.

Finally, let us now observe the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that influenced this post’s title (see 1:21).

Obviously this post comes somewhat after the fact, but I figured I should make the attempt regardless.

The final day of GDC09 was just as packed with good lectures as any other. Of course, by this point, I was somewhat in the “flow” of the event and was really starting to know my way around the conference (or at least so I felt).

First up was “Procedural Texturing on Multi-Core CPU: New creative opportunities through scalability” with Ed Plowman from Intel and Dr. Sébastien Deguy from Allegorithmic. Procedural content generation…right up my alley. While I tend to focus more on environmental content (landscape, cities, etc.), this talk dealt primarily with procedural graphics; more precisely, procedural textures. Allegorithmic offers a toolkit (Substance) allowing designers/artists to provide texture definitions as opposed to pure bitmaps, offering a space savings of up to 94% in some cases. As a friend of mine put it, it’s something like giving someone a one-page recipe as opposed to trying to transport and deploy an entire smegging cake. In addition to the space savings, procedural textures can be much more realistic and dynamic than regular bitmaps; however, this comes at the cost of CPU power required to actually generate the textures from a given rule set. The point of the talk was essentially that the increasing abundance of multi-core (and soon, many-core) systems will be able to take up the task of procedural texture generation, allowing a whole new range of effects and mechanics. It was also interesting to see the Substance toolkit that Allegorithmic develops; one can use it to define a pipeline of parametrisable, procedural effects. The toolkit I developed for my own thesis is a somewhat simpler, pared-down version of Substance, but it’s nice to see that I was on the same track as a commercially-viable product.

Next came Brenda Brathwaite, renowned game designer and professor of game design at Savannah College of Art and Design. Her talk, “100 Questions, 97 Answers, 56 Minutes,” was a fairly hilarious and rapid-fire FAQ covering the do’s and don’ts of entering the game industry. In a nutshell: don’t be an idiot, have a nice-looking website (Nick fail) and a decent portfolio, and work your ass off. My favourite bit: “Q: What was it like to work on [awesome game title here]? A: It was ecstasy, the greatest experience ever. Also, it was like being on fire from the inside.”

After that, I decided to pay a visit to my IGDA-approved mentor, Dustin Clingman: professor at Full Sail game design university, CEO of Zeitgeist Games, and web designer extraordinaire. He was moderating “The Dating Game,” a panel examining the possibility of creating the video game equivalent of the “date movie.” Some of the inherent difficulties: movies are viewed in the “neutral territory” of a theatre, while games normally take place in someone’s house; games are often aggressively competitive, as opposed to co-operatively engaging; and the huge drop-off of girl gamers after the 8-10 year-old range. Solutions included: reinvigorating public arcades with co-operative, semi-private games (think shooters taking place in enclosed booths); games that don’t require both hands and full attention, allowing more interaction between the happy couple without punishing them for looking away momentarily; and perhaps making use of user-generated content, or communal creation, resulting in a tangible artefact both parties can enjoy. Really interesting discussion, and it got me thinking of how I would implement my own such game. “Thinking” being the key word here.

Finally, I checked out Ian Bogost’s lecture, “Learning from the Atari 2600″ (and even got him to sign my copy of Unit Operations…ask me about the full story some time). The lecture was scheduled in the same time slot as a Peter Molyneux talk, prompting Mr. Bogost to remark: “At least in a talk about the Atari, all my predictions will come true.” Ah! levity. Anyway, Bogost started by relating his experience playing a “Chronicles of Narnia” game with his daughter. The latter had loved the book/movie, and expected to re-live some of the story’s iconic moments; instead, the game was just “an incessant barrage of wolves.” In looking at games for the Atari 2600, Bogost dug up a number of successful and less-successful ports, from both coin-op games and movies. What worked best, he found, were games capturing an appropriate feel and experience, such as the Empire Strikes Back game, and more recently Wii Bowling (on the Wii Sports disc). These simple games nevertheless reflected a complete experience: the former, the desperate struggle of the Rebellion against insurmountable odds; the latter, the key elements of bowling alley play. The moral: focus on experiences, only port a concept and not a full game/movie. Interestingly, he also claimed that E.T., consistently considered the worst game of all time, was actually a very faithful adaptation of the movie—”a film about alientation, not aliens”—in its representation of confusion and isolation. In that case, I’d also argue that A Boy and His Blob (NES) is a faithful adaptation of E.T.

With the lectures of the day—and thus GDC as a whole—complete, I returned to my hotel room to watch Hercules Returns with me mates, before taking an early flight out of San Francisco.

GDC09 was a blast. The lectures were mind-expanding and educational; more importantly however, being surrounded by like-minded people so very devoted to making games was hugely inspirational. I owe a monstrous debt to the IGDA for making the trip possible. A tip of the hat to the other IGDA scholars as well—it was fascinating to meet and discuss games with such a great group of people. With any luck, I’ll be seeing them all again soon.

And now it’s back to the real world.

Regular readers of this site (both of you) will notice that I dipped below the radar after my last post. After that crazy night of craziness, there was one final day of GDC followed by some relaxation with my GDC roommates. Then I took off on my own Saturday morning for a weekend in Las Vegas with a few of me mates from Montreal. Given that I couldn’t find free WiFi in Vegas, I decided to save my money for gambling, and only finish off the GDC posts once I’d returned. Expect a few wrap-up posts in the days to come…

I can’t write up the full content of today.

It is currently 2:30am, and I wake up in 4.5 hours.

After a day of decent lectures, I went out. All I can say is that I ended up at the exclusive Microsoft party, chilling in a private booth with a Frag Doll, the CEO of Harmonix, and one of the writers on Futurama/The Simpsons.

Don’t ask questions, Nick. Keep your head down and keep running.