I hope not. I sincerely hope not. GDC (Game Developers Conference) 2009 was held last week, and for the most part, I pretty much ignored it. You know: lotta hot air, lotta grandiose statements, lotta pats on the back. And then, there was this.
One session concerned rants from independent designers. They had a few minutes each to talk on whatever was bothering them. Ordinarily, I put my links at the bottom of the post, but for this one, read it now:
GDC 09: The Indie Game Maker Rant at Destructoid
I hope you survived the read. Aside from politicians, I haven’t seen such a load of unmitigated, pretentious crap. With any luck, these people will get therapeutic help and find useful jobs outside the games industry.
If the conference had been this week, I’d have considered this an April Fool’s joke of some kind. Unfortunately, it appears they’re serious.
On the bright side, it’s unlikely there was any mainstream media coverage of this particular “talk”. So we may not have to worry about it being spread to the “mass market”. I can just imagine the headlines over Heather’s ideas, and I’d rather not.
Perhaps some time in the future, like next year, they’ll invite a few designers who could have worthwhile things to say. You know, Jeff Vogel, who’s been at this 15 years, and successful. Or a couple of guys from CD Projekt. Or Stardock. People like them (or them, themselves).
Then again, these folks are successful. So maybe what they do isn’t art. And hey, isn’t that what indie is all about? Never, please. Never.
yeah they are some ’strange folks/developers’ i probably would have no interest in anything they developed and even less interest after reading what they had to say.
s f/d, is PC talk for some really strange, sick puppies.
Scorpia, did you mean: “If the conference had been this week…” or “If the conference had been this WEAK…?”
Pretentious, overrated, blowhard game designers have a long, dishonorable history. Looking at you, Chris Crawford. Still, this article was like a bad 90s usenet discussion of “What is an RPG? / Is Diablo an RPG?”
Some women attach near-holy significance to certain areas of their personal feminine functioning. The only thing funnier–or worse–than Heather’s game would be Learning To Love Aunt Flo, an educational game for naive teenage girls. And it hardly needs to be said how much worse the reaction that a male designer would get for his game on a similar topic.
It’s a really bad piece of journalism.
And you’re always going to need pretentious people in any industry; that’s what’ll get people Who Get Things Done really mad and do stuff to show those pretentious people what for.
Mind you, the female orgasm thing… isn’t exactly a bad idea.
…
What? What? I’m saying.
T-Boy, some of them are already showing “what for”.
About the orgasm thing, are you sure?
“Not tonight, dear. I have to take my Blue Bunny to happyland”. ;)
I would say that the future looks good for Indie games, with another coming out this June…
http://wii.ign.com/objects/143/14316971.html
LucasArts is an indie firm? or that just the publisher and not the development company?
and i’d like to point out, that’s INDIE not Indiana xian ;)
Yea, it was a joke. I know, Indie not Indy (Indiana) Jones.
Scorpia, you’re always going to need posers. Always.
And besides, you can’t escape them; pretentious people are nature’s way of telling you that hey, that thing you’re working on is cool, and is attracting people because it’s cool.
I mean, as gamers, we could be in worse places. We could be in a medium or an industry where everyone is dedicated to producing the best product our fans want, with only quality as defined as our fans being our only focus.
Yeah. We could be like interactive fiction or wargaming.
T-Boy, what a dream. It would be wonderful to be in such an industry. But then, the corps might not make the big bucks. We can’t allow that to happen, right?
Hey Scorpia. Long time. :) I’ve been busy on my own indie thing, so I haven’t been around.
I was actually at that rant, and I didn’t find it pretentious at all. It doesn’t come through in the coverage, but most of the people up there were pretty self-depreciating in their deliveries. The “games as art” stuff came off, to me, more like cries to inspire people, not a attempt to corner the moral high ground.
I guess… what exactly set you off here?
And as a side note, Brad Wardell DID have a talk at the IGS, and it was fantastic. A good, hard look at Stardock’s revenue numbers and a good intro to his and the company’s philosophy. If I compare the two, I rate Wardell’s higher - but partially that’s because there were a lot of the more artsy/inspirational talks at IGS, and this was very practical.
My take is that this stuff has its place - there is so much room out there for games to expand into, that we need all sorts. There are the crazy pretentious arthouse games, the sex games, the hardcore old RPGs, the experimental stuff - there’s room for all of it, and it would be hard for me to say we’ve come of age as a medium until we start seeing all this wacky crap start showing up and pushing boundaries. :)
Mac, yeah, it has been much too long. Good to see you posting again.
I guess it was just the way that session was reported. Something about it set me off. Thanks for your perspective. Maybe you could do a short write-up on that one, and I could add it to my post, just to set things straight. Or at least provide another interpretation.
Good to know Brad was there, and that successful indies weren’t overlooked ;)
Well, Scorpia… the fact that corporations make money from this is tangential.
What I care about is that everyone has a chance to make a game, with as low barrier of entry as they possibly can have.
Even if 99 percent of the stuff we get is produced is crap. That’s Sturgeon’s Law; you can’t hope to change the ratio of crap to gold, but you can change the size of the market, so instead of 1 percent of 300 games produced at any one time, it’d be 1 percent of, say… 3 million games.
So, let the posers in. Let the stupid l33t-sp33king 13-year-olds in. Let the perverts, let the furries in. Let everybody in. Let the whole planet in.
Because 1 percent of six billion is 60 million very good games, and that’s a lot.
I will do my best! I can’t promise anything though. We’re doing a prototype demo of Heritage at the IGC East in early May, and I’m running around like the proverbial one-legged man in a posterior displacement competition. :)
Mac, no problem. Whenever you can manage it. And if your project leaves no time, that’s okay, too.
Hey Scorpia - leaving here since I couldn’t find any sort of contact info for you - for some reason, your RSS links all don’t work for me. Using google reader. If you want to hit me on email, scott at my website.
Yeah Mac, you’re not the only one with that problem. Dale has to go mucking around the code and see what the problem is. This being tax time doesn’t make it any easier.
By the way, me@myname.com for email; just put scorpia in the two places.