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Game Developers Conference Day 1

By Andy Marken

There's a lot to see and absorb at GDC (Game Developer's Conference) but we don't get to really "see" the stuff until Wednesday when the exhibit hall is open.

The first two day  seem to be packed with news (here and there) but a whale of a lot of opportunities to get inside the heads of today's market leaders and trendsetters.

In addition hands-on type sessions that the 15,000 +/- seem to really thrive on.

It's a lot different from our Atari years but then the Tramiels' really weren't interested in sharing a whole lot of information.  Very unlike the breed of ultra-successful and struggling game developers/producers at San Francisco's Moscone center. 

Checking out the program of presentations and classes for this year you see that this generation of game industry folks aren't afraid to give you a look inside their thought processes and the steps it took them to make the grade.

While there's something for everyone the trails seem to focus on either - multi-level multi-player games (power game system and mobile device capable) or smartphone "games."

Can't really describe the latter but to say there are a lot of people hoping to produce some modest success with these games or maybe even deliver a whopping success.

Playmatics Session
Because of the written description's promise of discusing some of the new levels of arcade games we sat in on the Playmatics session.

Their approach is the thinking person's games - palm sweating such as Give Up Robot or mental strain like Grayscale.

To help those who paid their own T&E and attendence fees, the speakers described the game play as very, very hard and that was intentional in its design/development 

Give Up Robot and other games that were mentioned in passing in the session are forward looking meaning you can can actually proceed to the difficulty level you want and still feel fulfilled. 

While we tend to focus on the market and segment trends it is interesting that in a masocore game evolutionary process death and respawning are an integral part of the game...rather cool because we were always bummed when we got eliminated. 

That's really not such a bad deal!
The session speakers seemed to revel in the number of times they died at the game's various levels which is "a little morbid!"

The speakers provided the attendees a lot of the philosophy and psychology of what makes one of these masocore games so successful.

The speakers offered some games people can play and analyze to determine how they are going to either simply play to win or start to work on their own masocore challenges. 

The games they recommended you study and examine weren't necessarily masacore titles but did deliver the psychological draw that was necessary for success.  They included:
- Space Disposal
- Flyce
- Rubble Trouble
- The Visitor

Zynga Rising

It was easy to see why the GDC attendees packed Zynga's Mark Skaggs' session.  

For crying out loud the company was recently valued at $10 billion with its recent cash infusion so anything you can learn from these people can't be all bad!

virtual money...cool!

If you don't know it (you probably live under a rock) Zynga is the most popular family of game sites on Facebook. 

Stuff like Farmville and CityVille has a huge community of members of all ages around the globe paying real money to buy