Warren Spector giving game development talk

[dfc05]

Not sure if this is in the right forums section, but...

I might get to go hear Warren Spector give a talk at Austin Community College! (I'm at University of Texas). This is entirely dependent on whether or not I can get a ride there, but I'm excited. Also, it's free to the public if anyone in the area is interested in going. :imu:

Has anyone else been to one of these types of seminar events before? Was it interesting? Share your experiences! If I can go, this will be my first time actually being around and hearing from people in the video game industry, so hopefully it will be pretty cool.

Also... I have no idea what "Gaming at the Margins" is supposed to be about . It would be nice if they gave a brief description or something. But, it's Warren Spector! Also, he's currently working with Valve on a Source engine game? Which game..?

 

[Ennui]

We know almost nothing about his game at this point.

If you go to the seminar, be sure to paraphrase it for us here!

 

[Dog--]

Dammit, that name sounds familiar, what games did he make?!

 

[dfc05]

Dammit, that name sounds familiar, what games did he make?!

System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief

 

[dfc05]

Just thought I'd give a write-up on what Warren Spector had to say (I got to go; it was so insanely awesome). I think people here could come up with similar ideas on a lot of it, but it was still pretty darn cool.

This might get long, so in brief, he mostly talked about the future of the game industry, namely innovation, broadening the scope (becoming more mainstream?), gaming as an art?, and... How To Get A Job With Valve (seriously). I'm thinking the title "Gaming at the Margins" was meant to suggest the mainstream vs marginal paths.

And before I start, Warren Spector was really awesome as a person. Very nice, approachable, and makes a lot of jokes.
[Edit: I'll put the funnies in bold... for fun.]

Since this is a Half-Life 2 site, I figured I'd pull out the little bits more relevant to Valve / Half-Life 2:
-Jobs with Valve? : This came out during the Q&A session in his innovation speech/rant. Basically, he says that the Valve interview questions are really creative, but when it comes down to innovation, if you ONLY talk about innovation you don't get hired. You have to talk about markets, profits, etc. Interesting.
-Episodic content: He likes it.
-Mod community: Good for finding talent, not so good for innovation. I paraphrase - Sure you had Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, and if you have someone as talented as Robin Walker, you can do great things. But so many mods out there are about making maps and calling it a game.
-Steam/online distribution: Likes it, but when asked if he thinks it will bring down prices, he says that nobody knows what will happen. Three options: (1) Prices go down without the publisher/packaging costs/shipping. (2) Prices stay the same and money goes to (independent) developers to make more games. (3) Prices stay the same and greedy developers pocket the extra.
-What he's working on with Valve: Refuses to state .

Now that's out of the way, I'll try to go through his whole presentation or as much of it as I can remember. Hopefully I can remember most of his jokes (they were so true...). Hopefully nobody finds out that I wrote about what he said about certain companies which he told the journalist guy not to write. Haha.... :O. Please note that everything in quotes is paraphrased. I should've taken notes or something... He also did much of his presentation in a sort of "present the problem, what are the options, what do each of them lead to" manner. So if I start numbering things, that's what's going on.

Introduction-ish:
-Mainstream vs marginal: He talks about how games are becoming more mainstream. Everyone who doesn't play games is weird . Making lots of money, movies to games, games to movies, big media is taking attention ("and trying to own and destroy us!"), and you hear about it in the news (paraphrased- "You read about teen violence in the newspaper, and they connect it to videogames. And then the next day you read about how Rockstar is being stupid. Don't print that. I didn't say that.")
-Gaming industry is stagnant: He says that gamers are not demanding innovative games, and developers are not making innovative games. We have "non-interactive games masquerading as interactive games." He says that gaming right now is as non-interactive as a rollercoaster ride. If you want to innovate, why not think up a conversation system that isn't a branching option tree.
-Gaming industry is in danger: Best of times/worst of times scenario. For example, new hardware: good for the obvious reasons, bad because what are they doing with it? Making pretty games? He wants to see them use some of this for something new. He says that gaming is still very new, and people getting into the industry now can really make major changes and be able to say they affected the industry while it was still young (very inspirational)... but, not if they keep going the same route. Gaming is in danger of becoming like Vaudeville, or Broadway musicals (oh crap!). It could very well be big for a couple of decades and just... die out.

Culture of gaming:
-Violence in videogames: (1) Keep doing what we're doing. This may not be so bad. Gamers are getting older, and we'll have gamer kids, that have gamer kids, yay. (2) And then one day you have a President that plays GTA #54. He thinks gaming continuing on this path is leading to a "coarsening of culture," not as in games making kids murder each other, but.. "coarsening." Later on he made reference to all the kids in WoW running around screaming "****" at each other; I can't remember if this was what he was referring to by coarsening. (3) The third way: His example- "Germany has the strictest restrictions on games. No blood, no killing people. Yet I've gotten my games through without any problem. Why? Because my games provide an alternate route. You aren't forced to kill people, and when you do, there are consequences." He touts gameplay innovation as the way to go - making games that aren't all about shooting people.
-Demographics/broadening gaming: Age- People making games are getting old... and making the same basic games as always for a younger demographic. Gender- more girls are playing games, but there aren't enough female developers. Very few women working on the creative development side of things. Race- WE FAILED. He still sees the exact same types of people in development. Conclusion: "So now we have old people making games for little white boys."

Stuff about development:
(I'm forgetting the categories, and just lumping stuff together from here on. It was a two-hour long speech and I have bad memory)
-Publishers: Small and mid-size publishers will die out. Big publishers will take over. The world will be ruled by EA, Activision, and Ubisoft. He mentioned his group (Junction Point Studios) trying to develop a new system to do things but they couldn't get it to work. So "EA pathetically controls what everyone does. Don't print that"
-Developers: The only people that make money are those that can develop games for under $1 million, or over $10 million. Everyone in the $2-$8 million development range is doomed to fail .
-More about money: Some publishers have $80 million to work with. Development costs $10 million now, and will probably be going to $20 million. This means that the publishers can bet on 4 different projects in a year, in an industry where 4 out of 5 games fail.
-More about paying for games: He thinks the cost of games is way too overpriced. He says that he wouldn't pay $60 for a game even if his friend made it. Interesting point: The gaming industry is lying to everyone and itself when it thinks it's making all its money off a huge market. It's not that it has a huge market. It's that they overprice their games. But this prevents gaming from getting a larger market. If someone has $20 in their pocket, they can buy music, or a movie, or go out to the movies with friends, but if they want a game, well darn it's $60.
-MMO's: He doesn't like them but they are here to stay. Why? Because they make craploads of money. Take a $15/month fee, get even 10,000 people playing it, and you're making insane profits, especially when it's being distributed between maybe 5 people making the game. And about online distribution: Great! Give companies your credit card information! He forgot to cancel his MMO account and ended up paying $15/month for the 5 months he stopped playing.
-More on distribution: Gaming has one form of distribution - publishers. He compares this to the movie industry: you have the cinema, pay per view, broadcast, like 3 different dvd, vhs, high def, director's cut versions to pay for. Whereas with games you have 3 weeks of shelf space. I think this was a point against publishers...

Conclusions: (Where are we GOING?)
(1) Gaming is an art form. A commercial art form, and at this point, the commercial part is winning out. He says when he makes games he doesn't give a crap about what the market wants, he'd rather make something artistic, but unfortunately to develop games you have to do what makes a profit (I believe there was another point against publishers somewhere in here... haha).
(2) NOBODY knows what they're doing. He seriously means nobody. He even mentioned working with Valve and how even they're flailing about what to do next D:. BUT... he says this MIGHT give independent developers the opportunity to jump in and change the course of the industry. People with more experience might actually be worse off (rehashing the same ideas). INNOVATE. OR DIE.
(3) Pretend that the Mayan calendar ending at 2012 really does signify the end of the world. We have six years to make innovations in gaming before it's over. Are we going to leave our mark as being the person that rendered the most realistic blood spatter, or will we do something really different. Earlier on, he made a point about how someone in the industry said that GTA clones are what makes money so that's what they'll keep making until people want something different. He says that following the people will lead to failure. Developers need to make something new that people don't even know they want. Basically, do we want to find ourselves down the road making "Halo 72 and Lord of the Rings: Frodo Goes to College" ... will this broaden the gaming market; will this change the industry?

Random Q&A Time! (like I said, it was a long discussion..)
-Does he like the Wii? He says he likes Nintendo for doing something different when Microsoft and Sony are fighting it out with their machines. But he says that he doesn't think it will revolutionize the industry. When someone brought up how the controller is different: He thinks the controller is good at a specific type of game that takes advantage of its features, but not good at any other types of games. He does not think it will pull in a wider audience... people that liked Nintendo will buy it, and people that liked XBOX and PS will buy those.
-Sony Playstation price of $600? He assumes that they are doing this to get the initial group of people that would pay $600 for it, and then they'd pull the price down. He actually thinks they're trying to target the price for the HD DVD stuff (with some games that come with it) as the alternative for more expensive HD DVD technology.
-Will Wright and Spore: Will Wright is his HERO.
-Graphics: How much do they influence whether your game gets bought or not? He says that there is a line and once you get only slightly above it and have great gameplay, people will play it. Once you get below it, nobody will play it. Of course this bar keeps going higher.
-Licensing stuff (like from movies, books, etc.): He doesn't see a problem with it. He says that 10% goes into character and setting, the rest goes into gameplay. Whether developers should license a name or a character depends on whether or not they think it'll actually get more people to play their game.

----

There was a heck of a lot more he said but I can't recall right now. Except for his little rant on the "Good Old Days." Just a bit about how the gaming industry used to be 100% marginal, 0% mainstream. Just a bunch of small developers making innovative games. He talked about how when he started with Origin, he could walk in a room and see one guy working on a game that could simulate environments, and then the guy in the next room was working on character development, and the guy across the room was working on something completely different. You could immediately tell who worked on which game just by their style. You had Origin, and LucasArts, and Bullfrog, and they were all making DIVERSE games. Not so much anymore. Mmm, nostalgia.

 

[hungryduck]

woah, that is some interesting stuff.....good write up.

 

[Dog--]

Lol, I just watched a show called "Icons" and it was about Warren Spector.

That sounded fun, I wish I could've went...

 

[nutcrackr]

wow thanks for the write up, I agree with a lot of what he is saying about the game industry.

But you didn't get even a slight hint about his next game?

 

[Razor]

How can Warren Spector talk about creating innovative, fun games when his team was responsible for one of the greatest blunders in gaming history - Deus Ex 2. LOL, universal ammo my arse.

 

[0mar]

Yea, Razor has it.

Warren Spector has zero say in innovation/gameplay when he made that abortion of a game Deus Ex 2.

 

[Zombie]

Everyone has their off days...

 

[nutcrackr]

Warren Spector let Harvey Smith make most of the design decisions regarding DX:IW.
He has said before that he was against universal ammo and that different ammo for weapons makes sense because it's a real world thing.

I enjoyed the game anyway aside from those stupid things, which I attribute mostly to Harvey Smith and the simultaneous console development.