What is it?
GDC's annual Game Design Challenge, with Jenova Chen of ThatGameCompany, John Romero of Loot Drop, and independent developer Jason Roehrer.
What did I expect?
An hour of hypothetical game concepts based on a shared theme from some of the industry's brightest luminaries.
What did I learn?
-Like yesterday's Social Game Dev Rant, the Game Design Challenge wasn't set up like a traditional session or workshop -- instead, it was a competition built around a video game theme that the four developers were tasked with crafting an original game concept around. The theme: religion.
-Roehrer (Passage,Inside A Star-filled Sky) cited his grandfather, an influential man in from his youth, as a man he never really got to know, but someone who truly inspired him through his actions and passed-down words. His idea centered around a "multiplayer" game, played by one player at a time. One player would play, then pass the game onto another player, who's actions would influence their own actions and, in turn, their game-world. His game turned out to be a Minecraft modification -- a meta-game played within Minecraft -- called Chain World. The game is played until you die exactly once, you can't erect wooden signs with text, and players are allowed to commit suicide. Immediately after dying and respawning, players quit to the menu, the world saves, and the game's script will copy the world that you've created onto the USB stick that carries the game. Additionally, the script deletes the data from your hard drive, making the copy on the USB stick the only existing game -- which you then pass on to someone else. It's a game that you can only play once. He then gave the stick to one audience member to become player 2.
-John Romero (Doom, Quake) kicked off a Twitter meta-game, where a "God" (@God6502) spawned a "messiah" (@Messiah6502), who he urged 12 "apostles" (audience members) to follow, and join him on-stage. He gave each apostle a pad of sticky notes with which to gather followers, or "disciples," in the audience, and granted them two minutes to convert as many audience members as possible. After two minutes, he asked the followers to check their sticky notes -- if they had a star drawn on them, then that follower had been granted a "miracle," and was asked to join the apostles and Romero onstage to be counted. The apostle who'd handed out the most miracles became the new messiah.
-Jenovah Chen (Flow, Flower), born an atheist, took the design challenge as an opportunity to set his own beliefs straight. He looked at religion as a representation of cultural values that help produce human happiness, and help people find purpose in their lives. Chen lectured about challenging the the unknown; the teachings of Joseph Campbell, Charles Darwin, and Abraham Maslow; consumerism in society, and the propagation of ideas. For the challenge, Chen created a game based around the TED conference's website, borrowing concepts from YouTube (view counts) and Twitter (followers/"influenced by"), and urging players to spread ideas to win points and badges, and in turn become inspired by other ideas. He called it Propagationism.
-The Challenge's winner was Jason Roehrer, with Chain World. He took home a celebratory copy of Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard.
Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Saturday, March 5, 2011