A Celebration -of Geeks The Second Computet Game Developer's Conference Eric Goldberg ,

[Eric comes to us from the boardgame industry. He started his career as a desigr}er at Simulations Publications, Inc (SPI). After a stint as a consultant for a number of early videote~t proje~ts, he. rat! the dev.e1opmen.t effort at West f:nd Games. Now he is freelanczng agazn. H1S lzst of des1gn cred1ts 1S too long to znclude here.]

Copyright © 1988 Eric Goldberg

Have you ever been present' at an event that everyone could tell would be a failure from the very start? Do you remember that sinking feeling when you realized that the rest of the day /we.ekend/ week was going to be just so much wasted time, and how the organizers desperately scurried around trying to enthuse the attendees with false optimism? Yeah, it wasn't any fun for me, either, but hold the image.

Now, reverse it by 180 degrees. You now have an excellent approximation of how people felt at the Computer Gaming World reception that kicked off the Developers' Conference on Saturday night. Over 150 computer game developers and assorted hangers-on discovered that they were not alone, that they were part of a sizable community, that the other people in the community shared their hopes and concerns about the entertainment software field, and that they had a definite preference for cheap American beer over Jolt cola. If ever a spirited exchange of ideas among creative professionals could be called anticlimactic, the ensuing two days of seminars and shmoozing were. The success of the conference simply was not in doubt.

In his keynote speech, Dan Bunten reaffirmed that we are part of a maturing community. He cheerfully acknowledged that he, in common with the majority of the attendees, had grown up a nerd, and ran through a catalogue of the recognition signals. (Hands in pockets, standing on one .leg, slouched posture, social gawkiness, etc. , etc., etc.) Without suggesting that we should be ashamed of what we were (and perhaps still are), he matter-of­factly noted that we shared an extraordinary talent, and that we should take pride in our accomplishments.

Bunten then outlined a formula for continued success and professional growth, which was at once breathtakingly simple in conception and

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frighteningly difficult to put into practite. First, find a good wo~an. By sharing in.terests, she will be your bridge to mainstream adult culture, where RAM caches, flight simulators, and evil wizards are not the stuff of everyday conversation. Second, marry het: Third, have kids. As they grow up, your children will give you an adolescent perspective on life that your wife cannot. (It was Dan's 14-yearold daughter who told him that he had been promoted from "nerd". to "geek.") Continue in domestic splendor until ennui, retirement, or death cause you to leave the field . .

Bunten, who practices what he preaches, was underscoring the point that, for an artist to effectively communicate through his work, he should understand his ' audience's frame of reference. The best fiction writers, by way of example, tend to be social creatures and to be intensely interested in the way other people live and work. Chris Crawford had earlier proposed an academic approach to the same problem, when he suggested that the aspiring designer read about a broad range of subjects. Immerse yourself in literature, in texts on philosophy, sociology, history, tae sciences (and so on), Crawford told us, and your wqrk will become three-dimensional and, perhaps, truly great. Taken together, Chris and Dan were asserting that the well-rounded person has the greatest potential to be an accomplished artist

Bunten did not address what the several husband-and-wife teams in the computer game field should do, short of moving to Utah and converting to the Mormon faith. However, the few couples at the symposium, such as the Robinsons and the DiUons, appeared to have worked out their own solution; briefly, cultivate a circle of friends who do something other than what you do (which includes 99.9-repeat-9% of your neighbors, even if you live in Silicon Valley). Dan did not say what the single women in the field ought to do, but it's a safe presumption that,

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if they switch the genders in the . appropriate places, his recommendations should work just fine.

The attendees at the symposium were overwhelmingly male, and often could not figure out how to deal with the few females who make computer game design their business. At one semin~ Amanda Goodenough, author of children's stackware, did everything short of shooting off a signal flare to be recognized by the speaker. Though the audience deferred to Goodenough after the better part of a half-hour, other women commented that they gave up raising their hands after the first day. (Before condemning the assembled moderators to a remedial course in manners, keep in mind that short people at the back of the room, regardless of sex, tended not to be called upon to speak.) Bunten rescued us from terminal Neanderthal status by asking the women in the audience to comment on how they thought computers could support truly popular multi-player games -- and studiously ignored the men champing at the bit to be heard until a representative sampling of women had spoken on the question.

Brenda Laurel, already well-known in the Bay Area community and in no need of assertiveness training, presented herself as the software community's high priestess of weird. (You could have looked it up in the "Job Openings" section of The San Tose Mercury-News a couple weeks ago.) Laurel also paSSionately championed the cause of innovation before presenting Cinemaware with the award for Most Innovative Publisher.

Other award winners were Electronic Arts for Best Technical Support; Microprose for Best Q.A. Operation; Matt Householder · of Epyx for Best Producer; and Origin Systems as Best Publishet: Dallas Snell of Origin Systems said that he was as startled as anyone else when Origin won, if only because the number of developers who work with Origin is barely above the minimum necessary to receive the award. Regardless, any sensible developer will now seriously consider Origin as a publis~er, and the company's claim that Origin is more than a vehicle for Richard Garriott's designs has been borne out by his peers. There should also be a scramble to work on projects with Householder, who just as probably is booked into the next millennium by the developers who voted for him.

While some may choose to disagree with individual awards, there should be no question about their collective legitimacy. Origin Systems

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decided to attend the conference at the last minute; the Cinemaware representative was genuinely astonished when called on to accept the award; and Householder maintained a low-key presence throughout the conference. These are not the ways dark horses go about campaigning for awards.

In a surprise presentation, Crawford was cited as "Zee Greatest Game Designer in Zee Universe." The award took the form of a lucite light bulb mount~d on a black base. Though Chris is clearly among the best in his profession, the award was as much to honor him for making the event at which it was presented a reality, for turning the TournaI into a must-read newsletter, and for establishing a BBS, as it was an acknowledgment of his abilities. In short, the community Chris brought together showed their appreciation.

(Later, Crawford mused aloud whether he could accept the Grand Old Man status the attendees wished to confer upon him, because he felt it would require him to give up his gadfly role. Nonsense. Chris, you proclaimed yourself "an asshole" to a room packed with your peers. The award, in addition to being a token of our respect, is our way of saying that you're a lovable ass hole, and that we like you just the way you are.)

The conference committee made a deliberate decision not to give awards to game developers -- at least this time around. Apparently, there was a strong sentiment that these had far too much potential for creating animosity, and also that giving awards to each other was somewhat unseemly. Awards to peers can and do work quite well (see, for example, science fiction's Nebulas), so it is likely just a matter of time before a successor committee .begins giving these out. As for the harmony issue, it didn't hurt that five different publishers were honored.

In fact, there was surprisingly little rancor at the symposium, particularly when one considers how many large egos were confined in a small space for two whole days. Early in the program, there was a vigorous program of "marketing bashing," but by the wrap-up session, this was a dead horse. To the credit of the attendees, they realized that the accused ought to be present to answer the charges being bandied about, and that the few marketers present felt that the atmosphere of general disdain for their

. profession was not one in which to present their views.

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The chief bone of contention was the role of publishers in future conferences. A vocal group of developers felt that the publishers, with their greater resources and as the source of the developer's livelihood, would disenfranchise the free-lance developer in what's supposed to be a forum of his peers - but not if the publishers were somehow kept out. There was a brief controversy about an impromptu company party thrown just before the awards banquet, but, by the time it was put to a show of hands at the wrap-up session, not a single attendee voted to deny publishers the right to ply them with beer.

The publishers are not going to be excluded, unless we don't even have the little good sense with which we are born. They are too important a part of the computer game development process, and we will be the poorer if we do not benefit from what they have to contribute. (No writer's workshop, for example, is complete without editors who work for book publishers.) As one employee pointed out, this conference is the only place, including the SPA, where the entire spectrum of people who design, develop, program, produce, market, and sell computer games is represented. It offers an unparallelled opportunity for developers to learn, from each other, and from everyone else with whom they work.

The lines between publishers and developers are continually blurring, particularly with the proliferation of affiliated labels. (A developer becomes an affiliated label when he / they agree to take on the manufacturing risk, the producer's role, and the marketing and advertising tasks. A conventional publisher, with a full-fledged sales apparatus, distributes the label's finished product.) Many people within publishers - such as Microprose, which has yet to publish an outside submission - are developers, or are intimately involved in the process. Dave Albert of Electronic Arts put it neatly when he said, "I first worked for Penguin, then for Origin Systems, and now for EA. Several years from now I may be somewhere else. But wherever I go, I am a producer, and what I care about is making the best possible games." [My apolOgies to Dave for any eloquence lost in transmission. You had to be there to appreciate his fervOl:]

Any developer who doesn't believe he has something to learn from Trip Hawkins of EA or Bill Stealey of Microprose is sticking his head in the sand. And as long as the developer's conference is firmly established as serving the interests of the

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independent developer first, we will have a forum that can benefit everyone in the community.

The design community displayed a keen commercial awareness. The success or failure of individual products was largely judged to be a function of sales: Bunten advanced M.U.L.E. as a failure, because it had sold "only" 30,000 copies; similarly, Crawford pronounced Irust and Betrayal a dead loss because it had sold even less copies than M.U.L.E.. Perhaps this was a result of the proximity of Silicon Valley, home of many a successful entrepreneur; perhaps this was an artifact of the money-obsessed late 1980s; but whatever, the argument so prevalent in other creative fields which serve the home market, that art is often distinct from commercial success, was noticeably absent.

The attendees, for the most part, gave short shrift · to the notion that the arcade-style games currently being played by adolescents are precursors to the popular entertainment software of the early 1990s. During the Market Trends seminar, John Skruch of Atari US suggested that designers ought to be paying attention to the leading-edge Nintendo and Atari 7800 games; his remarks were greeted with massive disinterest. One Nintendo game, Zelda, was given grudging respect, because it was considered to transcend the limitations of the Nintendo system.

(No one argues that the Nintendo system itself will be a permanent fixture in home entertainment. Rather, the question is whether the best-selling games are precursors of a significant computer game sub-genre.)

This reaction calls to mind the George Santayana quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Game design professionals, at least as represented at the symposium, are in their late 20s and 30s, and have achieved as much as they have at a relatively young age because the previous generation, now in theirmid-40s, was slow to adapt to the computer. The corollary of Skruch's point is that the new designers of the 1990s will have been intimately familiar with the computer from earliest childhood, and that, if the current generation of designers wishes to avoid a rude shock, they had best be studying the software that most interests today's pre-adolescents. Instead, the symposium response to Santayana was Satchel Paige's "Don't look back, someone may be gaining on you."

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The theme of Bunten's keynote address hamme~d home the underlying logic of Skruch's ' point. Bunten's recipe for success is find a good woman, marry he~ have· kids, and then learn from your kids. [The emphasis is mine.] Bunten credited his daughter with keeping him in touch with popular culture; without her, he said he would not be familiar with things as diverse asFamily TIes and MTV. It's not that future games will be directly based on the most popular entertainments of the moment (though I rather like the idea of Rock Star Rascals ), but that designers should have a common language with the teenagers who are, after all, the bulwark of the customer base.

The community seemed taken with Trip Hawkins's "New Hollywood" metaphOl: There was relative certainty that the games we do, which are constantly requiring more and better sound and · graphic effects, will merge with video entertainment. There .was some discussion about what might happen when we collide with the "Old Hollywood;" the consensus was that we would play nimble mammals to the movie studios' dinosaurs. In any event, if such a collision does happen, the best­poSitioned company is Lucasfilm Games.

(Dave Albert pointed out that, based on how games are presently done, the "New Motown" is a more apt sobriquet.)

Not that everyone spoke with one voiCe: an observer who went from the Market Trends to the Multiplayer Games seminar would have had reason to wonder whether the two were being given at the same conference. The Trends audience paid little or no attention to the notion that telecommunications would play a large role in the future of computer game development; the Games people quickly concluded that the present machines were not the vehicles for popular multiplayer entertainment, and moved directly to a lengthy discussion of how the modem was the answer. Robert Gehorsam of Prodigy, an IBM/Sears joint venture which is making a spectacular entrance into the home videotex market, briefly described how well the games on his service have gone over with computer­literate profeSSionals; he and his peers at CompuServe, etc., will be giving a· panel during at least one of the next two conferences.

The technical seminars are, for the most part, glossed over in this article; there were two programming tracks, and no prizes will be awarded for guessing which was of greater interest to me.

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Evan and Nicky Robinson's "Developing for MS­DOS" was. praised by many attendees. While no one professed .a desire to grapple with an operating system universally regarded as clunky, the Robinsons were given full marks for a concise explanation of how to get through the odious task of supporting all four of the CGA, EGA, VGA, and Hercules graphics standards. The IBM PC and clone family is clearly where the most money is to be made in games.

Another sharp, semi-technical seminar was "Playtesting and Q.A.," given by Dave Menconi, Cem Kaner of EA, and Bunten. Menconi gave a solid overview of the playtesting process, and sparked a brief but lively debate as to whether a professional playtester was necessarily compromised (because the payoff for the consumer is fun, not money). The three panelists did concur that playing a game to debug it was an honorable profession. Kaner gave a solidly brilliant exposition on the process of Q.A., including a scheduling bar graph which provoked ripples of laughter for the first few minutes of his talk. ("Order T-shirts" followed soon after "Begin Design;" "Ship Game" preceded "Finalize Design Spec.")

Unsurprisingly, the quality of the speakers and the seminars was uneven. The best, aside from several lauded above, were Brian Moriarty's "Interactive Story Making," Crawford's "Creativity and Game Design" (and demonstration of whip technique), and Bunten's keynote speech. Others ranged from the undistinguished to the downright poo~ including one in which the audience hijacked the talk from the moderator and took it off in some very strange directions, and which ran out of steam well before the hour was up. This is not intended entirely as criticism; one can be a game design talent without being a good public speake~ and we would be foolish indeed to deny ourselves the wisdom of those of our top designers who aren't good lecturers. Rathe~ we are in need of game-literate moderators.

By general acclamation, the text of the prepared seminars will be found in the pages of the TournaI. This will allow Crawford to relax, ever so slightly, his never-ending quest for contributions, though I, for one, will miss his completely obscure historical trivia. (Where else can you find out about the decline in the Finnish rate of marriages in the 18th Century?)

This second developers' conference will come to hold a certain charm for the people who attended. Never again will we experience that first rush of excitement of seeing a community come togethe~ and

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never again will we be so damn grateful to find out how many people there are out there who are like us. By the time of the next conference, the game design community will have matured, and with this maturation will come professional rivalries, people who refuse to speak with each other, and the occassional messy drunk. (Nerds are not great at holding their liquor.) All of these are part of our collective growing-up process, and are a small price to pay for what we have gained.

The conference was a personal triumph for Crawford, Laurel, Menconi, Tim Brengle, Stephen Friedman, Jeff Johannigma~, and Stephanie Barrett. These people are the conference committee, and one of the consequences of their success is that they are responsible for harnessing the enormous momentum and goodwill generated for next May's conference.

. After the first conference, at which 27 people were present, Crawford hoped the next one would attract 60. His guess was low, by 120 attendees. Estimates for the next time around range from 250 to 300; the chief worry expressed by long-time designers was that even more will come. The committee deserves as much of our help as we can give; they are faced with a daunting and exciting task, and deserve our best efforts in return for enhancing our professional lives.

Dan Bunten should also receive our thanks, for doing us a favor of sorts. By seeing the humor in one of the more deep-rooted elements of our negative self-image, he has helped us make the transition from this conference, a celebration of geeks, to the next, a celebration of game designers. 0

Dan Bunten gzvlng the keynote address. Photograph courtesy Brian Moriarty, digitizing committed by Chris Crawford.

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What went Wrong There can be no doubt that the conference was a

big success. The feedback we have received so far has been uniformly enthusiastic and congratulatory. Being a crotchety SOB, I'd like to point out some of the screw-ups and mistakes that may not have been obvious.

The most hair-raising one was the ballot­tabulation for the publisher awards on Sunday night. We were prepared with computer, spreadsheet, and calculators and paper in the event of emergency, but the task of counting the ballots proved to be more time-consuming than we had allowed for. The conference committee holed up in a room with the ballots, the computer, and an hour and a half. We just barely pulled it off, sneaking into the banquet room ten minutes late. And did anybody notice the committee members sneaking out half an hour later for a last-minute meeting in the corridor? Next time we'll do it differently.

The physical layout of the rooms left much to be desired. The corridor was so badly jammed with people between sessions that movement was difficult.

Finances were too tight. We had to make a run to the bank to deposit the door receipts, just to make sure that the final check to the hotel wouldn't bounce. The good news, though, is that the conference did make a profit in the end, not much, but enough to seed the next conference.

Although the conference committee prepared for many contingencies that never arose, much of the smooth operation of the conference must be attributed to the patience and good grace of the attendees, who cheerfully stood in line for lunch, balanced paper plates on their knees, filed into lecture rooms at the appointed time, endured crowded rooms, and had a good time throughout.

Next time we'll do better:

Stephen Friedman presents Dallas Snell of Origin Systems with the Best Publisher award. Photo by Brian Moriarty, digitizing perpetrated by Chris Crawford.

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