Burning Down Whatever
I've also received some e-mail about the "Burning Down the House" session at GDC. I thought it deserved a separate post entirely.First off, from Thom Moyles (who writes for www.gamecritics.com and is excellent):
I was reading your take on the GDC Developer's Rant and as I was actually in attendance, I thought I'd pass along what I got out of it. I felt that Warren and Brenda were actually a lot more reasonable than what came across in the transcript. A lot of their salient points were not included, whereas their bombast was transcripted verbatim. More specifically, Brenda had a very good point about mobile gaming and how important it can be not only in terms of independent development but in terms of changing how games are designed. She certainly had a lot more to say than Costikyan.
Jason Della Rocca was my favorite though. He had a ton of really good things to say and it's a shame that his statements were mainly overlooked in favor of Costikyan (who had better one-liners).
Thom followed up a few hours later with these expanded comments:
The GDC doesn't do any official transcript (which is very frustrating, especially when you have a Japanese speaker who goes far too fast for the translators), and it's left up to attendees to transcribe themselves either from their notes or their recordings...and portions are definitely going to get dropped when you do that.
And you should check out Costikyan's blog, where he does talk about the session somewhat: http://www.costik.com/weblog/. The 'damning' line for me in his blog is where he admits that the Nintendo keynote was actually excellent and that Iwata truly came across as a game designer who happens to be running a company (as opposed to Allard, who comes across as a marketer who happens to be running a game company). I think his quote was 'I was way too harsh on Nintendo and Iwata in general, but I couldn't resist using the line, it was too good.'
The best session of GDC was actually the one featuring Keita Takahashi, the producer of Katamari Damacy. If you can find a transcript or an article about his talk, I would reccommend tracking it down, as it's excellent.
Aaron Daily also had some comments about the blog post I linked to yesterday from Matt Mihaly:
I had to laugh when I read this one. It might as well have been written by a board-game designer... This guy claims you can make video games any way you want, but he's not making video games, or doing anything most video game developers want to do.
Fair enough. As far as I can tell, Matt does make text-based MUDS, although I still think some of his comments were on target.
And thanks to all of you guys for being so thoughtful, both in these comments and in my e-mail in general.
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