Mar
Continuing my notes from the other day, the next up to rant was Jane McGonigal. She’s a senior research at the Institute for the Future. My impression of her talk was that she’s crazy. I’m sorry, but her talk was about how games are already so great so it should be our job as game developers to take what we know out into the real world and make that more like games.
Um, ok. That’s actually what it says in my notes. She had some ideas I thought were clever, but if she really thinks games are perfect she must not play enough games. I play games that get me as angry, frustrated and upset as the real world. I see people acting out in morally bankrupt ways in our games, they’re not perfect. But enough of my commentary, let’s see what McGonigal had to say.
She said “We’ve invented a medium that kicks every other medium’s ass!” (bullshit) “We rule the world!” (um, ok?) Well actually, “bad news, we rule the virtual world. We don’t want to fix the real world, we want to create alternatives to reality. Worlds we can engineer from scratch offer better experience, better community than the real world.” She said that her rant was about the fact that reality is broken. Our responsibility as the smartest people on the planet is to take our knowledge and power to make the real world like a game. (crazy lady, we’re not the smartest people on the planet. I really hope the smartest people on the planet are trying find a cure for cancer, seeking cheap renewable sources of energy, are striving to friggin’ achieve world peace.)
The only part I liked was some examples she gave. She talked about how we could make running more like a game and brought up the Nike iPod+ system. I’ve always felt like they under-utilize their technology. This is the system that tracks your runs with a pedometer hooked up to your iPod Nano. When you plug your iPod into your computer, it zaps your run data up to the servers where you can compete with other people in distance races and the like. She joked that if every time you ran 5 miles you’d level up or gather ore, everyone would be fit! So yeah, why not take that data and make a game? It’s all just stored in flat text files on the iPod, it’d be easy to take that data off and do fun stuff with it! So someone go do that!
Next she talked about how she has to play fetch with her dog for an hour a day. That’s boring! If you could play an MMO with your dog that would be awesome. Heh.
Anyways, I’ve linked above to her writeup of the talk, you can go see for yourself if you agree with her.
Chris Hecker got up next for an un-advertised follow up rant to his last infamous rant. He was given a roll of duct tape at the start “in honor of his controversial rant from last year.” He started with a disclaimer. It was nice and long with lots of fine print stating it was no one’s opinion but his own, etc etc. The rant was fast paced with lots of amusing visuals (like his Wikipedia page after people edited it in a NSFW way in response to his rant) so I don’t have many notes. He said he was still into ranting, even after the fallout from last year because complacency equals death.
Games could be the preeminent artform of the 21st century but it’s unclear if we’re going to get there on the current trajectory. Obviously ranting has to be followed by action. Some people say that if you don’t have anything nice to say than don’t say anything at all but he says that’s bullshit. Constructive criticism is incredibly balanced. It’s incredibly important that you speak your mind and tell the truth. It’s better if you can rant in a way that provokes thought and action rather than just reaction.
That’s all I have on that one. There were a couple more rants - from Jenova Chen of flOw fame and Daniel James of Puzzle Pirates. Not many notes on those, so I don’t have much to say. I think I was getting tired of typing, sorry!
