Cruise Elroy

Yesterday I attended the third annual Boston GameLoop, a self-organizing conference held by and for local game developers. The day began with little more than a large blank whiteboard; we spent the first hour proposing session topics, voting on each others’ proposals, and filling out a schedule with the most popular ideas. The rest of the day was devoted to the sessions themselves, which ranged from game demos to introductory lectures to lively roundtable discussions.

This structure worked fantastically. Virtually all of the talks were top-notch, and the signal-to-noise ratio was so high that it I was mentally exhausted by the end of the conference.

These are the sessions I attended:

• “Dialog As Gameplay” by Chris Barney (Family Education Network)
• “Game Journalism and Criticism” by Chris Dahlen (Kill Screen)
• “Narrative Design” by Clara Fernández-Vara (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
• “Drawing the Player In: Agency In Game Worlds” by Seth Rosen (Maximum Extreme Games)
• “Interactive Metaphor” by Ben Cummings (Mythic Entertainment)

Even if I wanted to I don’t think I could give a play-by-play of each session; there was far too much going on to take notes. Instead, I thought I would outline my three biggest takeaways:

BioWare is king of the narrative space. Almost every discussion I had (or heard) about narrative circled back to BioWare at some point, and the comments were almost universally positive. Even ostensibly unrelated conversations would suddenly, inexplicably, veer towards a BioWare game. The only other company that came close to that level of mindshare was Irrational Games — people still love their BioShock ruminations, especially when the developers are present — but in my perception there was really no contest. I’m glad I got to the Mass Effect games earlier this summer!

Lots of our problems can be traced back to limited resources. I’ve thought about this topic before, but the discussions at GameLoop helped to drive the point home. The issue has never been that developers prefer to implement “meaningless” choices, or to rely on a stilted binary between good and evil; it is that, given finite time and money for a narrative-driven game, there is an inverse relationship between the number of choices that can be offered and the impact of those choices. Similarly, there is no shortage of gamers capable of intelligent criticism, and no one honestly believes that regurgitating PR is great journalism — but there is a shortage of professional opportunities, and of developers willing to grant writers access. We make do with what we have.

Things are getting better. The inevitable kvetching aside, people generally seemed to think we were headed in the right direction in every session I attended. Dialog systems are more engaging, quality games writing is more common (though some have trouble finding it), and the importance of narrative design is more widely acknowledged than ever before. Even the rarefied discussion in the “Interactive Metaphor” session allowed that art games are taken somewhat more seriously than in the past. Perhaps all this was due to the infectious enthusiasm of the indie scene, but I left GameLoop feeling more optimistic about the industry than I have in some time.