NE WS AND INFORMATION ABOU T THE GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE® SERIES OF EVENTS WWW.GDCONF.COM
Interview: Meggan Scavio
MEGGAN SCAVIO, DIRECTOR OF THE GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE, DISCUSSES THE UPCOMING 25TH EDITION, THE VERY FIRST
GDC, AND THE SECRET TO HAVING YOUR TALK ACCEPTED
Q: Meggan, this is a very special
year for the Game Developers
Conference—it’s the 25th edition,
correct?
Meggan Scavio: It is! It started in
1988, and there were two that year.
The first was in the living room
of Chris Crawford, GDC’s founder.
Because this is a very special year
for us, I want to honor Chris. So I
think we’re going to put him on a
panel with others who have been in
the industry for 25 years and have
been making games for that long.
We’re still working on those names.
But did you know that there are
only three people who have been
to every single GDC and have been
active developers all that time?
They are Chris; Gordon Walton, who
is VP at Bio Ware Austin; and Tim
Brengle, who is now an adjunct
instructor at DeVry University and
who has run GDC’s conference
associate program for as long as I
can remember.
Q: What continues to make GDC
such an important event for
developers?
MS: Someone once called GDC
a family reunion, and to me it’s
always been that, especially back
in the San Jose days when we
were a lot smaller. That’s when
you could walk down the hall and
see everyone you knew. It’s a
little tougher now because there
are so many more people ... but
it is that one time of the year
when, as a developer, you leave
the confines of your office and
you join like-minded people to
share information and ideas and
talk about what you’re doing. We
say that GDC is where you learn,
network, and become inspired.
we’ve consolidated our iPhone
Summit and Mobile Summit into
a Smartphone Summit. At the
same time, we’re rebranding
our Serious Games Summit and
dividing it into two days—the
first will be about serious games
in the health field; the second is
all about “gamification,” a trendy
word that means using gameplay
mechanics for non-game consumer
technology applications.
Q: What were some of the biggest
announcements at GDC over the
past 25 years?
MS: Well, Bill Gates announced
the Xbox at GDC in 2000, and
Will Wright announced SPORE at
GDC 2005. Because GDC is for
developers, our show is where
cutting-edge game technologies
are unveiled. What you see at GDC
is what the public is going to see in
3–5 years at E3. E3 is now; GDC is
what’s going to happen.
Q: What special things can
attendees expect when they come
to the show this February?
MS: This year there will be more
focus on Smartphones, and so
Q: For companies looking to speak
at GDC, what’s the secret to
getting your talk accepted?
MS: GDC is all about integrity. We
have a very strict advisory board
which, when it is reviewing talks, if it
senses any sort of a sales pitch, the
talk gets declined. So my suggestion
to vendors who want their products
mentioned at GDC is to ask their
customers to submit a talk that
includes the technology and how
they use it. It’s the user who should
be talking about it, not the vendor.
That’s because we want to hear the
bad along with the good; we want to
know what problems the user had
and how they fixed them. And you’re
not going to hear that from the
vendor. So there has to be takeaway
... that’s what we look for when
we’re reviewing talks—takeaway,
takeaway, takeaway. Is the attendee
going to walk out of that room
knowing something they didn’t
know when they walked in?
Interview: Brian Reynolds
BRIAN RE YNOLDS, CHIEF GAME DESIGNER AT Z YNGA, TALKS DESIGNING INNOVATE GAMEPLAY, AND 3D IN SOCIAL GAMING
Q: Brian, your keynote
address at GDC Online
looked at the launch of
FRON TIERVILLE and the
process of designing
innovative gameplay.
For readers who may not
have attended, what was
the main takeaway?
Brian Reynolds: I talked
about the approach
we took to pitching
FRON TIERVILLE within
Zynga, and then the
process we used to
design it. We had a
fairly conservative
pitch (FARMVILLE plus
more game) and set out
to take the best from
FARMVILLE and the best
from MAFIA WARS and put
them together on the
frontier. Maybe the most
interesting part was
showing how many of
our original pitch slides
made it into the game,
but then noticing that
largely those original ideas
weren’t the things that
people now identify as
what makes FRON TIERVILLE
a great social game.
The real innovations in
FRONTIERVILLE weren’t
in the pitch; they were
things we found along the
way, things we found by
playing and improving and
playing and scrapping. So
it was a talk about “here’s
a good process to design
innovative gameplay.”
Q: Who or what
inspired you to be a
game designer? And
what games—past
or present—do you
consider excellent
from a game-design
perspective?
BR: I sold my first game
when I was 13 years
old–for one hundred
dollars [gives Dr. Evil hand
gesture]. So I’ve always
been interested in game
design and programming.
The first game that
made me want to do this
for a living was probably
ULTIMA VI. I remember
thinking “Wow, this is a
really big and open world”
and, at the same time,
“Hey, I could totally have
written this!” Some of the
other games that most
appealed to me as both
a player and a designer
over the years include
CIVILIZATION (amazing
open world plus lots
of simple mechanics
that interact in complex
ways), STARCRAFT
(great combo of sharp
asymmetry and near-perfect game balance),
HALF LIFE 2 (my favorite
story ever combined
with terrific game detail
and balance), GEARS OF
WAR (the most fun pure
shooting experience and
such innovative game
craft), and BIOSHOCK
(great passive-listening
story-telling technique).
Q: What’s your take on
3D social games? What
are some of the ways
you would use that
technology to engage
players?
BR: I think it’s still a bit
early for 3D in the social
space. Navigating in 3D
makes for difficult UI
decisions that are hard to
teach to the mass market,
and the quality of the pure
graphics isn’t high enough
yet for the mass market
to get attracted to the
potential immersiveness
of it. So I don’t see it
happening yet.
GAME DEVELOPER | JANUARY 2011 54
