This week I attended the Montreal International Game Summit, a professional conference for game developers. Since that is not my profession (yet), I managed to get a free pass as a student volunteer. This was a compelling arrangement, even if it meant I didn’t always have my choice of presentations (I particularly regret missing Brenda Brathwaite.) Fortunately, the talks I did attend were also terrific, so I thought I might share some of what I learned.

Jason Graves – The Music of Dead Space

Did you notice the music in Dead Space? Neither did I, yet it’s an absolutely fundamental element of the horror genre. Composer Jason Graves explained the unique challenges involved in creating “the scariest game ever”. He explained how a soundtrack with consistent themes and progressions makes the player feel safe and strong, so an effective horror soundtrack has to be dissonant and arrhythmic. His compositions were partly inspired by the surreal techniques of Modernist composers, including odd directives that are difficult to express using standard music notation (ex: play this scale as quickly as you can.)

In a fascinating intersection of music and programming, each track in Dead Space has four dynamic layers of intensity. The chosen layers depend partly on the player’s distance from objects in the environment labelled as “fear emitters”. These objects are usually monsters, but can also include hallways, corners, bodies, etc. The music slowly crescendos as the player approaches these objects, a subtle and interactive method of inducing dread.

Nathan Vella – Indie in 2D

Capybara Games is an independent game studio that assembled from members of the Toronto IGDA. Their premier game is Critter Crunch for the PS3 and iPhone, an awesome throwback to the era of “hardcore puzzle games” (think Yoshi’s Cookie) with gorgeous art and animations.

Co-founder Nathan Vella talked about finding the right people for a video game startup; real partners who share your creative vision. He explained how nearly everyone Capybara hired had been introduced through friends and acquaintances. The hiring process for a small company should be casual and instinctual: hang out, have a conversation, look for shared passions.

He also emphasized the importance of a shared aesthetic goal. He revealed the piece of concept art that served as the vision for Critter Crunch, and showed how little the final game diverged from it. Every team member kept that concept piece on their desk, ensuring that everyone pulled in the same direction.

Randy Smith – How To Make Games That Aren’t Fun

Randy Smith is a game industry veteran. Formerly a game designer at Looking Glass studios, he recently co-founded the indie studio Tiger Style Games and released the excellent arachnid simulator Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor for the iPhone.

In his presentation, he explored the question: do games need to be fun? This is ostensibly the metric by which video games are judged. However, in other media there is plenty of room for work that is engaging and worthwhile without being “fun” (ex: the film Schindler’s List).

Randy noted that many games have dark themes (death, murder, loss, anger) but treat them in a very light manner. They neglect to explore the consequences and ramifications of actions and events. As Penny Arcade recently demonstrated, Nathan Drake kills hundreds of minions without concern or guilt. While such games are entertaining, the scarcity of games that address the human condition in a serious way is emblematic of the immaturity of our medium.

While he didn’t have an easy answer for how to address these issues, he proposed a thought experiment “not fun” game called Hospital Director. He suggested giving the player choices with no right answer: should a busy hospital send an overworked doctor home or risk her making a mistake? He also put forward some ideas about creating emotional connections and leveraging interactivity.

Marc LeBlanc – Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics

I’ve written about my own take on the MDA framework, but at MIGS I had an opportunity to meet one of its co-creators. At the end of his presentation, I took the chance to ask him two burning questions I had since reading his paper:

Do you feel MDA is compatible with Scott McCloud’s six layers of art? If so, how do they intersect?

Prefacing his response with the fact that he had read Understanding Comics a long time ago, he replied that to him the six layers of art purely described games at the Aesthetics level. In that sense, he asserted that McCloud’s layers are actually orthogonal to MDA. He was also sceptical of McCloud’s system where artists “accumulate experience and level up” to gain access to the esoteric aspects of art.

According to MDA, the Aesthetic level only includes emotional responses in the player that were intended by the designer. Why make that distinction?

Marc replied that MDA is intended as more of a design tool than a criticism paradigm. Thus, an unintended unpleasant aesthetic response should really be considered a flaw and therefore be fixed in the design phase. He conceded that there was room for emergent aesthetic responses, and that designers should pay close attention to such player behaviour.

I copied Marc’s answers above from memory, I apologize in advance for failing to capture shades of meaning. I may address my own views about his answers at a later date.

Chris Hecker – Meaningfully Mass Market

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the biggest entertainment launch of all time, making $550 million dollars in one weekend. Sensationalist headlines often tell us that the video game industry is now bigger and more profitable than Hollywood. In his presentation, Chris Hecker revealed the numbers behind such claims and explored the idea of what it means to be meaningfully mainstream.

While video games are making record profits, they lag behind film and music in terms of unit sales. To quote someone who had the good sense to take notes at the presentation:

Gone With the Wind, the most successful film by revenue after adjusting for inflation, sold 35 million “units” in the United Kingdom alone in 1940, at which point that country had a population of 43 million. Even more astonishingly, it sold 202 million tickets in the United States — which had a population of only 130 million at the time. “Everyone went twice!” Hecker exclaimed. “This is mass market reach.”

Put otherwise: “Celine Dion is beating every game we’ve ever made.” He also refuted the claim that the average gamer is 35 and female. When “games” are deceitfully defined to include cards and board games, then two main market groups emerge: 18-34 males and senior women. These two groups average to a mythical 35 year woman who is not at all representative of the gaming demographic.

How can games avoid the “cultural ghetto” that comic books have fallen into? Chris asserts the answer is to target a more varied audience and take more creative risks:

Not all bands are trying to make Thriller. They’re not all trying to hit every single person in their entire audience with a single work, which we try to do routinely. We have such incredibly narrow sets of users that we don’t actually have a reasonable description of a mass market audience. Film can do both The Dark Knight and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it makes the medium richer for it. You can rent one when you’re in one mood, and the other when you’re in another mood. We don’t provide for that.

He concluded with an introspective challenge to game developers: “What are you trying to say, and why? And are you trying to say it with interactivity? If you can answer those, you’re on the right track.”

Finally, I also attended presentations by Jakub Dvorsky of Amanita Design, Jason Della Rocca, Jeff Goodsill, Paul Winterhalder, Valve’s Jason Holtman, Jonathan Cooper and Dorian Kiken from Bioware, and a business panel featuring Clint Hocking. I regret not being able to reproduce your great talks from memory!

MIGS was a terrific experience, I learned so much and was surrounded by people with a passion for game development. I’ve thankfully taken some of that energy home with me, to reinvest in making and writing about video games.

Photographs by CasualCapture.

This Wednesday I attended Gamma 3D, a game design event being thrown by Kokoromi and connected to the Montreal International Game Summit. There is serious indie talent at these events; last year’s Gamma 256 featured the much-discussed Passage among others. The theme of this year’s competition was 3D stereoscopy, explained thusly by the organizers:

“It’s very typical of games right now to toss [3D stereoscopy] in as some back-of-the-box bullet point,” says Kokoromi co-founder Heather Kelley. “We wanted to throw it out there as an actual design challenge, and not treat it as some buzzword.”

Adds co-founder Phil Fish, “Right now, Ubisoft is working on a 3D stereoscopic game, and we’re seeing it more in TV and film. So we asked the question: is it worthwhile? Is there anything you can really do with it?”

I had a chance to check out this year’s exhibit with a badass pair of 3D goggles in hand, and was thoroughly impressed and the quality and creativity of the games being exhibited. Here are some of my personal favourites:

Note: these games are all available for free download at the Gamma 3D site.

super HYPERCUBE – Kokoromi/Polytron

Super Hypercube was programmed by my friend Renaud (who writes the excellent blog The Instruction Limit.) The game is an exercise in 3^rd grade geometry, challenging you to rotate a randomly generated cube cluster so that it fits through a hole in the wall. I thought the game was a great twist on Tetris block rotation, and it evoked a similar skillset. While Renaud himself was quick to admit that the game could be played without 3D goggles*, the addition of stereoscopy certainly helped by improving the perception of depth. I was also very impressed at the level of visual polish. You can’t tell from the screenshot, but the multiplier indicator is projected from the object you’re manipulating (an idea I’m told was inspired by the holographic menus in Dead Space.) You can read more about the game over at Renaud’s blog.

*In other words: the goggles do nothing!

Paper Moon – Infinite Ammo & Adam Saltsman

Paper Moon is a gorgeous platformer that will doubtlessly (and perhaps unfairly) draw comparisons to Braid. Objects in the foreground and background can be toggled by the player to create platforms, open doors and defeat enemies. The stereoscopy isn’t tacked on; it’s impossible to tell the depth of objects in the game without 3D goggles. While I didn’t notice any particularly interesting puzzles using this mechanic, I think the concept has a lot of potential and I hope the Infinite Ammo gang continue to explore it. It was also casually mentioned to me that the character artwork was created using cardboard cutouts, a process I’d certainly like to hear more about.

The Depths To Which I Sink – Jim McGinley

I’ll admit: at first I couldn’t tell if this was a game or a screensaver. On closer inspection, I would describe the game as fl0w set in a world of polygons. I didn’t actually get my hands on the game so I’m fuzzy on the exact mechanics, but the gist is this: the player-controlled worm can move in the third dimension and can only break the square panes at the same depth. If you’re not convinced you’ll have to see the game in action, it’s much prettier with a pair of 3D goggles.

As a somewhat unexpected bonus to attending Gamma 3D, I also got to meet Chris Remo of the excellent Idle Thumbs podcast!

If I had to review my conversation with Chris, I would say:

You are going to be blown away! – gangles.ca

Many thanks to Kokoromi for putting on such a terrific event, they’re doing more work than most to promote “games as art.” I look forward to next year’s competition and, if I get my act together, I may even try to submit something myself.

I’ve put up my photos from the event on Flickr, and be sure to check out my friend brilli.am’s write up of the event as well.

Montreal Girl Geek Dinners are an offshoot of the London Girl Geek Dinners, started by Sarah Blow. The goal of these get-togethers is to make technology accessible and interesting to all age groups and all people, particularly women.

These monthly events are aimed at providing a welcoming atmosphere and a platform for learning in an informal environment. They are always held in pubs, bars or restos and there is usually a speaker (or several) who talk for a short while on a chosen subject for the evening.

The event lasted 3-4 hours, a large part of which was spent eating and networking. I had a chance to speak with the organizer Tanya McGinnity as well as Peter Yang, a designer at Ubisoft Montreal. The attendees came from many different backgrounds; some were programmers and web designers, others were just self-described geeks. In the spirit of making these events accessible, the speakers avoid getting too technical.

This evening’s talk by Aleece Germano was about self-employment. Ms. Germano encouraged us to adopt the mindset that everyone, even nine-to-fivers, are really self-employed. She spoke of her own experience as a consultant, how to develop professional relationships with clients, and how to protect yourself legally and financially in these situations.

Though I have no personal interest in being self-employed, a lot of what she said was just good general career advice. The other Girl Geek Dinner topics chosen so far sounded great too. Last month Angela Byron did a talk on Open Source development, and Heather Kelley of Kokoromi spoke in December.

These dinners are a fantastic initiative, and if one is being hosted in your area I strongly urge you to check it out. Kudos to the organizers, great job.

Yesterday marked the end of CUSEC 2008, a three day software engineering conference for Canadian university students. While the conference has been going annually since 2002, this was my first year attending. I had initially planned to be quasi-live blogging the whole thing, but I hadn’t realized how busy the three days were going to be. Instead, here’s a quick recap of some of the terrific people I heard from at CUSEC.

• Day One
  • Tim Bray – Hard Problems in Network Computing
    One of the co-editors of XML, he gave a great talk about some of the difficult problems that programmers are having little success in solving. I don’t remember the exact words he used (relying on my brain was a bad idea, I plan to take better notes next year), but the main problems were communication between different programming languages and taking advantage of parallel processing.
  • Dr. Marsha Chechik – Guarding Against Software Accidents
  • Zed Shaw – The ACL is Dead
    Author of the Mongrel web server and notorious blogger, he talked about staying creative in the face of bureaucracy and corporate greed. The part of his keynote that really struck a chord with me was that “managers want all of your creativity, but trust none of your judgement.” I had a chance to talk to Zed later at Brutopia and a little throughout the conference, he was a really cool guy with a lot to say. Here’s hoping he comes again next year.
  • Bruce Miner – Taking Risk
• Day Two
  • Sylvain Carle – We Didn’t Start The Fire
    A self-described “venture technologist”, he talked about why we should consider founding or working for startup companies.
  • Michel Martin – The Evolution of Large Scale Business Software
  • Dr. Peter Grogono – Living with Concurrency
    This talk was a bit over my head, but it really made me appreciate what a problem concurrency is and will be in the coming years. Dr. Grogono is one of the most loved computer science teachers at Concordia, and after hearing him speak I can understand why.
  • Dr. Jeffrey Ullman – When Theory Matters
    Prolific textbook writer and Ph.D. advisor of Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), Dr. Ullman spoke about the theory of how Google’s PageRank system works, as well as variations such as minhashing and locality-sensitive hashing.
  • Jeff Bailey (Google Corporate Speaker) – Hacking on Open Source After Graduation
    He talked about the history of OSS and why major companies like Google and IBM invest millions to develop it. I had always been interested in contributing to an open source project, but after hearing his talk I feel compelled to begin doing so within the next few months.
• Day Three
  • Zed Shaw – Factor Tutorial
  • Dr. Jeremy Cooperstock – Music & Games: How Fun Applications Stimulate Core Technologies
    I really enjoyed this presentation, he began by talking about how the video game industry has been accelerating technological progress, which included some of his own research into the “next step” of virtual reality. The meat of his talk, however, was about his research into ways of overcoming network latency to allow people in separate parts of the world to play music and talk together naturally.
  • Jon Udell – Hacking the Noosphere
    Another talk that was a bit over my head, he spoke about keeping the focus of Web 2.0 and information sciences on people, and how we can gather information in a human-centric way.
  • Jeff Atwood – Is Writing More Important than Programming?
    As a big fan of Coding Horror, I had been looking forward to this talk from the beginning. In his keynote, he argued that writing for people was in many ways more important than writing for machines, and that it is crucial to “convince other people that your code, in a world positively overflowing with free code, is worth looking at in the first place.” His talk provided a counterpoint to some of the more technical presentations, and was a fantastic way to close the conference. Better yet, his talk inspired my friend Malini to pick up her abandoned blog again!

I can’t believe how much I learned in three days. Hearing from passionate people and being in a community full of fellow coding geeks has really inspired me to be creative, take chances and really explore the world of software engineering. I’ll definitely be attending CUSEC 2009!

Every Sunday in the summer, hundreds of people gather around the statue of Sir George-Étienne Cartier on Mount Royal. The assembly doesn’t have an official name, but it’s called the Tam-Tams by most. The focus of the event is the drum circle, a free-style jam where anyone can bring a hand-drum and start playing along; it’s not unusual to see over a hundred drummers at one time. The rest come to listen to the music, dance, play some hacky sack or frisbee and just enjoy the great outdoors.

Along with the Jazz Fest (which I wrote about earlier), the Tam-Tams are part of a complete summer experience in Montreal. The event has a great vibe, Mount Royal park is beautiful, and overall it’s quite possibly my favourite use of a Sunday. If you’re ever in the city, do yourself a favour and check it out.

• Tam-Tams in Montreal site
• Google Map of the park

Montreal is a fantastic city in the summer; it has four universities downtown, a great selection of bars, clubs and venues, and a fairly unique mix of English, French, and a thousand other languages. With the F1, Just For Laughs, Francofolies and (most importantly) The Montreal Jazz Festival in town, there is no shortage of fun things to do.

I got to sample three of my personal favorites iconic Montreal institutions yesterday, so I figured I’d write about them:

Carlos & Pepe’s

Brutopia Brewpub