The Fantasy of Control: Dispatches from GDC 2010

I am writing about the 2010 Game Developers Conference for GameSetWatch and will link the articles as they go up here.

• Day One. EVE Online. The BART.
• Day Two. Press pass. Jenova Chen.
• Day Three. The Metreon. Infinity Ward.
• Day Four. Workflows. Fluency.
• Day Five. Baiyon. Incandescence.
• Day Six. Parade. Trauma.
• Day Seven. Trends. Video Games.

Comments

[Josh Strike]

Man you found out what it's like to be a petty journalist... heheh... when I was writing the music column for Pasadena Weekly there was no end to it. I used to walk into any show for free, anywhere in LA, which was great; but yeah, you have to just shrug off the self-promoters and never answer your phone.

BTW every time I hear someone refer to a market as a "space" -- especially if the word "social" is anywhere in the same verbal paragraph -- I start to gag. That's how you know you're around a marketing flack as opposed to a coder.

Also: "Part of the point is not to be sexy." Hell of a quote. I think that is DEAD wrong. If there's one thing I've done more of than anything it's writing management apps; the more restrictions, rules and hoops you need to force on the user for a particular business model, the more desperately you need those to flow in a way that feels completely natural and peremptory to the lowest-level employee using the software. Not least because they're the ones most likely to find ways to make an end run around "that stupid warning that pops up" and end up writing bad data that fucks up the whole chain of action going forward. Using the software should feel like a privileged experience. And it should feel like management is helping them do their job, subtly guiding them through processes they understand, rather than bearing down on them through a rigid piece of software. Your observation on this is a good one; maybe it's time to write a communized version of this where dictates from on high are subtly coded into cryptic UI manipulations and occasionally violent and nefarious outbursts against particular violators, yet with a happy-smiley overall feeling of harmonious democratic employee-love all over it. Management software governed by "secret rules" that can be hidden from the employees, but with a leaning toward, and an image of, promoting independence and free thinking. It's kind of what I've tried to do with my work, but I never formalized it as such.