Wednesday, March 14, 2007

GDC Recap - Part 1

I took oodles of notes at this year's GDC and got to see most of the presentations that I was interested in seeing. It was a good year and, as always there seem to be some really neat things that are happening within the gaming industry. As I find time I'm going to go back through the other notes that I took and get more info entered in, but for now I wanted to comment a little on some of the things that I just read or heard about - starting with the Shigeru Miyamoto keynote.

With lines out the South Hall of the Moscone Convention Center, down the street and around the corner, I figured I'd be just fine catching a recap after the fact. I should note that I did get to see Miyamoto speak at last year's GDC - and that might have also factored in to the decision to avoid the crowds and lines this year. Last year focused a lot on Nintendo's console and handheld gaming platforms as well as game design - but, as expected this year, there was a lot of wii talk going on.

During Miyamoto's presentation - apparently given with visuals that had been loaded into his wii Photo Channel, he hinted at the fact that wii was a system/gaming platform that has broken down some barriers for folks that haven't traditionally played games. By getting down to basic and intuitive game-play via real-world movements they have created a system that gamers and non-gamers alike can enjoy - in commenting on some negative reviews, he noted: "Game reviewers out there need to add a new category when scoring games... how fun it is for people who don't play them." (cited from: Gamasutra) Perhaps we just need a whole new game scoring system for non-gamers... Perhaps the whole definition of of "gamer" will begin to evolve...

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