GDC Day 1

Just finished with my sessions today at the Game Developers Conference. I started the day by joing to Katherine Isbister’s talk on extroverted gameplay. It was basically an academic look at real-world social aspects of a game. Like when people get together to play Dance Dance Revolution. The most interesting thing to me was the idea of “Watch, Play, Teach” — people learn by watching, then they do it themselves, then they want to show someone else. This idea help makes some games popular.
The keynote was rather uninspired — Microsoft hinting at how great the next XBox will be without giving any details. They kept repeating the term HD (High Definition) and then gave away 1000 HD TVs to 1/3 of the audience (including me!). Everyone attending also got a free XBox live subscription for 12 months.
After an IGDA lunch I went to a group gathering for IGDA coordinators. I’m the coordinator for the Colorado chapter. We exchanged some ideas and chatted.
I finished up just now with Raph Koster’s talk on Game Atoms. He basically talked about his quest to come up with a workable notation system to define games. His conclusion was that there will one day be such a system, but his attempt isn’t it.
Now I am off to an unofficial gathering of Macromedia developers at a local bar. I’ll post on that tomorrow morning.