Gaming geeks gather to hear gurus speak

Tech hosted a unique symposium on electronic games and digital media last Thursday, which featured a keynote speech from famed game designer Will Wright at the Tech Square Research Building.

Living Game Worlds 2006, organized by the Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center, brought together students, academics and industry developers to talk about the future of games and other interactive software.

The symposium included panels of participants on topics such as design processes and digital art. Later on during the day, developers made presentations of demos.

“Wright talked about new media and how it’s heading in a different direction. Everything is centered around [customization]. For example, in iPods you can customize your play lists. Kids growing up now want to control themselves. He also talked about somatic properties and ways to interact with games, making them simple enough for people to [understand]. He’s about new ways of doing things, new ways of thinking,” said Michael Chu, a second-year Computational Media major.

Though many of the students at the conference were Computational Media undergraduate major or graduate students in Digital Media, other disciplines also have a stake in the future of digital interaction.

“Definitely, Wright originally studied industrial design, so a lot of it curves over,” Chu said.

A fairly new member of industry was present at the symposium: GameTap, created by Turner Broadcasting. GameTap designs interfaces to older games that it licenses for play online, such as Asteroids, Galaga and Sonic the Hedgehog.

“Right now we have 372 games on the system,” said Mark LaClare, GameTap representative.

Company representatives at the event seemed very interested in Tech’s role in shaping the future of their industry.

“I’m very interested to see what Tech students are doing. I think there’s a convergence happening here and it’s happening at other schools too, but not in the south. Atlanta has the potential to be a real planet of development because the students here, and the work they are doing here. It just needs to be promoted here. Certainly the MIT Media Lab has much more traction but there’s a lot of potential here,” Diana Hughes, interface designer from GameTap, said.

The symposium’s keynote speeches were given by Wright, known for his SimCity series and The Sims (the highest grossing game of all time) and Dale Herigstad, experienced graphic designer in television and three-time Emmy Award winner.

Several industry experts talked over the ways game design is changing during a panel on design process and games.

“There are times I want an epic cinematic experience and there are times when I really want to be in control. [Games] started out as living in a really small part of this space, it’s exciting to see that growing. We’re going to keep expanding out into new experiences,” said Carl Schnurr, designer for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6.

“More money is going to go to next generation consoles, and the PC is going to be like the connective tissues. [Games] in the future will be mostly network enabled,” Wright said.

“You’re going to log into a gaming AOL and play your single player game online,” said Johnny Wilson of Manifesto Games.

“We may not call that multiplayer gaming, but on the Olympics we just watched one skater go down the pipe, checked his time and watched another skater goe down the pipe, and compared his time to the first. That’s multiplayer,” Wilson said.

“In computational media, this is exactly what we do. There are industry and academia right here. This is the kind of thing people fly across to ocean to see. We know how to make games about shooting stuff. How do you make games like poetry, with emotion?” asked Rob Fitzpatrick, another Computational Media major at the conference.

The event was put together by the Digital Media Graduate Program under the GVU, a unique Ph.D. program offered through the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) and focusing on preparation for digital media research.

The GVU is involved with research in human-computer interaction, graphics, animation, wearable computers, education technology, and other topics.

One of the goals of the GVU is to promote collaborative research which combines many of these cutting-edge technologies.

“This has been loads of fun. I know a bunch of people here and I’m meeting new people…. We have to try and find a common language we don’t want to repeat the error of film theory and move apart from [industry],” said Clara Fernandez Vara, a Ph.D. student in Digital Media.

Fernandez Vara’s research focuses on how people understand and become involved with games.

During one of the panels, Ralph Koster, Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online Entertainment, made a comment of particular interest to her.

“He had read my blog where I was talking about single player games, and he was just responding to it. I just thought, ‘Wow, small world,’” Vara said.

For more information on the presenters, and on Game Worlds 2005, visit http://gameworlds.gatech.edu.