Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #327 - GDC 2016

Episode Date: April 29, 2016

Mark reflects on his trip, including an hour-long lecture, at the 2016 Game Developers Conference.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so one of the interesting things about drive to work is it's actually my drive to work. So we have a change up. Things are going to change a little bit. But hopefully, I guess, to the benefit of you guys, I think. So it turns out my daughter has changed schools and now is going to a school close to where I go to work. But what that means is I have to now drive her to work in the morning. So she's going to be in the car. She's listening to her music. Maybe one of these days we'll actually let her join in on a podcast. But anyway, the

ramification for all of you is it takes slightly longer for me to get to her school, about 40 minutes. So we will have a little extra podcasting time for the immediate future. I don't, right now I'm driving her every day. I don't know if that will always be true. So for the immediate future, future podcast will probably be about 40 minutes, maybe slightly longer if there's traffic or rain or whatever. But anyway, just so you know why this one's a little longer than normal. Okay, so today I'm going to talk all about the GDC. I just attended my second GDC. GDC stands for Games Developer Conference.

And this year, not only did I attend, but I spoke. So I'm going to talk all about what entailed that and talk about things that happened there and what I learned. Anyway, today is all about wrapping up my GDC 2016 experiences. Okay, so let's start about me speaking, since that actually was the thing that probably was the most, spent the most amount of my time and focus. Okay, so last year, I did a podcast in 2015, if you haven't heard it, you can go listen to it. I talked about my experiences. I'd heard about the GDC for many years. A lot of people go, you know, Wizards always sends people, but I'd never gone. So last year finally was the time for me to go. And I went and my big takeaway was, whoo, you know what? I should be, I should be

speaking here. That's my takeaway last year that I thought I would, I would do a good job speaking and that it would be interesting and I'd have an interesting topic. So while I was at the conference last year, I came up with my topic, which was 20 years, 20 lessons. The idea being I just celebrated my 20th anniversary at Wizards in October of last year. And like, oh, well, in 20 years, you know, not a lot of people work on the same game for 20 years. In fact, most games well, in 20 years, you know, not a lot of people work on the same game for 20 years.

In fact, most games don't last 20 years. So the idea that I was working on the same game for 20 years was pretty unique. I'm like, what have I learned from doing that? And so I decided that I would give 20 lessons, 20 years, 20 lessons. The idea is average about one per year. They weren't chronological or anything. I'm just sort of like, here's general lessons. They weren't chronological or anything.

Just sort of like, here's general lessons. So one of the things I'm planning to do, by the way, is I'm going to turn that lecture into a series, a whole series of podcasts. In fact, I'm going to do 20 podcasts. So I've finished my, or I've almost finished my 20 years, 20 podcast series. And so I'm going to start a different series, which is 20 lessons, 20 podcasts. So apparently I like doing 20 things in 20. Although my 20 years one actually wasn't 20. So this one, actually 20.

There'll be 20 podcasts. But anyway, so I decided that I wanted to do a speech. But me wanting to do a speech and me being allowed to do a speech are not the same thing. So I had to figure out when I needed to apply. So sometime in the middle of the summer or whatever, I decided to go look at the website. I said, oh, yeah, I wanted to apply. And it turns out I had like a week.

Like I luckily happened to look in enough time that I had a week to do it. So I had to put together a pitch. Like here's what I'll be doing. And then I have to sort of explain who I am and, like, why I think I'd be good at it. Sort of, I had to sell myself. Now, a little story here is, many years ago, when Wizards was making, there's a product

we made called Gleemax, which was us trying to do a social media site that was focused on gaming. It didn't quite work out. We decided that we wanted to get more of a presence at GDC, and so a whole bunch of people put together talks. So we submitted like five talks, and of the five talks, only one got picked,

which was Robert Cuccia did a talk. But among them, for example, Richard Garfield had a talk, and they turned him down. It was like, they example, Richard Garfield had a talk and they turned him down. I was like, they turned down Richard Garfield. So I was, I felt like they could turn down anybody. So I wanted to have my bases covered. So one of the things I did was I think I over, over committed on my, my, my presentation. So for example, one of the parts is, you know, do you have any evidence that you'd be a good public speaker?

So I just like linked to every video I've ever done of me doing public speaking, which was a lot, obviously. And anyway, I was happy to find out that I had passed the first section. So the way it works is you submit your talk and then there's stages you go through. talk and then there's stages you go through. So I passed the first round and I got a mentor and his name is Soren and my mentor is somebody who would, so once I got accepted for the first stage, I then had a certain amount of time to put together a rough version of my slideshow, the deck, as they would say. So it wasn't a finalized version, but just kind of like, give a general sense what your talk is going to be. So I knew my structure because I was going to do 20 years, 20 lessons.

So like I was going to give examples. The plan had always been I wanted to sort of give an example from magic about it like sort of how I learned the lesson a story if you will and then the lesson

and then I would talk about the lesson and I had 20 of those so each of those could be no longer than 3 minutes because I had 60 minutes total which seems like a daunting task but I was up to it luckily I'm

I speak quickly and I thought I could get it in. So I had to put together my, and I think I had, I think I submitted in August and then like early October I had to turn this in. So I didn't have a lot of time. So the first thing for me was figuring out what my lessons were. And I had been over the course of the year writing down lessons I wanted. In fact, I ended up with more than 20 and figured out which 20 made the most sense. One of the things all about my talk is that I really wanted them to interconnect. In fact, lesson 20 was interconnect.

But the idea wasn't that I was really giving one or 20 little mini talks. I was giving one mega talk where all the things sort of swarmed together. That really was one big interconnected talk. That was, I don't want to give anything away from the end, but that's,

the final lesson is realizing that they all interconnect. I don't think it really gives it away, but anyway, so I gave a version of it to Soren. I think that version had,

I don't know, 300 or 400 slides. Um, and, uh, and he liked it, gave the thumbs up. And then I was, uh, I was approved to do the talk. Um, and then I had a bunch of months to sort of refine it. Um, I did some work over my break and during the winter. Um, but it really wasn't until about a month before that I'm like, okay, okay, I got to get this into shape. So by the time I did, what I did is I did a presentation to R&D to sort of like, I used one of the magic meetings so that I could prep it and I could do an early version

and get some notes and improve upon it. And I gave that speech. The running time of that speech was 40 minutes, which made me realize that I could have a little more time. Also, one of the things I had done early on was I had used illustrations and pictures for my examples, but when I got to the lessons, I didn't. And I found that it worked better if I had pictures for that. So I had to add in some more pictures.

Um, so I think when I did the talk to R&D, I was somewhere in the 500 to 600 slides. So I gave a talk, and then I added a whole bunch of slides. I think I went up to like 750 or something. And then I gave a second talk to our bitcrafting people, the people that work on Magic Online.

I thought that was an audience closer to what the average audience would be at GDC. Because I was trying hard to sort of not assume my audience necessarily knew Magic. Although if you knew Magic, there was plenty to,

you know, I mean, the more you knew Magic, the more you'd recognize the things I was talking about. And then after that talk, I made a bunch of changes and I think I went up to like 800 some slides.

And then I had a third talk I gave and got some more notes, and then I went up. So my final slide count was 941. So if you do the math, I had a new slide every something like four to five seconds, I think. So anyway, I like having a lot of slides. I like a really visual, like when you come to see me talk, there's just constant visuals going on. That's kind of how I like to do my talks.

I like to have lots and lots of visuals. But anyway, it went, so I was prepping it, I did it. And then once I went to GDC with it, I couldn't change it anymore. It was locked in. But every single day I practiced it, I really wanted to get down and be very comfortable with it. So I got there Tuesday night.

So Tuesday night I practiced. Then Wednesday I practiced. Then Thursday during the day I practiced. And then Thursday at 5.30 was my talk. Oh, but before I get there. So normally at the beginning of, if you listen to my GDC from last year, they do something called Flash Forward,

where they have a bunch of people that are going to speak, give a minute talk. And then I think they have like, I don't know, like 60 people talk or something. Just to give you some idea of talks you could go see.

But this year, because it was the 30th anniversary, instead of doing a Flash, a Flash Forward, they did something called Flash Backwards, instead of doing a flash forward, they just went and called it flash backwards, where they had a bunch of people talk for five-minute increments about different aspects of gaming. Like someone talked about adventure games,

and someone talked about MUDs, and someone talked about shooters. So they just talked about all the, I mean, mostly the video games, but all the different kind of games and things that have happened over the last 30 years. Very interesting talk. I'll talk about it a little bit when I get to my talks. But anyway, instead of having the flash forwards, so the flash forwards this year were digital. So anybody or they asked certain people to turn in 60 second videos of their talk. So I decided I wanted to do something a little fun. So the one I came up with is the idea where I'm at my house and I'm giving my talk and then I just constantly get

interrupted. First my youngest daughter comes to ask to borrow my mom's her mom's ipod ipad and then my mom calls me and then my older daughter comes back with my younger daughter because they're fighting over who gets the ip iPad and then the doorbell rings and in between all this is me trying to give off information so you can get you to come but in the end I sort of give up and just say hey come see me but secretly I've given all the information anyway it was cute

I was happy with how it turned out I shot a couple versions of it and one version was exactly 60 minutes which is what I used I had to cut it down so for me starting to talk to me ending was exactly 60 minutes, which is what I used. I had to cut it down. It's like, from me starting to talk to me ending was exactly 60 seconds, so that's the one we used. But anyway, so I was, I didn't know, so it turns out they gave me a pretty big room. In fact, on Wednesday, I went to check out the room, and it was big.

It was a big room. It was a very big room. I think it held 700 to 800 people but it was the kind of room that could easily hold more than that if they just put some more chairs in.

It was really big. So I was happy at my talk that, I mean, I didn't completely fill the room up but I had hundreds and hundreds

of people. It was about two-thirds filled so I'm guessing 500 or so people. It was, plenty of people were there so I was quite happy. So how did the talk go?

I thought it went really well. I made one big mistake, and other than that, it went really well. So my mistake was I'd been practicing on my iPad, and when I practice on my iPad, it's full screen. But when I actually do the slides, it's side-by-side so that I can see the next upcoming slide. And the final lesson, I'm drawing lines between. What I did is every time I did a lesson, I put it up on the screen.

And then in the end, I have this sort of hodgepodge of lessons up on the screen. And in my final lesson, I was joining them together with colored lines to show how, well, this lesson really is similar to that lesson. And this lesson is similar to that lesson. lines to show how, well, this lesson really is similar to that lesson, and this lesson is similar to that lesson. And so, I couldn't, because

it was not full-sized, it was half-sized, my eye safe is not what it used to be. I'm getting older. And so, I literally couldn't read the slide to see what lesson I was talking about. I kind of remembered it because I had done it enough times that I roughly remembered the order. But anyway, that was my, if you ever see, so my talk is on what they call the order. But anyway, that was my... You ever see...

So my talk is on what they call the vault. So GDC records all its talks. So my talk can be watched. Other than that little slip up, which luckily it didn't... I mean, the lesson was the lesson, which is they all connect, so... But other than that little slip up,

I think it went really well. The feedback has been very positive. I got mentioned in some wrap-ups and things, and I had some people sent me very nice messages, and they really enjoyed it. So I think it went well. Like I said, I'm going to run, I'm going to do 20 podcasts hitting all 20 lessons. I didn't bring, I didn't bring the lessons with me. But anyway, I will, I'm going to do a podcast or multiple podcasts all about the lessons there. But anyway, that was my speech. I thought my speech went well.

I was very happy. Okay, so let's talk about other things at GDC that I enjoyed. So the way it works, for those who don't know, is I think it goes all week long. But traditionally, we've just gone. We show up on Tuesday, and then we go Wednesday, Thursday, and we go in the morning on Friday and leave Friday afternoon. And so usually, we just go Wednesday, Thursday and we go in the morning on Friday and leave Friday afternoon. And so usually we just go Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning to hear talks.

There's also an expo hall and there is a lot of different booths around. There is indie games that you can play. Oh, let me talk real quickly about one of my favorite indie games. So the game that got a lot of attention this year, and I think won a bunch of awards, was called Her Story,

which I think you can download on iOS products. I know that because I downloaded it. And so the idea is you are on a computer. It's an old computer. And you have database to this interview of this woman. But the thing is that you're using this special database where you can type in words. And then if you type in the words, you get a small snippet of video. And it shows you any video snippet that uses those words.

So what you're getting is you're getting video snippets of her from different times and different periods saying key words. And the way you can sort of explore and find other video is by putting other words in. And so it's a very interesting game in that, you know, you just type a word in and you see some video and then you quickly figure out that she's speaking at different times, she's wearing different clothes, there's dates on it, and you realize that she's come in a bunch of different times, and then you slowly start to realize something has happened,

that you're trying to solve a crime. I won't give it away, but there's some crime you're trying to solve, and she is the witness, and so it's a neat sort of game in that you are trying to solve it in an interesting way and you're getting the information out of order and you're trying to figure out what relevant things are so but anyway I um I played it a little bit I played it I think I figured out a big thing about it well I played for like 10 minutes and I cracked one major element of it but but I came nowhere close to finishing it. Obviously, I only played for 10 minutes.

But I played a bunch of other games, a lot of sort of independent games. One of the things about the game industry is there are so many games made. And obviously, there's what they call the AAA, which is the big multi-million dollar brands. But also, there's lots and lots of games made by lots of different people. So it was neat to go around and see that. One of the big things this year was virtual reality. I ended up not standing in any of the long lines to see virtual reality stuff. One of these days I will get around to doing that.

My biggest problem is I have a really, really good sense of balance. And so whenever I do virtual reality, my brain gets in trouble because part of my brain says, hey, visually, this is telling you something. But the kin because part of my brain says, hey, visually, this is telling you something. But the kinesthetic part of me says, wait, that's not true. And so I get sick sometimes. So I have to be careful. I do want to try the VR out. I didn't actually do it this time. Although that was one of the big takeaways from the conference is sort of the virtual reality is on its way. I mean, whether or not it happens. I mean, the technology exists now.

The real question is, when can they get it to a point where it's, you know, they can make the devices that are cheap enough that people can buy them. You know, like the technology is here. Just a matter of, is it mass marketable enough? You know, is the price point? Anyway, it's the kind of thing

that's eventually going to get there. I mean, as is with any gaming technology, it'll start a little more expensive. The early adopters will do it as more people get into it. The cost goes down as more people buy into it because mass producing is cheaper. And anyway, so I didn't actually do any virtual reality. Like I said, they were all kind of long lines and, um, I, you know, I didn't. Um, okay. So, uh, the next, oh, so let me talk about my talk. So I was going to pick my five favorite talks and then I ended up picking six. So my six favorite, this is a theme, you know, make a five-year plan. Here's the six-year plan. Pick up five. Okay. So these are my five favorite, six, sorry, my six favorite talks I went to.

These are just chronological in the order I went to them. So I'm, I'm just going to go chronologically. I'll point out what my favorites were as I go along.

So first, slash backwards, 30 years of making games. So I didn't write down the names of all the people who spoke, but the idea was it was an hour and a half,

it was a little longer than most talks. And what they did is they had, I don't know, like 10 speakers or so, who each had five minutes. And they talked about many different aspects of gaming. Like the first one, I think, was talking about adventure gaming. And, you know, going all the way back to like, I don't know, a lot of Zork and the early sort of games where you're like, it's text adventure. And then they, someone else came and talked about MUDs and sort of the world building and stuff. And someone came and talked about

first person shooters and someone else talked about sort of the, how the ability to sort of capture information and how that changed over time. And someone else talked about just the graphical capabilities and what computers were capable of. And so it was very interesting that just, it was people who were instrumental in some aspect of gaming kind of coming back and recapping the area where they had had some expertise in. And so these were like top-name people who were like one of the key players in some aspect of gaming

coming to sort of share their lessons and stories and stuff. And they had five minutes, so they definitely were sort of doing an abbreviated version. But it was really cool to see a lot of things. And, I mean, obviously growing up with games, I could flash back and see a lot of things that I remembered. You know, one guy talked about how when he started 30 years ago, he had an Apple II, and my dad had an Apple II. So, like, I know what he's talking about. Like, I remember, you know, loading games in with a cassette tape because disks didn't exist yet.

So, but anyway, that was fun. One of the most interesting things was the last speaker was the guy who runs Oculus. And I didn't realize how young he was. He's like 23. He's like, that was, and he always talked about the future. He's like, well, everybody else is talking about the past. I'm talking about, you know, we're on the cutting edge of this new technology. But, you know, we don't know where it's going to go yet.

It hasn't really found the audience yet. And anyway, it was a very interesting talk. It was pretty cool. Oh, the other thing that happened right before that, I mentioned this, when I was sitting down at the very first talk we went to, I went and picked up my bag,

I just got my badge and everything, and in my bag, because I was a speaker, I got some special stuff. So one of the things I got was a deck of cards, and the deck of cards

was a GDC deck of cards, which was nice, and then it turned out that they had, the 50 speakers were pictured on it, the 50 most popular speakers from last year were pictured on the cards.

The Ace of Spades was the highest rated person. And then everybody else was random on other cards. And I think the Queens were the women who do the programming, I think. But anyway, so with the Jokers, there were 50 different speakers. And so I was like, oh, there's some pressure here. They were like, try to be good so you can end up in the deck of cards. So I was like, okay, okay, I'll try to be good. We'll see., try to be good so you can end up in the deck of cards. I was like, okay, okay. I'll try to be good.

We'll see. You'll find out next year whether or not I made the deck of cards. But I thought I'd give a good speech. Whether I'm in the top 50, I have no idea. Okay. So the next thing I went to was a classic game post-mortem for Ms. Pac-Man. A guy was giving him a guy named Steve Golson. So what happened was I went to check out my room

to see the size of my room and he was there. When I went in to look at the room, it was in between sessions and I ran into him. He was the next speaker to speak. And I said,

oh, I was interested. I wanted to hear what you were saying. So I checked out my room and I stayed and listened to it. So the story of Ms. Pac-Man, it's one of those things that I'm not sure how much, I mean, it was a fascinating talk.

I did not know anything about the history of Ms. Pac-Man. For example, the people that made Ms. Pac-Man had nothing to do with Pac-Man. They weren't the Pac-Man people. It was a bunch of kids who were at MIT and they had video games that they brought in to make money. And what happens is video games over time stop making as much money because people get better at them. So one of the things you could do at the time was buy these upgrade kits that made them harder to play.

And made you more money and made the kids happy, usually because the game got harder and they could be more tested. But the game that was the most popular game that they had was Missile Command didn't have an upgrade kit so they decided they dropped out of college and started a company to make an upgrade kit for Missile Command and then after they were done with Missile Command they decided to make one for Pac-Man meanwhile they get sued by Atari

because of Missile Command and they end up through it all end up going to Midway and sell their game that they were making for Pac-Man. And they ended up using it and decided to make a new game out of it. But anyway, it was fascinating just watching sort of how it came about and that it really was not the story I was expecting. I was not expecting...

Because the way they made it is they literally broke apart a Pac-Man machine, they figured out how it worked so that they could put in their own material, and then they figured out how to change it to make it more interesting. So they added different mazes, and they added a different pattern for the ghosts that was harder to predict, and they added in different rewards,

and anyway, they just did some stuff that was a little bit different, and Ms. Pac-Man went on to be, as far as the number of consoles made, you know, it was a world, it has the world record for the most consoles ever made. So the more Ms. Pac-Man was made than any other game. So anyway, that was very fascinating. Next.

The next talk, chronologically, was my favorite overall talk. It was called 10 Ways to Make Your Game More Diverse by Meg Jayanth. J-A-Y-A-N-T-H. Meg Jayanth. Jayanth. I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that. So she, really the point of the talk, I mean, she had worked on a game called 80 Days. But she was trying to talk about what you need to do to make your game more diverse.

And I didn't write down all the lessons, but, I mean, I have notes. I just don't have my notes in the car. So one of the things she talked a lot about was, first off, hiring. That part of having a diverse, part of being diverse in your game is being diverse in your game makers. And she talked a lot about how you need, if, if you do not know the answer, you know, like you need to explore different people's stories and you need to make sure you do the research to do it correct. Um, and she just gave a lot of examples where somebody would do something and then, you know, because what she said is if you don't know any better, what you tend to do is you fill in with what you know. And what you know is somebody who's not of that culture tends to be A, stereotypes, and B, the most limited version of it.

And that if you're trying to get a more breadth to something, go and talk to the source material. Talk to someone who that is their history and their culture and what she says is,

A, you'll be more diverse, but B, you also have a better game. And one of the big things she was trying to say in her talk was, not only will this make your game more diverse, but B, you also have a better game. You know, and one of the big things she was trying to say in her talk was not only will this make your game more diverse, but in the end, it's better, it makes it a better game. And she talked a lot about how in her game, how they spend a lot of time and energy doing

research and talking to different people and trying to not fall in some traps that, there's a lot of easy things to fall into where you just kind of do things the way they've always been done. And a lot of that inherent in that is some misunderstandings and things. Meg was a really good speaker and she was giving a lot of really good examples and just very compelling. Like one of the things I realized is having done a bunch of these now that there's three things that make for an awesome speech. Number one is you need a good topic. Like, one of the things I find funny,

somebody who paid a compliment to my speech, I thought it was real nice, is they said that normally they feel like they see a lot of speeches that have like five minutes of really good material, and then they stretch it to fit into an hour. And the compliment of my talk is I felt you had like 90 minutes and you crunched it into 60.

So number one is you want to have a lot of material. You want the topic to be interesting. Number two is your actual presentation, your ability as a speaker. You need a strong speaker. You want someone who's very good at speaking. And then number three is, and this is really important to me, is just the slides and the visual presentation and what goes along with it.

Because you can have compelling content and a really good speaker, and just if you have the compelling visuals that go with it, it just really helps enhance and cement and make it easier for you to follow what's going on. I really have come to believe that the presentation itself. So, like, you need a good topic, a good presenter, a good presentation. And I'll put those all together. And Meg did it. Meg had all three.

It was a very good talk. Like, one of the things, and a lot of R&D was there, because this is a topic we spend a lot of time and energy on, which is we very much want to make the game as diverse as we can I know it's something that the creative team works extra hard on

of just trying to make sure we have enough representation and that we are being true to lots of different cultures and not sort of just falling into one

one culture but anyway it was a neat talk and it definitely made me think and it was it was a talk that I most sort of walked out of and said, okay, can I apply this stuff?

Like, one of the things I talk a lot about when I talk about writing or giving speeches is what we call takeaways, which is a good speech makes the person who listens to the speech really have a better sense of there's something they can do. That by seeing the speech, they've now gained some actual bit of knowledge that they can make use of to improve what they do.

A takeaway means that I now am better equipped to handle something than it was before I read the article or saw the speech or whatever. And that you want to really make sure your audience, you give them some tangible takeaways. That's really important. And so one of the good things about this one was, okay, am I doing all the things? I mean, you know, she did 10, I did 20. There's something about sort of having a list that helps.

But here are some things. Are you doing these things? Are these things something that you can apply? are some things? Are you doing these things? Are these things something that you can apply? And anyway, if you happen to have access to the GDC Vault, I recommend watching the speech, 10 Ways to Make Your Game

More Diverse. And it's definitely something that I know R&D is going to spend some time and energy on, trying to figure out how to... I mean, it's something we've already tried to do, but something we have to continue to do even more so. Okay.

Next was past, present, and future for League of Legends esports, given by a guy named Dustin Beck. So one of the things that's interesting is Dustin got hired, when he was hired I think there were five people at League of Legends doing esports. And now, they showed a picture of the esports people

and it's like, I don't know, 120 people, 130 people, a lot of people. And League of Legends, for those who don't know, is now selling out

concert halls. I mean, stadiums. Selling out stadiums. Like, he told a really funny story about how they wanted to go rent the Staples Center. And the people at the Staples Center are like, I don't, you do understand we're a stadium. They're like, we want to have a video game competition.

They're like, yeah, we're a stadium. You understand, we're not a, we're not like a little theater. We're a giant stadium. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's funny because they ended up selling off the stadium in an hour. And so so but anyway so one of the things that's really interesting

is just he was talking all about how what they've done with League of Legends to really bring up esports and esports is something

we care a lot about it's just something we've spent more time and energy with and it's an area we have room for improvement. And, you know, this is not my, I mean, it's not my job to do Wizards esports.

So this was more R&D, just getting some information and just so we can have conversations with people on the organized play side. And some of them are also in the talk. So, but it is definitely something that's always on our mind of how can we bring esports to the public and what can we do to make magic in esports. I mean, it is, but how can we improve upon that. So it was a very interesting talk. It definitely was.

It was interesting in that it's an aspect of the business that I didn't know much about. Like, I knew that they had filled up some stadiums. Like, I kind of knew they were successful, but I didn't really know a lot of the details of it. And Dustin did a good job sort of talking about some of their philosophies, because they really came in in a weird place where there are a whole bunch of different little leagues doing things, and they decided they were going to make their own league. And, you know, whenever you do something,

there's just some controversy of, are you making the right choices? And when you change the status quo, people get upset. But they've really done something cool. And, I mean, I don't know how many of you guys all know about League of Legends esports, but it was another one of those talks where it's just, it is interesting sometimes to go and watch

how somebody else does something that is some relevant to you and just sort of seeing a success story and seeing how it happened just like the Ms. Pac-Man talk was quite interesting that it was very neat to sort of see you know literally these MIT dropouts that have formed their own company you know these are the guys that go on

to create the best selling video game of all time you know that just it's an interesting sort of... It's interesting. I like watching the story of how things happen. So the League of Legends esports story was very interesting. And Dustin, once again, was a good speaker. And he had the three things you want. He had a good topic, he was a good presenter, and he had a good presentation. So that was definitely fun.

Okay, the next one I went to, which was probably my second favorite, although this one was dense. I'm going to have to watch this one again so that I can sort of absorb all the information I need to absorb. So it was called Gamer Motivation Profile Model and Findings by Nick Yee. So Nick owns a company that does modeling um and so what they did is they came up with a system by which to check um attributes of a gamer and then they went out and they asked gamers to take the survey and then as um they got different media coverage they got more and more requests eventually i think what he was saying right now, they have like 222,000 gamers who have taken the survey. And the way they got people to take the survey is if you took the survey,

they would show you your scores. And then you could see how you fared against other people and stuff. But anyway, this is a hard one for me to describe because it's very crunchy. It is very data-driven. But basically, sort of the takeaway from it, and this is a vague takeaway because this is the kind of one where I went, I took notes, I always take notes while I watch it.

And it's hard to take notes and process information at the same time. So this is one of those talks where I got the notes, but I'm still processing information. I actually want to watch it. I want to watch it once more where I'm not taking notes so I can sort of just pay attention. His big takeaway that was, to me, most interesting

is that there were groups that tended to, there were attributes that clumped by each other, meaning that if you're more likely to have quality A, you're more likely to have quality B. And that was very intriguing to me because there were things that clumped together

that you wouldn't realize would clump together. That, for example, the same people who really enjoy, well, it is interesting, this is not, I'm going to give you

an example and then say it's not that far away from some of the five do. But we're talking about the people that really enjoy sort of, you know, blowing everything up in a game where you just get to destroy everything in sight are the same people that are clumped near people

that really enjoy the social aspect. Which is funny when you get quite down to it. It's kind of a Timmy thing. So maybe my findings are not that far away. But anyway, a lot of what he did is he also asked them what their favorite video games were. And so there's a lot of information showing how video games clump versus how different attributes are. Last year, for example, I talked about how there was talk all about the definition of fun. And like, oh, that was really dense.

This is the dense one for me. I really enjoyed it. But it's one of those things where I'm, I just need to sort of dig a little deeper into all the information and try to understand what it means. Um, it is definitely one of those talks that like, I think could have the biggest impact. Like this is my parallel of the fun one from last year where I think it's the densest and has the biggest impact on what i do like understanding fun and understanding why people find things fun and how things can be fun is fundamental to what i do and so having a talk that really talks about that is it's pretty key um and this was definitely one of the ones that um

i want to better understand i mean i i like i said, I got some of it on the first view, but I need the second view, and so I can sort of, without having to also try to take notes on it, I can really sort of absorb all the stuff he has to say. But anyway, I went and talked to him afterwards. We have what we call a breakout room. Oh, I'll talk about my breakout room in a second.

The breakout room is after you're done, there's a space where you can go and talk to people who want to talk to you. So I did do that. I'll get to that in a second. Okay, the last thing I want to talk about was called Rules for Development of People by Julie Farbenel.

I hope I didn't mispronounce her name. From Blizzard. She works for HR at Blizzard. And she talked sort of three basic rules, sort of how best to manage people. So in general, a lot of other talks I saw, one thing that's interesting is that a lot of the talks are about different aspects. Like, I do have teams.

I don't manage people in that Gottlieb does the managing. But I do oversee people. It's not like I don't do some managing. I don't actually manage their time, but I manage their processes, if you will, the sets they're working on. And so it was interesting. One of the big takeaways is

that you should be playing to people's strengths. The goal is not to fill in their weaknesses, but make their strengths better. She said that, this was my big takeaway from this one, in that there's only so much you can do to take someone's weaknesses and make it less of a weakness. But people can really take their strengths and improve mentally upon them. That the area of the greatest room for growth on is not your weaknesses, but your strengths. I thought that was very interesting.

And she talked a lot about ways to bond in groups and how to sort of do things that will help sort of cut through vulnerabilities and make people have more connection. Anyway, it was a very interesting talk because it definitely helped give me a sense of how maybe, and the teams that I run, the teams that I do, how there's some things we can do that would help things, make things better. So it was very, anyway, it was a good talk. Like I said, I, sometimes you're always surprised where the best talks come from.

I mean, obviously, like I went to, I think, 10 talks this year. I mean, I brought up my favorite six. I went to 10 talks this year and then I gave a talk, obviously. And so it was interesting. So, okay, so real quickly, my wrap-up room. So the problem was I was off in, like, North Building, and the wrap-up room for all of them were in West Building. And so I had to, the people who wanted to come talk to me afterwards had to really like march like a far distance. That said, I still had a line. In fact, my talk ended at 6.30 and the wrap-up room closed at 7.30. So I had an hour.

And it turns out I needed the full hour. I had, I don't know, talked to 30 or so people. It was really nice. I mean, one of the things that I always enjoy doing, and I talk about this, is that I like interacting with fans and stuff, and I like, you know, these are people obviously that cared enough to come hear my

talk. So I signed a bunch of cards, and I took some pictures, I answered a bunch of questions. I was really touched. Five different people said that I was one of the major reasons that influenced me into game design. That was very touching. And I got a lot of interesting questions. In fact, I got some questions I had never, ever gotten before, which doesn't happen a lot because I get so many questions that like, wow, I've never actually had that question before. I got a bunch of questions like that. I don't remember them, unfortunately. But anyway,

the other fun thing about the talk was there were a bunch of people who, former Wizards people, who I hadn't seen in a while. So I got to actually, and not even Wizards people, just Magic people in general. In fact, Henry Stern,

who I worked with a long time, actually showed up and he and I ended up going to dinner. But I saw a bunch of other people that just I hadn't seen in quite a while. And it was nice to talk to people, and obviously people enjoyed the talk.

Okay, so I'm not too far from my daughter's school, so let me do my wrap-up. So, other things that was at the GDC this year. The one thing about the Expo Hall, which is interesting, they've broken it up into two sections. One section

is more service-oriented, and that's where I learn how big the gaming industry is, how many companies are like, we're here to help maximize, or advertise, or market, or we make such and such tool that you might need to make your game

or we make some sort of operating system or some sort of character creation or whatever. There's just rows and rows and rows of companies that service the game industry in a very technical business way that I was really unaware of. I mean, I guess I was a little aware because last year I went to the Expo Hall. The other thing that's fun is there's a different part of the Expo Hall that shows off new games, a lot of smaller games. And there's a lot of colleges that have game design programs that are sort of advertising for their game design program. So that is... Anyway, it is...

It's neat to just see, I love seeing sort of, like, one of the cool things about independent games in general is, um, usually, look, they don't have the resources that something like a AAA publisher will have. And so, in some ways, it reminds me of the early days of video games. So, real quickly, for those that... So, I grew up in the 80s. I mean, I was born in 67. And so, I grew up in the arcade. I mean, we had an Atari 2600 at home, which is a very... In fact, we had the Odyssey, which was the very first home system in which you taped plastic screens to your TV screen,

and then you basically had a cursor you could move around. But eventually, I mean, I did have some stuff at home, but the stuff I have, if you guys would see it, or maybe you already know it, it's rudimentary. Most of the idioms took place in the arcade. And one of the things about the arcade in the early days was there were just a lot of restrictions.

You know, there's only so much technically they could do. So a lot of what early arcade was is taking advantage of using ingenuity. Like, well,

I'm limited in how much graphics I can do. Graphically, I'm limited. And so there's a lot of inventive things done in the early days just by, you know, the mother necessity, right?

That invention comes from people making do with what they have to, which is not too far from restrictions to create creativity, by the mother necessity, right? That invention comes from people making do with what they have to, which is not too far from restrictions on creativity, by the way. And I find that indie games are a lot of the same space, which is they can't compete graphically with the... If you look at the graphics nowadays, the amount of details they can do, because there's so much stuff they can do with graphics, but the independents sort of don't have that ability.

They have to make do with what they got. And so it's really neat. Like, Her Story is a good example of nothing about it technically is particularly outstanding. It's pretty rudimentary from a technical standpoint. But from a design standpoint, it's brilliant, right? It does really neat and cool and innovative things. And they made use of the technology available to them. They didn't have the ability to sort of invent new technology.

So they, in fact, used old technology, but used it really cleverly. But anyway, I'm driving up to my daughter's school. So that, my friends, is my 2016 GDC experience. I had a lot of fun. I really, really enjoyed speaking. And so, anyway, I'm about to pull here into the parking space.

So, I'm not sure how long we'll be doing these 40-minute podcasts. In fact, today we had rain. So, today was a little bit longer than that. So, anyway, I'm pulling into my space. So, we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic,

it's time for me to be making magic and drop my daughter off at school. So anyway, I'll talk to you guys next time. Bye-bye.