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Notes: 1 / 1 year ago
If you ever need a super-inspiring pep-talk to get you started on a game, if you ever feel disenchanted by the process, if you ever just want to be reminded what’s so amazing about games as a canvas, read this. Read it even if you don’t fall into one of those categories. Read it now.
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1 year ago
GDC 2010 Wrap-up
It’s been a week since I returned from GDC, and I think I’m finally de-jetlagged, rested, and fully recovered from the underslept mayhem that it always is. Despite how exhausting I make it sound, though, it was a great time and incredibly inspiring.
This year I attended GDC as a conference associate. I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to talk about my experience as an associate without permission from the heads of the program, so I’ll just keep it to saying that it was an amazing experience and is full of tons of awesome people. Met a bunch of a new friends I hope to stay in contact with and got to see a whole different side of the conference. Totally worth the unpaid labor- er, volunteer work.
I went in this year largely more interested in attending the various indie developer events. It’s what I do right now and the community is welcoming, interesting, and inspiring. In past years I was in a mad-scramble to network with whatever bigwigs I could find and desperately grasp at getting a job. I found that my frantic flailing didn’t in fact get me a job, but it certainly caused plenty of anxiety and generally made my experience at GDC less than fantastic. So I went in promising myself to relax and just meet people as the opportunity arose.
But yes, indie things. I attended many of the indie summit sessions, from Ron Carmel talking about the hopefully sweet indie fund to Thatgamecompany’s group therapy session about developing in an experimental environment. I got to witness the lovely indie developer rant that resulted in Tommy Refenes getting his iphone game pulled from the apple marketplace (ya jerks!). It was all great and made me want to run home and start making games right away. But there was still a whole week to go.
Unfortunately, for most of the rest of that week, I caught a bad virus that left me sleeping in my hotel half the time. But still! I made it out to the Gamma IV party, which was a great time. Additionally, it was a big reunion with all of my college mates who have dispersed to various places since we graduated, plus we added several new friends to our posse. I attended the IGF and Developer’s Choice award, where everyone was way too scripted and I kept getting distracted by the giant teleprompter in the back.
Despite missing most of the second half of the conference, I’d say it was a pretty successful week. However, next year, I’m unhesitatingly slaying anyone who so much as sniffles in my direction.
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1 year agoryanbatten.com is complete.
Bring it on, GDC!
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1 year ago
So I just finished this book. My conclusion is, everything is amazing! Written as a book about science for people that don’t like science, or just feel disenfranchised by the way it was presented to us in school, the book does a really great job of making learning about everything really interesting. And it is about just about everything. It covers not just the science, but the history behind the numerous scientific discoveries made in the last few centuries. It covers everything from the Universe to the atom and everything in between. It’s hardly a dry reference book, though. It reads like a narrative, telling the unlikely stories behind the discoveries and the eccentric men and women who made them. The whole thing was enrapturing to me, and all I can wish is that it was longer. I could handle a thousand pages of this stuff.
If you think we, as humans, have learned almost all there is to know in this world, after you read this you’ll realize we’ve hardly scratched the surface on the way the world works.
Must read.
I posted this on my other blog, but I had to repost it here for its relevance. This is a great book for the game designer to read. You should know a little bit about as much as you can as a designer, and this is a damn good start.
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1 year ago
Rebuttal: Indie games don’t have to act like indie games
This is a response to this article. You should read it first. And then rage with me.
First off, let me make public that I am not a huge fan of the author of this article. I liked Destructoid, but I find this guy antagonistic, overly-sarcastic, and egotistical in a way that leaves my blood boiling with the large majority of his writing.
That aside, I’ll keep this as professional as possible.
The author has a problem with indie games. More specifically, indie games that are attempting to be “art”. He claims (in a nutshell) that people should quit making art games and just stick to the fun stuff. Or at the least make your art games fun.
Fundamentally, I don’t disagree with some of this argument. I don’t have any personal desire to make a game with some deep meaning that only I can distill and leave my audience scratching their head as they struggle to interpret it themselves. That’s just not me.
But, on the other hand, I would never tell people who do want to make art games to stop. My primary reason being that while they may not end up making an game that is fun to play, concise in its meaning, or easy to consume, what they ARE doing is pushing the limits of what games are and what they can do. Even if it fails as a complete package to be called “game”, it still sets a precedent that others can integrate into their own games in the future. It subtly changes what is acceptable to put in a game (story-wise certainly, but I’m referring to gameplay and mechanics mostly, and the way you deliver your story). It’s pushed out the boundary that encapsulates games and widens the possibility set for what others can do.
And anyways, who’s to say that games have to be “fun”? This gets into a whole different issue to me, about how appropriate it is for us to be using the term “game” to describe our medium still, but that may be a topic for another day.
He also says that they should be more accessible, less vague, less interpretable. To this I would have to respond by asking him if he likes any of the art movements that have occurred in the past century and a half or so. Maybe he doesn’t, and that’s fine. But you can’t deny that the direction art has gone is that interpretation of the message has been handed to the user/viewer. The creator may have subtle, deep, personal meaning in the piece, but no artist is obligated to shout that meaning at them. And largely don’t want to either. The purpose of art often is to allow the consumer of it to make their own meaning from it, decide what it means him or herself, and not to shove meaning down their throat. Why should an art game behave differently? I see no reason that they should. There is room, in fact a large mostly empty room, in the medium of games for less obvious, more interpretable examples.
There is value to art games, there is value to mainstream games, and there is value to those that do the balancing act in between, able to fuse artistic meaning in an engaging game experience. And that’s just it: they all have their place. If it ain’t your thang, then don’t pay attention to it. But don’t lambaste it for doing something you don’t understand or care about. Just go find what you do care about. We have enough close-minded bigots trying to shut down what they don’t understand in this world already.
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1 year ago
Hello World!
I’ve started running into several things to post about, but they all feel inappropriate without first introducing myself!
So let me tell you a little bit about myself and this blog.
My name is Ryan Batten, and this is the alternate game development-centric blog to my other, more whimsical blog here. I am an independent game developer who lives in Chicago (I know, the burgeoning center of game culture). I work with a small team of 4 developers on a variety of games. We collectively call ourselves “Skylab”. I’d link you to our website but it isn’t finished yet (shh don’t tell anyone)!
I graduated from Columbia College Chicago about a year ago with a degree in (wait for it) Game Design. I’m not sure yet whether it was a great or terrible idea, as clearly I’m not sitting at a lavish desk in a top tier game studio developing the next big thing on the market. But I’m not so sure I even want to be there! There’s something to be said for the amount of creative freedom I’ve had in the past year of struggling to pay bills with two part time jobs and making games when I have the time and energy to expend.
Enough about me, onto the blog. While I’ve been tweeting about games and development (among other things, often Chicago’s shitty weather), blogging at my other blog, and making games (beware, this site might not be finished yet either, revamping my portfolio as we speak), I haven’t yet created a place to really write my thought on games, the issues and culture that surround them, and the development of them. So that’s what this is for. You’ll end up finding things here about what I’m working on, what I think about various issues in the medium of games, and other things that generally interest me about games.
Now that that’s out of the way, onward to more interesting things!
You can find more of me
here: www.ryanbatten.com
and here: Twitter
