GO3

The opening address for GO3 by Francis Logan, MLA - Minister for Energy, Resource, Industry and Enterprise - set the upbeat and positive tone for the day by announcing $1B in funding over a decade to bring fast, fibre broadband to every home in Western Australia. On top of half million dollars in support provided by the government for Interzone Games to set up a studio in Perth, Western Australia. Interzone Entertainment COO, Robert Spencer noted that Interzone are hiring - seeking recruits to staff the 300-strong complement for their Perth studio. I only attended the first day of the three day conference and expo and give my heartiest congratulations to the organisers, presenters, attendees, government and other supporters for putting on such a great event and also for their wonderful job in promoting Perth as a site for Interzone and others in the games industry.

The morning sessions had Keita Lida, Director of Content Management, APAC, giving an interesting an involving talk about Nvidias hardware GPU developments in the context of games history - he is a notable games historian - and future developments, followed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, founder of Q Entertainment Inc, recognised as one of the top New Media Producers and Innovators by the Producers Guild of America. On the technology front, Keita Lida made a persuasive argument for the strengths of the ongoing and growing PC game market due to the continuing technology upgrades available to PCs that are deferred until the next hardware cycle in consoles like the Xbox360 and PS3. I am somewhat unconvinced by his conclusion that PC game titles are as good or superior to console games because such an argument mostly negates the reason for the tight platform integration and advanced features in consoles, including multiple cores and specialised functionality. Albeit part of his role to evangelise the energing Nvidia SLI technology that enables scaleable graphics, physics and AI performance by employing multiple graphics cards.

The talk by Tetsuya Mizuguchi was a timely followup to the Metamorphosis of Melbourne event run a short time ago by Form as part of the Creative Capital series. I was enthused about his entertaining the relationships between different modes and media in the creation of his game play, an epiphany that led to his current thought-leader role in the genre due to his sophisticated approach to multimode games, following earlier successes for SEGA like Rally Championship and the wonderfully immersive Manx TT Superbike game that physically involves the game player. It was particularly interesting to hear the relationship between the vivid colour of Kandinsky's art work, painted to Jazz and other music, the colourful and pleasurable immersion of techno rave parties and the gloriously retro Senorama as motivating elements for his fabulously fun dance game Space Channel 5 through Rez, who flies through space rhythmically destroying targets with arresting gameplay, and Lumines an addictive, hip and stylistic musical puzzler, that both combine the elements of colour, music and vibration in a visual, auditory and stimulatory feast. In terms of innovation and creativity, Tetsuya Mizuguchi's talk called Inspiration led Creativity was an inspirational case study to a rapt audience.

After lunch, John De Margheriti, CEO BigWorld and John Passfield, Pandemic Studios gave interesting talks on, respectively, the Future direction of MMOGs and Destroying all humans around the world, alluding to their refreshingly retro-alien, kill-humans, fun-take on 1950's USA and its translation into a (apparently surprisingly) successful title in Japan. The BigWorld Technology solution provides a mature middleware platform for developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Games that is fast becoming the industry standard. John De Margheriti gave some interesting advice on industry directions by citing some of the trends and market differences evident between, for instance, Western markets compared to China and India. China is a gigantic, largly online market that favours server session management for first-person, shooter-type games, having less emphasis on the quest-oriented MMOGs that dominate the USA and Europe, while India has an enormous base of lowered-powered machines that are largely used to play the computer equivalent of the national obsession leading to a 20 million strong installed base of the computer game of Cricket.

John Passfield's talk about translating Destroy All Humans! or DAH into a Japanese release. DAH is a wonderfully subversive game based on an Alien named Crypto who kills humans with his amazing array of weaponry - in particular the anal probe that causes human heads to explode so Crypto can collect the DNA remnants of his race from the human brain stem that is emitted in a gooey mess of cerebral material and fluids. The Japanese market required this to be changed to a life gem being provided for the player rather than brain parts after the same, screaming, running escape after being anally probed. The 1950s references to McCarthyism among others do not translate well across cultural lines and were changed to largely equivalent Japanese pop cultural references, for example, Godzilla, along with a full language translation, while retaining the essential features of the game unchanged. The issues with translation, a huge task involving 6000 lines of text and large amounts of character speech, are of syntax, semantics and contextual meaning - reminding me of the issues surrounding translations of word play in Douglas Hofstadter's GEB.

I got to hear Harvey Smith, studio creative director at Midway Studios-Austin, talk entitled The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology before I had to leave. The issues of character projection from the player to the avatar, the development and meaning of the sense of self during immersive gameplay, and cultural issues affecting game and character design, point of view (i.e. first person, moving camera; text choice menus), well-defined versus undefined characterisation - formed the theme of his talk. The talk covered a broad spectrum of ideas that range from the historical development of such features as hair, mouth, noise and eye on Mr Potato, in early and current computer games in almost identical fashion. An intriguing example he used was a line to a Russian private named Vasili in Call of Duty who was told he should throw a potato down range instead of an expensive grenade, as part of scenic and character development.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to chat with Masaya Matsuura and John Passfield about project and software engineering management issues in games development. Also to engage Tetsuya Mizuguchi briefly in coversation after lunch when I had spoken with an architect about the similar confluence of creative sources that stimulate our own work in architectural and software design. There was a large contingent of students, recent graduates and game-industry hopefuls in attendance - giving hope for building the mass and scale needed to supported a proper games, serious games (eg. simulation and training) and supercomputing industries that tend to pop up together in clusters as witnessed in Brisbane and Melbourne that are already so very successful in this space. Another contact I must followup is an Asian training organisation about opportunities for collaboration between universites and companies that seek to train or employ game developers and designers, or to outsource studio work.