Game On! Art Expo In Buenos Aires

On Saturday I strolled down a few dozen blocks to Objecto A, an art gallery in Palermo, which is Buenos Aires' attempt to take Soho, Hollywood and Silicon Valley and then jam them into one neighborhood. The place had this M.C. Escher style architecture that's typical of the city, even buildings in poorer barrios have this walking up a stair into a platform with a door leading to another platform feel to them, as a result of the city being planned by Argentines (to that point, there are almost no alleyways in the entire city, leading to tantamount waste management problems). But I wasn't there to trip out on decadent, artistic squalor, I was there to trip out on decadent, pretentious game design chatter.

First I heard Francisco Ortiz from Microsoft talk about the growth of Xbox Live and the numbers were pretty staggering. During the talk I got a vibe of Singularity-type stuff, after all if billions or trillions of hours of gameplay have gone on over our Halo-playing networks, surely we're a few steps away from simulating universal histories, right? I really got a kick out of the comment he made about free PC games not being part of the establishment. Fucking right people! He mentioned that all payments on their marketplace are processed in dollars, I raised my hand and asked in Spanish (the whole thing was in Spanish): "Que vas a hacer cuando el dolar collapse totalmente?"

He jokingly said they'd start using Yuan, then clarified they have to explicit plans. This guy is an agent of a multi-national corporation, he may be smarter than corporate or he may be onto something. If Windows 7 barks at you in Mardarin whenever you try to download something, you heard it here first.

After the talk I got to chatting with a guy named Christian about Iceland and gaming markets (in both senses) and Eve Online, Francisco stepped out for a cigarette and joined the money/game smorgasbord. He mentioned that competitive Quake 3 players all started playing without any textures or shading because of the frame-rate advantage. All of this had something to do with life being a game, but we didn't want to say it because the implications were too scary, especially today.

When I mentioned Nintendo Francisco said that they see Nintendo as catering to another market, and I told him they were only taking a bucket to the well. I described how I Wish I Were The Moon, which is a low-interactivity state machine hack, is deeply appreciated by millions of people who are starved for that kind of aesthetic interaction. Christian countered that those games don't sell, and I mentioned The Path as having high production values and doing brisk sales, and that game has the same kind of low-interaction high-novelty deal going for it. Then I brought up the rate at which Sony's game division is losing money, it made us all want to laugh a bit but refrain out of professional respect. Yeh.

My boss showed up with a few guys from work, he asked me why I wasn't speaking at the event and I told him I give unscheduled talks to anyone who will listen.

Meanwhile, the director of GameLoft Buenos Aires was giving a talk on managing the creative process. Portenos like to call it "GamePort".

Then this artist that I've worked next to everyday for the past six months gave a live demo of how he can paint stuff really fast using computer software, I listened while playing the last level of Flower.

I caught up with an interaction designer who's worked on serious games and done consulting for Mercado Libre, he was there with his wife, who is a teacher. I told them my two best game design ideas, which both have to do with social dynamics. As above, I used Benmergui's moon game as an example of content that serves a bigger audience but is low-interaction, but then I compared it to Go. I said I think the key to getting deep gameplay of this kind is through multiplayer.

Then the headliner showed up, Gonzalo Frasca, PhD. SRL - fresh off the Buquebus ferry. His talk was in Spanish, were they all, but I got the gist of it following the slides. Best known for September 12th, Frasca has since focused mostly on keeping his studio running, Powerful Robot Games has been cranking out better-than-you'd-expect advergames for Cartoon Network, for example taking Teen Titans and making a balanced arcade/TD game where each character has a different vector pattern based on their personality and fictional superpower. I respect that, and I told him as much afterwards. I mean, I designed a fucking wrestling game, but I've been eating really good steak so it's cool. His slides indicated that he's very interested in the social dimensions of gameplay, not just online but physically and ritualistically as well. If there is ever a One World Religion it will consist of a big "Free To Play" ARG/MMO.

The next talk on my roster was Dan Benmergui's. He was wearing the GDC '09 shirt, repping his international idea-soak. I told him in two years the whole thing would be the IGF, with Sony and MS competing over signing different booths, and Nintendo waiting to soak up everyone else - he did not disagree. He started by referencing a chronology of film's evolution used in Jason Rorher's GDC talk, and then he gave a bunch of examples of games he thought fit into a similar cannon. In the process he explored how games tell a story and how they fail, agreeing with the statements made by Jason, Jon Blow and many others that games will never be as good at telling linear stories as other highs, like film. Everything from Dwarf Fortress to The Path to good 'olGravitation were cited. I asked him why no multiplayer games, he replied that the benefits of exploring systems that multiple players entail can be achieved with complex AI or procedural content as well, such as in the case of Dwarf Fortress. Or maybe he didn't say quite that, no entendi' muy mucho.

The whole experience solidified in my mind what needs to be done both artistically and commercially, in my career if not those of many other designers. We need to use multiplayer as a tool for producing dynamically created social content, this has already been done for chat, click-fests and deathmatch, but there's tons of potential for highly aesthetic gameplay to be created using this deeply under-nourished dimension of play. Maybe I'm not really covering the event, I'm just interpreting it in the context of what it made me think.

So then I split so I could meet up with my Bonita Supreme.