RPI Game Symposium Report

Last Friday and Saturday, I was in Troy, New York, at the 2008 Game Festival & Symposium at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Like the SCAD conference I reported on a couple of weeks ago, this is a university-run meeting, with speakers from industry, and with mostly students in attendance. Michael Lynch met me at the Albany train station, and squired me about.

Friday night was the "festival" portion, with students showing off their final projects, some of which were quite impressive, for undergraduate games created over a single semester; staff from Vicarious Visions, a local developer (and now an Activision studio) were on hand to judge them, with the top 5 receiving small cash prizes at the end of the conference. (For what it's worth, I agreed with them on what constituted the top five, but would have ranked them differently.)

The theme of the conference was 'serious games,' though the RPI program is not particularly geared to such.

The first speaker on Saturday was Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria, creator of the McDonald's Game, Operation Pedopriest, and Faith Fighter; he expressed the thought that we can really only hope to understand the modern world as a congeries of dynamic systems with emergent properties, that games are by nature dynamic systems with emergent properties, and that game developers ought to be working to grapple more immediately with real-world issues, and can thereby offer insight into matters of importance. Later on, in conversation, he chastised me for mentioning him by name in these pages, and in particular in association with his games: "I get death threats every day," he said. And I believe him, and perhaps will be more circumspect in future; yet it's hard not to acknowledge one of our most courageous and interesting auteurs in the chancy area of 'games for change.'

Next up were Paul Tarini and Dwayne Proctor of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major heath-care non-profit, who were among the funders of Re-Mission; they talked about some of their game-related efforts, and also about their huge (half a billion dollar) commitment to reversing the trend toward childhood obesity in this country, and games' potential contribution to the effort.

After lunch, I spoke on the topic of Design for Serious Games: Why So Many Suck and How to Design Ones that Don't. (Link is to presentation, a tad over a meg in size.)

Following was a panel discussion with three RPI graduates who now all work for First Playable in Troy, and seem delighted to do so. They also praised the many virtues of working for a small studio--a bit of a one-sided discussion, really.... here's one example of why this isn't so rosy, and of course here's my bitter screed on the subject.

Eric Zimmerman was the last speaker of the day; he tried to combine one of his patented (and rousing) lectures on game design with a pitch for Gamestar Mechanic and a plea for creativity in design, and basically ran out of time -- any one of the three would probably have sufficed in its own right. But he's always fun to listen to.

Finally, Karthik Bala of Vicarious Visions (not incidentally an RPI alum) presented the awards for the Festival.

Eric and I took the train back to the city together; I nodded off, and he played Astral Tournament.

What I found interesting, and heartening, about the experience was something I also took away from the SCAD conference: as game development programs spread through academia, they are not, as you might first expect, becoming primarily vocational ventures to train people in the skills required of them by the conventional industry, but do seek to inculcate a design sensibility, an impulse to innovation, and an appreciation for the historical development of the field. We may at least hope that, just as Cahier du Cinema and the rise of film studies led to a creative renaissance in film, academic attention to games may do likewise in our own field.