Sunday, September 20, 2009

GDC Austin: Friday

Friday was a great day. I don't know how to express my day on Friday other than I feel like it was crafted for me. Playfish, Raph Koster, and Damion Schubert.

Koster doesn't have slides up yet, but in a nutshell he says that games are about training the intuitive part of the brain. And to do that we look to mathematical/computational complexity. Games in the NP and higher complexity realms are very engaging. I heard all my CS professors shouting with exuberance. He used Karp's 21 NP-Complete problems as a reference, and boiled down every successful and fun game to some form of an NPC problem. My question then: is any game modeling an NP-C problem reducible to SAT?

Schubert pretty much convinced me that today's MMOs need solo aspects.

And Sebastien de Halleux from Playfish convinced me that I should be making Flash games.

Now to catch up on all my work... (and play Aion)

3 comments:

Verilazic said...

I was wondering if you were going to post any more notes from the talks you mentioned you were going to go see? I was especially interested in "Finding The Right Rewards To Sustain Player Engagement: A Close-up Look At The RPG". >.>

motstandet said...

Those were just some of the talks I thought we would want to see, but we pretty much played the whole thing by ear. After one session we asked, "what do you want to go to next?"

That time slot also had Dave Mark's MMO AI talk in it, and we opted it attend his presentation. It was worth it.

Verilazic said...

Ahh, bummer. I agree just by looking at the notes, it sounds like the AI talk was definitely worth it.