I love the Game Developer's Conference! the lights, the cameras, the action, all the best and brightest coming together for meets and greets and foods and drinks, it's exciting, exhilirating, and completely exhausting!
This year, the conference was SO HUGE! two expo floors, a gajillion sessions and keynotes and special guests and parties and awards shows and demonstrations and booth crawls and games games games games games, i found it impossible to keep up. it was enough just to go with the flow, hang out with the cool kids, and soak up as much as you could (and even then, i missed out on a bunch of stuff).
SO here are some random thoughts that passed through my sensory-overloaded brain as i attended sessions and talked shop with my friends and colleagues:
In the "schwag store", laid out between books on game programing and logo t-shirts, there was a fairly impressive pile of "game music CDs", and i found myself thinking, "i don't get it ... if you haven't played the game, why would you want to listen to the music ... and if you have played the game (for like 40 hours!), haven't you heard the music enough already!?"
Howard Yeh of Qualcomm is the bravest man in audio! his session, Advanced Audio Through BREW was one of the most amazing things i've ever seen at GDC, and basically consisted of "here's this incredibly horrifying audio bug that's shipping on literally millions of phones, and here's how to work around it ... and here's another unbelievably nasty bug, and here's how to work around THAT!" this went on for like 45 minutes, and by the end, i was so glad i only have to worry about producing audio for just the one platform (that would be the T-Mobile Sidekick). i got a renewed sense of awe, respect and pity for my mobile audio brethren who are producing game audio and ringtones for over four hundred different varieties of handsets, each with it's own capabilities, idiosyncrasies, and bugs. a stephen colbert "tip o' the hat" to you all ...
Talking about music is like smelling a painting! i continue to be amazed at the number of audio sessions that contain no audio samples whatsoever! many rooms were set up with lovely 5.1 surround systems (courtesy of our friends at Dolby) that frequently were used for voice only. there was one audio track session where i couldn't hear what the speaker was talking about because of the explosions and gunfire emanating from the game design session next door! that's just so wrong somehow ... WE'RE supposed to be the noisy ones!! people should be complaining about OUR volume levels, not the other way around!
My favorite surreal moment: when the usher asked the attendees to "please turn off your cell phones" ... for a mobile audio session!
Whenever i hear a cell phone ring, i always take a momentary professional interest in who's phone it is, and what ringtone they use ... and i noticed something interesting at GDC this year: most "audio guys" use very simple ringers, basic telephone bleeps and burbles. with a few exceptions, nobody uses the "clip of your favorite song" ringtones that are so popular with the great unwashed masses (and so profitable for the cell phone carriers). i gotta figure it's because guys who use their ears for a living are particularly sensitive to the horrible audio quality of most music ringtones (and yes, i'm including my own!)
Perceptual coding is the process of using psycho-acoustic principles to decrease file size by only encoding sounds that humans can actually hear (i.e. MP3). after one particularly eyebrow-raising "vaporware" session (of which there are always a few), a friend of mine mused about how the technology described would actually work: "they must be using imperceptual coding!"
Note to conference speakers: try to tone down the hyperbole, m'kay? i know you're proud of your work, and there's always a bit of salesmanship going on, but really, when you say "this technique let us produce a game soundtrack that sounds like nothing that's ever been done before!" and then the audio sample sounds exactly like the score to Polanski's "The Ninth Gate", you're just asking for a Kick Me sign to be taped to your back, okay?
And finally, i have no problem with the fluorescent lime green t-shirts worn by the conference staff, it did make them easy to identify (as in "you must be a staffer, because no human would ever wear a color like that on purpose!") but can someone please explain to me why a significant number of the men were wearing kilts? is there some braveheart trend i'm unaware of, or maybe there's a lot of game development going on in scotland? otherwise, guys, please, put some pants on, will ya!? talk about peripherals!! :)
- pdx
were you at GDC? what did you think? leave a comment, or drop a note to the annoying audio guy ...
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Audio
Comments (4)
Read More Entries by Peter Drescher.
Um, no mention of the fabulous IASig party? Hello?
Ok, I applaud the kilt-bearing. A) It's nice to see something on a guy other than jeans. B) They're utterly free of the embarrassment of baring your assets plumber-style. C) It's nice to see some leg, even pasty thin ones. ;)
that WAS a great session, and i found myself marveling at how many of the same tricks and techniques illustrated in Mario and Zelda are still used today, particularly in mobile games. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!
One of my favorite experiences was hearing Koji Kondo demonstrate his interactive Nintendo music. The graphics and sound quality were unbelievably primitive, but when the wee mushrooms all jumped in sync to the beat, I had to smile.