Electronic Entertainment Expo 2007

When Nicklas “Cece” Cederstorm from Massive Entertainment says that he rolls around the floor pretending to be shot and shooting at people when pitching a game, you believe him.

Clearly his approach has paid off - he is part of Massive’s concept group which gets to work on game concepts that have been approved for production all year round. “We get to do all the fun stuff over and over again” said Cederstrom. “It’s like a honeymoon all the time.”

But Cederstrom is big on putting the right spin on a game when pitching it to marketers - something he says the team has learnt from experience.

“You need to be manipulate people into thinking this is the best game ever,” said Cederstrom.

He advocates a one page pitch with full colour screen shots, bullet points with key concepts and some more indepth text explaining the background story. “You need to get them instantly” he said. “It takes time, but it’s well worth it.”

“The marketing department has the power to make or break your game.” His advice is to do all the work for them - have the tag line, know your audience - that way they look at it and see their work is done.

But Cederstrom realises not everyone has the resources he does. When it comes to selling a game yourself he says the best thing is to be yourself and show your passion for your product. Something he does anyway. He says he gets to pitch to the scary suit people who love their little Palm Treo’s and are much more likely to play with them than listen to him unless he grabs their attention - hence the diving under tables and shooting up people.

But he also recommends a good powerpoint presentation with lots of “eye candy”.

“Eye Candy is the shit,” he said, just in case his point was not made.

There you have it, and well clearly its worked for him.

(note: requires flash)

Cosplay.

Such a harmless sounding word for such a strange pastime.

GO3 is host to a massive cosplay competition with the overall winner receiving the opportunity to get a return trip to Japan to attend the 2007 Tokyo Game Show.

So what exactly IS cosplay?

Simply put, cosplay is “costume play” – the art to dressing up like a fictional character. The more popular cosplay characters are usually sci-fi related, from comic books, computer games or characters from Japanese cartoon characters.

I spoke to “Plasmadavid” who was dressed up as Link, the computer game character from the classic Nintendo game franchise “The Legend of Zelda”. Clad in a green tunic and wooden shield, the 18 year old tells me that his lovely Nanna had handcrafted him his costume, with the shield fashioned during a woodworking class at school. Why do it? Cos’ its fun.

Saturday’s cosplay competition pulled in a huge crowd of admirers. It was quite obvious that almost every entrant had put in weeks or even months effort into the costumes. The stage was littered with kooky creations armed with giant swords, anchors and guns. It was surreal, like a scene out of Alice in Wonderland – just with slightly less drug references.

Today is the first public day of the GO3 Electronic Entertainment expo and the crowds have definitely shown up. The Norg crew are stationed at the LAN party surrounded by just under 400 gaming enthusiasts with their extravagant gaming setups. Boxes of all colors of the rainbow litter the landscape, all glowing and buzzing away with their cooling fans going haywire. More gamers flow steadily through the door, all bleary eyed from waking up at such an early hour – 10AM.

As I wander the isles of gaming goodness, I find myself almost lost in a virtual world of ones and zeroes. Everywhere around me there are square and rectangle portals leading to mysterious technicolor worlds. In one direction I witness a dark and grainy world set in the era of world war two, in the other direction I see a mystical world populated by orcs and wizards. In front of me I see a much larger world populated by hot pies, chips and drinks. Oooo, the food kiosk!

But there is one thing that mystifies me – the amount of testosterone which flows around me. The crowd at the LAN party is predominately male. Out of the few females in the pavilion, I only bear witness to a small handful actually playing the games. The rest adorn their boyfriend’s side like strawberry smelling flesh trophies.

I had a chat to one of the girl gamers who affectionately calls herself “Mystique”. As she stares glossy-eyed at the screen, I bear witness to her blowing off the heads of several of her victims. She even takes the time in achieving these “headshots”. Why? “Because it’s funny. Blood is funny”.

Young Mystique has been gaming for over 10 years under a male pseudonym and admits it’s hard being female in such a male dominated world.

“I can’t really afford to admit that I’m a chick these days – the boys just try and chat me up and get really pouty when I cut them down”.

With this, she turns back to her screen, arms herself with a really, really big gun and runs off into a building lined with a handful of snipers.

Two minutes later she leaves, completely intact with all who got in her way blown to smithereens.

Gee, I wouldn’t wanna mess with this girl.

Day Two at GO3 drew a huge crowd, with long lines of gaming enthusiasts waiting to get into the expo. The big drawcard of the day for many attending the conference was Hideo Kojima from Konami who spoke on the “Evolution in technology and changes in game design”.

Hideo is most famous as the creator of the Metal Gear series, soon to celebrate its 20th birthday and his presentation looked back at his own career spanning that time and the evolution of the Metal Gear series from a “hide and seek” game to the soon to be released Metal Gear Solid 4.

It was a great insight into the mind and motivation of one of the most creative and driven game developers around and really brought home the challenges early game developers faced to think outside the box and the continual push to take games to the next level.

“There is no end to the technological evolution,” Hideo said. “Game design will continue to evolve”.

When Hideo first developed the concept of Metal Gear it was something very different to the shooting games of the eighties. His initial concept was “a hide and seek game”. In 1986 when Metal Gear was born he had to create a combat game on MXS II, which had many limitations. On MXS you could not shoot in many directions and Hideo had to limit the number of enemies and bullets on the screen. Hideo came up with the idea of a game based on running away, where the main character was “sneaking” away from his enemies and so the stealth game was born. It was also the first game that had a story behind it.

Back then there was no scrolling so Hideo had to show one screen at a time “like Pacman”.

Next came Metal Gear 2 and the challenge was to bring in new ideas to the game built on the same platform. Hideo’s idea was to develop the game from a puzzle game into a stealth game.

The Metal Gear 2 idea was to sneak into an “area” and the new tension was that you didn’t always know where the enemies were. The game progressed from infiltrating a stage to infiltrating an area. This was also the first time Snake could crawl. Sound also became part of the game so Snake had to be quiet to get past the guards and Snake could distract the guards by making a sound.

In 1992 saw the development of the CD-Rom. And the PC evolved into an 8-bit machine pushing the features developers could add to games including voices, sounds and texts. At this time Hideo created an adventure game called Snatcher.

In 1994 a new “evolutionary” machine appearedin the form of the Sega Saturn and the first PlayStation. Hideo again looked to reinvent the Metal Gear series.
The new computing capabilities were a huge leap in game development with full colour 32bit CPU and for the first time developers had the ability to create games in 3D. Hideo decided to create Metal Gear Solid which was “hide and seek in a 3D world”. This meant when Snake hid you only saw what he would.
It was a stealth game in the 3D space. Hideo pushed the 3D features that the new platforms brought and created the ability for players to control the game view. There were three cameras that gamers could use:

• The first person view
• The third person view
• The cinematic behind view, where players could see themselves and the enemy

The character faces in the game were written in ‘dots’ so there were still no expressions.

In 2001 the DVD Rom was born with Playstation 2. This had 200 million polygons and was the first “high performance” gaming computer. But Hideo didn’t just want a high polygon game, he wanted to make the player feel like they were in the game and wanted to express the environment through heat, humidity and smells. It was a big challenge at the time, but Hideo wanted to use the extra CPU power for the immersive environment.
New actions were also implemented like hanging, where Snake could hang and scoot along undetected from the guards. This was achieved through using motion capture technology which was fairly new in those days.
In 2001 Metal Gear Solid 3 was released on PlayStation 2. Hideo said when it came to creating Metal Gear Solid 3 he had exhausted the concept of place. Hideo is using infiltration of a situation in MGS4.

Metal Gear Solid was sneaking in a familiar world, Metal Gear Solid 2 was a moving environment in an industrial setting. The difference with Metal Gear Solid 3 was that the background was the jungle, which created challenges of building a moving natural world, but the new concept was “survival”.

To survive Snake had to capture food capture, camouflage and find cures if he got hurt. It added another realistic element to the game.
In 2006 the Blu-ray HD DVD era came along with the PlayStation 3 and the XBox 360. Hideo said by this time he thought he had exhausted the concept of space and he wanted to push the game into new territory. This time Snake has to sneak in a military environment and the battle becomes psychological. The player interacts on a whole new level.

Using the Metal Gear example of its 20 years of evolution was a great insight not only into the technological advances in that time, but the challenges that every new platform creates for developers and that continual push to take games to a new level.

Masaya Matsuura presented his thoughts on music influence on game development. He definitely has some controversial views about music composition and computer game production.

He spoke several times about something he called ‘positive emergence’ and ‘negative emergence’. These two terms describe the different, opposite ends of a grossly simplified spectrum of human emotion. Masaya is very interested in drawing out positive emergence using music, and computer games. He described positive emergence by showing the audience footage of Japanese and African children at play, using dance, chanting and percussion. Masaya then contrasted these experience with the ‘negative emergence’ which he feels is presented in most modern computer games, which rely on violent conflict to motivate the game. Masaya feels that if computer games cannot move past this common motivator, and start providing a positive emergence, the industry will die.

Masaya’s then demonstrated how the Aibo Robotic Pet (for which he was responsible for producing the audio feedback sounds) produced a positive emergence in humans. The Aibo had been on display outside the conference the previous day, attracting conference delegates, and interacting via sound and movement. The delegates were unaware that the Aibo was remembering all their faces as digital photographs, which Masaya was able to extract, and display on the big screen during his presentation.

Every face was smiling. Clearly, the Aibo’s interaction with humans was producing a positive emergence.

The highlight of the presentation was when Masaya started playing music on his keyboard, to which the Aibo was able to whistle (or howl?) along with. Amazing. I’d love to get one of these cute critters, but it appears Sony has halted production.

At the end of the presentation, I was left contemplating the differences in attitude between Western and Japanese society, esp. in regard to entertainment and media. Most of the Japanese presenters at the conference explained how they look for ways to create happiness, and to create a positive experience for game players. The majority of Western games use violent conflict to motivate game play. Personally, I’m a bit tired of seeing that in the news, on the net, in the papers; I don’t need it in my games too. I’d rather play music with an Aibo.

World In Conflict is the amazing new RTS from Massive Entertainment, and it is insane. You may have played a few Real Time Strategy games in your day and you might even think there’s nothing new that can be done with the genre, apart from the obvious such as updating the graphics or changing the setting of the game. You’d be wrong. Imagine that the Berlin Wall never fell back in 1989, and that a threatened USSR mounted an offensive on western Europe and the USA. The events that may have unfolded as a result of the wall never falling and the cold war turning to a hot war are explored in World In Conflict.

I got to play a pre alpha build at GO3, which is the first time it’s being shown in Australia, and I was blown away. The idea for the game was to combine the gaming genres of strategy and action and Massive has succeeded.

The back story is written by Larry Bond, who is a Tom Clancy collaborator, so the single player campaign(s) will be an interesting experience. The single player missions are also designed to teach the player to learn different strategies and tools to prepare them for multiplayer combat. You will be able to play different factions, USA or USSR, plus a third faction that hasn’t been announced yet.
The graphics engine is unique for an RTS, because you have full 360° viewing capability. It’s like a FPS, you can look anywhere instead of being limited to a particular viewpoint. You are able to zoom down to a single units view, which lets you hear them up close, too. There is quite a lot of detail on the macro level! Suddenly Command & Conquer 3 or Supreme Commander’s renderer’s appear rather dated. You won’t believe this until you see it for yourself.

World In Conflict also features an official online ranking system - as you play online, your rank increases, which means you get benefits (like bragging rights!). World In Conflict is set to have local cooperation with most game server hosts such as Internode and Gamearena, and will have servers for World In Conflict at game launch.
There is so much I could ramble about, however this is something you’ll just have to check out on your own. For now, watch someone waste a perfectly good nuclear tactical aid on a single tank. Enjoy.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi led the audience through the development of his game development career, sharing the inspirations and experiences which provided the fuel for his game development vision and creativity.

Tetsuya started his career with the production of Sega Rally Championship, an arcade game I remember playing during the late nineties here in Australia. Sega Rally Championship was released in 1995, and it was around this same time that Tetsuya attended a rave dance party.

As the colored lasers, lights and fog played over the seething mass of dancers, Tetsuya was reminded of his education in media aesthetics, particularly his studies of synesthesia. He felt he had to communicate and share this new experience through an interactive computer game. The end result was the cult classic, Rez, which combined simple gameplay mechanics with psychedelics layered visuals and hypnotic, thumping techno music.

Tetsuya had a similar vision after seeing (and enjoying) the musical Stomp. Tetsuya wanted to communicate and share the percussive energy he felt, and the dancing experience, through a computer game. This was the inspiration for his cult classic, Space Channel 5.

As Tetsuya described these games, it became obvious that high production values, and the desire to entertain and amuse other human beings was the driving motive behind his creations. He spoke several times about ‘creating fun’ and even describe how he analyzed and broke down the Stomp musical, to determine which components of the experience created the enjoyment he felt. These games sit in stark contrast to his latest game, 99 Nights, a game about war between humans and goblins.

99 Nights takes the player on a thrilling, visceral ‘kill kill kill’ experience. Part way through the game, after the game player has finished their killing spree, Tetsuya turns on the player, making them consider their actions from the point of view of view of the Goblins. The cinematic sequence depicting this is quite emotive, and it became obvious that Tetsuya is now interested in drawing a darker, subdued, yet thought provoking experience from the player. His inspiration for this game? The world around us… today.

The students of a Diploma of IT at West Coast Tafe have created a HL2 level using Garry’s Mod 10 of their Tafe campus, which you can see in the video. I had some good fun destroying their computing labs, which if you’ve ever been under pressure for an IT assignment, is something you’ve always wanted to do…
Tafe students Ryan Johnson (Mapper) and Joseph Varley (lead designer) have done an awesome job recreating the campus at West Coast Tafe.

Tafe will be offering a Diploma in Information Technology (multimedia - games development) from next term so if it excites you, come down to GO3 and have a chat to the guys.

The course is offered 12 months full time of part time equivalent and is designed to provide the skills and knowledge for a person desiring to obtain a high level poistioon in games development and mutimedia design and management.

Well, here I am on the floor of GO3. Today is industry day, perfect for guys like me who want to get hands on to all the goodies without having to battle the crowds. Technology is everywhere as far as the eye can see.

Well, assuming your eyes can see within a radius of 100m.

Its times like this I wish I had my credit card on hand. Or at least a firearm of some sort combined with a guy named Larry waiting in a getaway vehicle. The amount of electronic goodies that surround me could make a grown man cry. Not too sure how that would happen.. I suppose all the goodies might start cutting up onions or something. But nonetheless, I’m sure there will be some sort of male crying involved somehow.

I’m standing in front of the Aussie HiFi stand watching two gamers with plastic guitars strapped to their bodies. In front of them is the game Guitar Hero 2, playing on a huge Samsung flat panel. A small crowd gathers behind our two rock stars as they strum away. The massive speakers surrounding the screen blast out a cover of warrant’s classic ‘cherry pie’ whilst our budding guitarists jam away.

In their minds, these two gamers were rock gods.

To the rest of us watching, they were just two nerds playing with fisher price toys.

At the Gametraders stand to the right of me, staff demonstrate the joys of Wii sports to a gaming neophyte. Our new gamer hails by the name of Hayley, an energetic young lass from Ballajura. She is playing Wii tennis and swinging the Wiimote wildly in the air with a maniacal grin on her face.

Hayley tells me this is the first time she has ever picked up a games controller and now she’s hooked. I lamely attempt at stretching the interview further but decide its rather unsafe given I nearly get decapitated by her spasmodic thrusts of the Wiimote in the direction of my beautiful face.

Yes folks, this is what gaming has evolved to – in a few years gaming will blossom into a full-contact sport. Naturally being a conference, you hear buzz-words being thrown around but two words used quite often was “motion and emotion”. And to be honest, I think the concept is here to stay. Looking around me, crowds have gathered to stare at goofy looking kids play on the Wii and the Guitar Hero guitars yet these patrons promptly ignore the impressive World in Conflict stand.

I smile to myself as their set finishes and grab one of the guitars.

Time for the big boys to show em’ how its done.