My GDC Canada Experience - Day One

by The Acagamic

GDC Canada Registration
Photo by Lennart (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

Just came back from joint con­fer­ences GDC Canada and Future Play, a com­bi­na­tion of events that I would like to call the per­fect game-industry-academia cock­tail mixed by some very tal­ented Canadians. I had the plea­sure to speak at both events about the sub­ject I am pas­sion­ate about: Psychophysiological Player Testing and Metrical Game Research.

But back to topic: The first annual Game Developers Conference Canada was held from May 12–13 at the Vancouver Convention Center and appar­ently evolved into this event from the Vancouver International Game Summit (accord­ing to NextGen Player). The motto of the con­fer­ence was “learn, net­work, inspire” and for me it lived up to this promise. It started very casual with a keynote inter­view with Don Mattrick, who is a leg­end among Canadian devel­op­ers and has been in this indus­try from its early begin­nings (evi­denced by some excel­lent past/geekhood pic­tures in a video intro­duc­ing his career).

Next ses­sion I ended up in was the “Army of Two” post­mortem by Reid Schneider of EA Montréal, who talked about pro­duc­tion stuff, but more impor­tantly about the met­rics log­ging sys­tem that Electronic Arts uses, which is inte­grated in a debug­ging tech­nol­ogy called JUICE. Looked some­what sim­i­lar to Microsoft’s TRUE sys­tem, but less sophis­ti­cated. He showed some heatmaps (death maps) of their test lev­els and talked about the data that are used to check lev­els, appar­ently con­sist­ing of events like player death, player wounded, player uncon­scious, part­ner AI death, part­ner AI wounded, part­ner AI uncon­scious, NPC death, player death, game over, etc. — Reminded me of the stuff I did for one of my papers (Log who’s play­ing). Anyway, was very excited to see game met­rics log­ging in action at EA.

Next, I should have gone to Clive Chandler’s Emotion talk, but instead went one floor up to check on fel­low aca­d­e­mics pre­sent­ing at the par­al­lel Future Play event. Had a sneak peak into Doris Rusch’s work­shop on Making Deep Games, where she talked among other things about love in games. Somewhat artsy for me, but very inter­est­ing nonethe­less. Had to leave early to set up stuff for my own talk at GDC Canada titled Next Generation Testing: Biometric Analysis of Player Experience. I had a very nice audi­ence with good ques­tions at the end. See the slides below:

Next Generation Testing: Biometric Analysis of Player Experience

Next up was an inter­est­ing talk about what game devel­op­ers can learn from the German car mas­ters at BMW. Just had to see that one. Started fairly slow, but was full of metaphors and com­par­isons and ulti­mately a very valu­able talk from Otto Ottosson of Threewave. It even fea­tured game met­rics and heatmaps from their test­ing sys­tem (fre­quent and early test­ing is appar­ently some­thing you can learn from BMW). Seems like every com­pany is doing some sort of level met­rics for game test­ing now! Awesome! Great way to end the first day of GDC Canada sessions.

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