GDC 2008 Post-mortem

GDC 2008 has just finished. I enjoyed it all immensely. The Worlds In Motion Summit sessions were generally packed out. Judging by the event, virtual worlds have arrived in the heartland of the games industry. But what does this mean and is the games industry ready for the changes in mindset?

Raph Koster made two terrific presentations. The second one was a post-mortem on Metaplace to date. I was very pleased that VastPark stacked up very well against Metaplace. Feature for feature we're both terrifically similar and fundamentally compatible. We've both favored LUA, REST, XML (where it counts) and a web-like framework. Although there's obviously much work yet to do on productization and solving playability issues in more physics intensive worlds, Raph and his team have created a very consumer friendly product that is lightweight and lends itself to becoming a standard interactive web stack. On the other hand, it wasn't clear that they had elegantly solved the complex problems of automated distributed content delivery and copyright when enabling users to remix high quality 3D assets into their virtual worlds. The issues of distributed content delivery and copyright are critical to enabling professionals to release their libraries of content into the system so the content can be used and monetised. That's a big part of what we've sought to solve with VastPark (and particularly with our MetaWSS specification). We think that solving these content issues have much wider application across media syndication and delivery because it works for new media formats but it also works for any digital file, no matter what the format.

It seemed obvious to many in the crowd that if we are to use game technology to grow a web, we need to get rid of proprietary system stacks. IMHO, the fact that game technology has generally been proprietary has significantly hindered the growth of the ecosystem built on game technology.

What I took away from the post-mortem was that everyone on this "game tech as a web" crusade are headed away from the traditional games industry's mindset towards an open standards thinking mindset. An irony is that if the games industry doesn't do it, others will.

Until now the game industry has had a game-centric ecosystem, but now a whole host of new industries want to reach in and help themselves to the communication, presentation and real time feedback possibilities inherently available in game technology. Many people feel that game tech can be used for other things: training, teaching, group communication, real time workplaces, general entertainment and casual immersive experiences. Get ready to game more.