GDC's Jamil Moledina 

In Part I of our two-part Q&A with Game Developers Conference executive director Jamil Moledina, we discussed what makes GDC tick; whether the lines were blurring between core games and casual games; and whether both the short session games market on consoles and the indie game phenomenon on PCs are fixtures or fads. In today's second and final portion of our interview, Moledina talks about whether it's legitimate to compare the PC and console markets; why game industry scold Jack Thompson won't be speaking at this year's conference; and what lessons should be learned from the Fox News/Mass Effect debacle. Enjoy.

Speaking of pessimism, you know, towards the end of the year it seemed like there were a number of flagship shooters on the PC that were not performing as well as people had expected. Unreal Tournament III, in particular doesn't seem to be selling as strongly as it has in the past. I think Crysis seems to be underperforming. Orange Box, I think did solid to strong numbers. You have Call of Duty 4 which actually did pretty decently on PC but those numbers were significantly less than it did on PS3, which was in turn, insignificantly less than what it sold on the Xbox 360. And this was a franchise that began on the PC. Shooters were the Jerry Bruckheimer summer movies of the PC, but the energy around them seems to be increasingly moving over to the console. Are you seeing the effects of that in the development community? Where should we expect to see the PC going? Are we pretty much going to be seeing free ad supported games, MMOs and RTS games on the PC while the rest of the flagship stuff moves over to the console?

Well, one season is perhaps not necessarily the best gauge for the long term viability of a particular style of play. It's the same season--correct me if I'm wrong--that Halo 3 came out in, right?

Uh-huh.

So that was something that certainly did some numbers that brought up the first-person prospective shooter genre. The interesting thing though that you bring up is the difference between PC and console. And I think it's hard to compare the two largely because the PC is constantly in flux. Everyone has a different PC. There isn't standardization as there is with console. And more and more you're seeing people find pros and cons to that. The pro with the standard platform, of course, being that the game will always work. But at the same time it may require an initialization process. There's still perhaps some time that goes into it. Whereas on the PC side, you have a much lower threshold for initially creating the game. So there's a greater diversity. You may see more unique or interesting types of titles. And so they don't necessarily need to do the same numbers as you see on the console.

Once you start comparing number of PC sales to numbers of console sales, I'm not sure you'd get a reliable trend out of that. The thing that we're really excited about PC though is that it has this kind of capability like I was talking about with indie games to create really off the wall types of titles. People have the ability to express themselves in a wider variety of ways. So by doing that and by setting lower targets in terms of what they ultimately hope to sell or have available by download, people still are making a living and doing so quite successfully.

I'm not sure it's that easy, but I'm not sure that I have a way to help parse it. Although it's something that I think is worth having an ongoing conversation about. There are a couple of PC developers that I know that we talk generally with about this idea, but you should definitely meet them and figure out how they're able to stay very comfortable and very satisfied and very creative.

Are there any sessions that are going to speak to this need? Because again, as I suggested, shooters were at one point--and still are, even on PC--the equivalent of the summer blockbuster.

Yeah.

But looking at Infinity Ward and Call of Duty 4, one could argue that the console SKUs were the lead platforms. I mean there were two of them to one on the PC. Orange Box was also on console. So I'm wondering whether there are any sort of panels that deal with the challenges that are facing traditional PC developers who, if for no other reason than potential revenue, are having to develop simultaneously on a console because the market does not appear to be as healthy as it was in years past?

I'm not sure if there is. I'm going to have to take a look at the schedule overall. But there are a couple of people you should definitely talk to about this. One is Ken Levine who is doing a writing talk on BioShock, and he has a lot of ideas on this topic. And another person--not to get into kind of sales-y mode too much--is Todd Hollenshead who runs id software as well as Mike Capps over at Epic. One of the things that developers definitely face the challenge of is adapting to multiple platforms at the same time. This is a growing need: the investment required for a modern game requires it to be released on a couple of different platforms in order to see the return. So there's a lot of tools that help adapt games to multiple platforms depending on which one that you start with. There's definitely people that are talking about that at GDC, but I don't know for sure which sessions those would be. I would have to get back to you on that. But, hey, BioShock was a great first-person Shooter game that came out in this frame.

I don't know if this is your place make these kinds of assessments, but there are a number of people who were suggesting that last year was one of the best, if not the best years in video game history, from a quality standpoint.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that something that you're hearing from your advisory board, the developers you're talking to?

Absolutely.

And how does that impact what happens at the show?

Well, I definitely get that from our advisory board and also from the Choice Awards Committee. That was a huge resounding conclusion: "Wow, these are all really, really great games." And the effect on GDC is that we have a lot of great examples to discuss and inspire the next generation of developers. Everyone is submitting on AAA titles. There's so many wonderful challenges that people have overcome: the challenges like of the uncanny valley; or compelling, perfectly tweaked multiplayer; or creating writing that makes you actually care about what's going on.

I only put in maybe 20 minutes or 30 minutes on any given game on its first run. And I found myself an hour and a half into BioShock not even noticing the time had gone by. There's a lot of great compelling breakthroughs that have happened in games this year. And it's something that gives us a lot more content to talk about because inevitably, it comes to, well, how did they do that? What were the challenges? What did they try that didn't work to get there? That's highly instructive, and that's kind of the core of our show.

When we spoke last year before the show, I expressed some concern about the prior year's keynotes--

Okay.

--my feeling that they had been too PR-y, with not enough substance.

Uh-huh.

There are always multiple masters that are trying to be served at these events, but it seemed like Sony's press conference--with both Home and in particular LittleBigPlanet--had the right mix. It obviously achieved some corporate objectives for Sony in terms of generating excited about the platform but it also seemed to get developers excited and inspired about possible directions in games, user created content and things like that. And then there were a lot of people that seemed very inspired by what Miyamoto had to say about how he approaches game design; the different audiences he thinks about; and the whole thing about trying to elicit smiling faces from players. So after the conference when you look back at your keynotes for '07, what was your takeaway and what are you trying to achieve with this year's keynotes?

Well, I was really pleased that they hit the mark in terms of the goals that we have set out. GDC keynotes are actually mutually developed editorial sessions, so we're working with the keynote speaker to develop the talk, as it were. So there's a lot of collaboration in the process. The great thing--let's take them one by one.

I can't say too much about exactly what happened, but for the Sony keynote I had the opportunity to play LittleBigPlanet in October of the previous year [2006] and it was by far the most fun game I played for that entire year. Knowing this was coming and getting a sense for how it was created, there's a lot that is still actually not particularly well known about the game that is just about incredible. A lot of the external part of the game is user generated content, but a lot of the tools used to create the game are able to create assets with almost instantaneous results. They've got something going on the back end that is just absolutely insane.

So this was something that we talked to Sony about and said, "You know what, this is something that is actually one of those breakthrough examples that illustrates ideas about development at the same time that it showcases what you want to talk about." In much the same way that when Will Wright revealed Spore, it was through the framework of talking about procedural animation and procedural game design. So this is something that we worked with Sony and Phil [Harrison, head of Playstation's worldwide studios] on, and they absolutely got it. We were just kind of riffing off each other and it just resulted in a very strong keynote.

A similar thing happened with Miyamoto-san [Nintendo design chief Shigeru Miyamoto]. He was very curious about what we were looking for in a keynote. We gave him some ideas said, "Well, there's a lot of things that I'm sure go on in terms of your process of going back and forth. What are your inspirations? Where do your prototypes go? What ideas did you work on that never saw the light of day? How long have you been working in your mind on something like the Wii? What are its earliest ancestors, if you will?"

Through that process we were able to get a very inspirational and retrospective keynote that was very strong and performed extremely well in terms of our attendee feedback. With that in mind, this year's keynotes are also mutually developed editorial sessions. So we have some confidence that they should hit the same types of notes that we've been hitting recently.

So can you give a little insight at all into what we should expect to see?

I'm afraid I can't go into much detail at all on that. We haven't heard from Microsoft in terms of a large strategic vision on the GDC stage for some time. And it would be, I think, perhaps not the right order of things if I were to let on at all. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to show up. [Laughs.]

And the other keynote?

The Ray Kurzweil keynote?

Yeah.

That would be more on the kind of inspirational side of things. This is a guy that has been working and inventing: AI: human computer interface; inventing new technologies for people to do the things they want to do in the real world. He's someone that exemplifies the vision track that we introduced a couple of years back. Because it's all well and good to have a lot of detailed sessions about the games you're working on now and maybe in the next two or three years as well, but we find that it is also highly influential for people to consider what might be the possibilities five, ten, twenty years out from now. What are the tools that people will have? What will people be like at that stage?

Ray is one of those guys that seems to be able to kind of get there before any of us can. He's someone that has been a fairly consistent top request by our attendees for a keynote and by our advisory board for a keynote. The planets aligned this year and we were able to develop something that fit both of our interests.

How was GDC Prime received, and is that coming back this year as well?

Yes. GDC Prime was actually very well received by the people that attended. We didn't get the numbers we were hoping for. The idea was to replicate the GDC advisory board meeting, in which you have a lot of luminaries sitting around with a common frame of reference; working out exactly what issues they're dealing with; and being able to work with colleagues that they wouldn't otherwise have access to or the comfort to really be that open with. So we are actually working on bringing back GDC Prime, but it won't be--one thing that we learned is that it probably shouldn't be physically attached to GDC. So we actually had two GDC Prime events in 2007, one that was actually at GDC, and one that was a stand alone event in San Diego in early December. So we are looking at bringing that back. We found it to be incredibly successful for the people that attended and also in terms of brainstorming ideas for GDC moving forward.

There was some confusion surrounding the possibility of Jack Thompson being a speaker or keynoter, but I understand that's not happening. What happened there?

The best that I'm able to piece together is that one of our advisory board members had a conversation with, or had dinner with some people that were working with Mr. Thompson and had brainstormed some ideas. As far as I can tell, no explicit invitation was extended. We certainly didn't officially extend an invitation, so I think a lot was made of a situation that was non-existent. And while we do have 400 sessions to play with, it's remarkable how hard it is to say no to people. The industry itself has grown so much and we're folding in new content about startups, about, vision tracks that are looking slightly forward. It takes all of our energy and inventory just to cover what we need to cover and then add in all of the new trends. We often don't have an inventory for a lot of the things that we would love to include. So there wasn't really much option there in any regard.

Is that something that you think the industry would benefit from, or do you think that his perspective is pretty well understood at this point?

I think it's useful to have a dialogue about things that are challenging to the industry overall. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that at all. GDC is built to be a fairly neutral forum for the discussion of ideas about creating games. There are a lot of discussions on that. There are several roundtables that exist at GDC where people are free to talk about the ideas that matter to them. And the business and management track certainly deals with issues of publicity and public acceptance and perception.

We've actually created a new award in the Choice Awards called the Ambassador Award for the person who best represents the game industry--either internally or externally--in a positive light. So I think more and more we're going to have to recognize that we exist in a context. As games become more and more a part of popular culture,it's important for us to have a very deliberate and insightful dialogue. I think there are a lot of people out there that have the ability to kind of translate what games are and represent them to a national audience like we saw Geoff [Keighley, videogame journalist and TV host] do on Fox News the other night.

What did you think of that?

I thought it was odd that there would be someone that would critique an art form or work of art without actually having experienced it. So that probably backed her into a corner that was difficult to get out of, but it was really commendable that she acknowledged that. I thought it was great that Geoff was able to stand up for the game, which is actually a great game. I would say that it's an example of what games can ultimately do, in terms of creating a compelling narrative that is fun and that matches quite well to some of our greatest science fiction epics in film and in books. So I think that was a great example to kind of get wrong publicly [laughs], because it brought a great game to light.

The other thing that I was very encouraged by was [Electronic Arts' vice president for corporate communications] Jeff Brown's response as well. Usually, a lot of people in the game industry simply have a more defensive posture on this which is to say that, "Well, the ESRB is the body that governs the rating of games, and this is available to everyone to see what the level of content is." It's a fairly neutral and I think defensive position, because it doesn't actually speak to the merits of a particular game. And what Jeff did was he said, "Well, this is actually a great game. This is something that has consequences. You don't get to do anything without actually having worked through a particular relationship with a particular character, and this is actually far milder than most of the television content on your network anyway." When you do compare games to what happens in the world, in the news in terms of what our politicians are up to--frankly, I would rather have our nation's kids playing games.

The thing that I think we need to do as an entertainment form is to get our creators more into the spotlight. I had mentioned before that the GDC is a neutral forum. Well, this is one area where we try to put our thumb on the scale a little bit and put the individual creators on stage. Naturally, that's part of the conference and learning process where you have the creator of, let's say, Halo's multiplayer capability on stage talking about it. So individuals get some degree of notoriety. Kim Swift, for the design of Portal, for example. But we don't do enough of that. Our awards show happens to be the only one that awards individuals onstage. Individuals win awards, not games. We can only do so much from our point of view. It's wonderful to see more and more of shows on G4 have developers on; see more interviews with developers on blogs such as yours. The challenge is to get more of the creators up in front of an audience. And it was so wonderful to see people like Will Wright and Ian Bogost on "The Colbert Report."

Having more of these types of opportunities I think will help our industry. And the trick of it is that with film, you know, the actors are very visibly on screen. Obviously, they are the ones that get a lot of publicity from that. Whereas with a game you're creating a mascot, so everyone is behind the scenes when it comes to games. That makes it a little trickier to kind of get the word out about individuals. But I think it probably starts with us recognizing individuals. Granted, I mean I think we all have a slight aversion--or a high degree of modesty, I should say--when it comes to accepting praise for doing certain things. We always say, "Well, it's really about the team. A lot of these things wouldn't happen without the team." And that's true. You can't run a $20 million product alone. No one person can be solely responsible for the success or the quality of that product. But I think there's an opportunity here to say, "Thank you--and it was a team effort."

Jamil, thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Oh, my pleasure.

For Part I of our Q&A with Moledina, click here.