Well, I survived GDC, and we wrote unholy tons of great talk coverage from smart, exciting developers! I was on the One Life Left radio show with famous people one night!! I did a lot of work, but some of my fave experiences real quick: This Alone in the Dark postmortem, a touching talk from Double Fine’s Nathan Martz on lessons in Once Upon A Monster‘s design, and the always-brilliant Richard Lemarchand on why designers should think more about the science of attention than about the unhelpfully-vague “immersion” concept.
We all want so much from games that it’s sometimes easy to get frustrated, or misdirected (a recent Edge column I wrote about my frustration with the “games as storytelling medium” conversation is online today). But GDC always revitalizes my enthusiasm for games, the people that make them and the ideas that some of our best minds are always brewing. Incidentally, I weighed in pretty extensively on the “storytelling medium” thing in last month’s “Ask Gamasutra” feature.
I returned back to New York from San Francisco with a terrible fever that took me out of commission for nearly a week, and I’m scrambling to get back to life now. Speaking of revitalizing my enthusiasm, play Journey. Play Journey. There is nothing in the world for me like games made by people who want to create and who are doing it because they care. If you don’t have a PS3, sell a relative’s organs and buy one (or borrow one from someone, at least).