Screenplay is the UK's only independent games festival and is held just down the road from me in Nottingham. I went along to explore all the weird and wonderful nooks and cranies that Screenplay is always stuffed with and to talk about some of the weird and wonderful things in Second Life.
The first session I made it to on Saturday was an interview with Matt Smith complete with run throughs of his classics Manic Minor and Jet Set Willy on the big screen. They were 2 of the first games I played and I remember them being rock hard as a kid, so it was amazing to see the levels I’d struggled with for hours raced through in seconds. The interview got of to a slow start with Matt struggling to find his words, but he soon got in to his stride and told his story from learning to code in Tandy to writing best selling games on the Spectrum. It was the classic lone coder makes good story which continues to inspire, but is rarely heard in these days of huge teams and budgets, except maybe in SL.
Next up was an enjoyable session exploring the bonkers excess of modern shmups, which left me wanting to fill entire screens with explosions. Then Ricard Gras presented a selection of machinima - films shot inside game worlds. The selection included the hilarious first episode of Red Vs Blue, in which Simmons and Grif talk about their purpose in Blood Gulch, a look in to the job satisfaction of Vice City pimps and Bloody Mary. Later in the festival Richard gave a machinima how-to, discussed p2p networks as ideal distribution channels and also talked about the copyright uncertainty surrounding machinima. His productions are made using Vice City and it is unclear whether Rock Star will one day stop him distributing his work. This provided the ideal opportunity to point out that Bloody Mary has no such problems because it was shot in SL, Linden grants IP ownership to residents and it uses a Creative Commons licensed soundtrack. Everyone wanted to hear more about SL, so I invited them to my presentation the next day.
After a frantic morning actually throwing some slides together for my talk, the first presentation I made it to on Sunday was the end of David Hayward’s talk about moding. 2 things which came up in the discussion afterwards is it’s very difficult to make mods more than FPSs with different graphics and that it’s difficult to keep a big team together to make an ambitious mod. Similar issues were raised at Screenplay 2004 where there was also a lot of talk about how hard it is to develop and distribute original games. At the time I argued that web distribution was the way to go. This year I decided to go a step further and present SL as “A Sandbox for Game Design Experiments”.
As most people hadn’t heard about Second Life, I introduced it as a user built world in which people socialize, explore, play, learn and create before emphasizing SL’s strengths as a platform for independent game development: there is always someone around in the sandboxes to help out or collaboratively create with; while you’re building the community can provide continuous feedback and once you’ve finished SL provides an automatic distribution channel and ownership of your work. The talk was well attended and went down really well. Since then Cory has echoed a lot of my sentiments in his call to arms response to the GDC “Burning down the House” session.
Next up was a presentation by my friend Martin Flintham from the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University where I did my PhD research. He talked about the Mixed Reality games that the lab has been working on with Blast Theory. The games can be played either using a web interface, or by moving around the real world location which mirrors the virtual world. "Can You See Me Now?" had the web players being chased by runners in the real world while "Uncle Roy All Around You" puts members of the public on the streets. Since I left the lab, they have run the games in cities all around the world and are looking at ways to make the game scale economically. Since Screenplay, Matt, Ju and Nick from Blast Theory have also won the IGDA Maverick award, very cool.
After the presentations, everyone moved to the bar for the traditional Difficult Questions About Videogames quiz and music. Martin and a few others asked me about SL, so I got a ticket for the WiFi network, got out the laptop and gave them a tour. I started taking requests and so we went to Spitoonie when someone asked to see a theme park, played some Tringo to show off an SL game and then ended up clubbing while listening to Little Boy Blue playing his Gameboy generated music in RL. It was a very cool way to end the festival and Martin commented that navigating the metaverse wirelessly in a bar while listening to techno felt like the future.
After diving out for a curry there was just enough time for a game of pavement pong before heading home. Chris Evans was inspired by people stumbling around drunk and the game was certainly fun played in an advanced state of refreshment. The game tracks players running up and down a projected pong game to move the paddles. It works best tracking white shoes or socks, items which were in short supply amongst the cool Screenplay art festival crowd, but it was possible to make up for a lack of white with an excess of movement, which made it even more fun. I found that MC Hammer running man moves were particularly effective; I knew they would come in handy again.
So, Screenplay was a lot of fun. The machinima session, my presentation and the demo in the bar gave SL lots of coverage and generated a lot of interest. A number of people I met at Screenplay are now SL residents and one is talking to Foxy Xevious about an exciting new project in SL. Hopefully we’ll see lots of exciting new developments in the months to come.
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