This week saw the Develop Conference's annual descent on the British seaside, as hundreds of game developers - along with a few of us pesky press types - arrived in Brighton for a wide variety of talks.  The wind was strong, and the rain came as frequently as the crippling bouts of burning sunshine, but it seems a splendid time was had by all.

It certainly was by FACEOFFGAMES, anyway, despite the terrible lack of sleep that plagued us all  week.  Work hard, play hard - that's the motto, right?

All Points Covered

Realtime Worlds' David Jones opened the conference with a packed-out keynote speech on his history in game development, his current projects and the future of the medium. “I think that, going forward, multiplayer is really where gaming’s at,” he said. “Players come for the single-player experience and invest 20 to 30 hours into it, but really they spend ten times that online.”

The ways in which we consume and pay for games was a hot issue this year, but Jones noted that many of the touted ‘new’ methods are in fact old ones.  He referred to coin-op payments as “micro transactions” and a three-minute game of Pacman as an example of a “subscription service.”

The star of Jones’ talk was upcoming persistent-world, online action game (“It isn’t an MMO!” Jones assertively assured us), APB.  Much of the footage had been previously showcased at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference, but it remains as remarkable as before. Demonstrating the game’s extensive character customisation tools, Jones discussed the idea of celebrity in online gaming, stating his desire for “people to be instantly recognisable, and be able to make themselves famous to other players in the game.”

The footage cut to a group of men on a drive-by shooting, and a police car storming in from a distance.  No characters in APB are AI-controlled, and players are dispatched based on a complex matchmaking system that strives to keep the game balanced at all times.  “The system can bring you in temporarily,” explained Jones. “It morphs seamlessly from being a single-player game, into 50 versus 50, and then dies back down again.”

Developing Digitally

The move towards online distribution was one of the hot topics of the conference.  It’s one Jones wasn’t too sure about (“If it happens, we just have to be ready to deal with it. But it's not something we'd design a product around.”), but others were more certain about its role in the future of the PC games market.

In a panel chaired by IGN’s Justin Keeling, a number of industry figures talked out the advantages of digital distribution as a delivery platform, and the role it is already playing in boosting the previously declining PC sales figures.  Dorian Bloch of ChartTrack pointed to research that showed a 15 per cent decline in retail sales for the PC since 2006, but noted that one of last year’s biggest trends in gaming was a move towards digital distribution.  His prediction for the coming year?  A twofold increase in leading digital distributors’ profits.

Charlie Barrett concurred that digital distribution is the way forward - indeed, for his company Kalypso Media Digital, it’s already well on its way. Though understandably reluctant to reveal exact figures, he assured the audience that Kalypso’s digital sales had risen by “a lot more than 15 per cent.”

This sort of stat-heavy, research-based industry analysis made up roughly two thirds of the conference schedule. The other third was about as far away as possible.  It’s an old topic, one that many feel has been done to death, but the amount of people still keen to talk about it in such death means it’s probably still relevant.

We refer, of course, to the A-word.

Film Studies

“To me, it’s quite obvious,” stated Silicon Knights’ Denis Dyack. “I think videogames are art.”

Dyack spoke in incredible detail about why games should be considered the eighth art form, riffing off Ricciotto Canudo’s early film theory work, in which he described the medium as “the seventh art.”

He pointed to various other accepted art forms that were treated suspiciously in their early years, including poetry.  “Games are attacked and monitored by the right,” he said, “as poetry was.”  But despite the thoroughness and clear level of intellect on display, we couldn’t help but be confused by a few of Dyack’s comments.

The future of games, Dyack said, is in their non-linear potential and inherent interactivity - as opposed to films, where, in his words, “if you videotape Star Wars, you get the same thing.”  But Dyack went on to state that such interactivity isn’t the only thing worth examining. “The future is not in gameplay,” he said.

Maintaining the film analogy, he continued, “in film, the awe of technology went away. It went through a cycle from spectacle to narrative. The same is happening with games. People are starting to care a lot more about story.”

Indeed, Dyack seemed curiously pre-occupied with film throughout, citing it as a medium games could learn a lot from in conveying emotions through, for example, the use of camera shots.  “Silicon Knights has always tried to speak the language of film,” he revealed.

And his approach to creating artistic games seemed surprisingly mechanical.  “I’m a big believer in research,” he defended. “We have too much of a rock star mentality, but believe me, we need some sort of methodology.”

The Winner Takes It All

Others took a different approach to the games-as-art discussion. Flower designer Jenova Chen discussed emotions, and made a plea for videogames to be “more than toys.”  And talking about Chen’s game, PaRappa The Rapper designer Masaya Matsuura spoke of how moved he was upon being introduced to it.  "It was the first time I'd had these sorts of feelings when playing a game,” he reminisced.

He made these comments in the Develop Den, which played host to some of the more informal events of the conference.  Game-based radio show One Life Left were broadcasting from the room over lunch, and the men behind the National Videogame Archive - an attempt to salvage and maintain various components of the medium’s history - explained their working.  Perhaps the most interesting of the Develop Den events was the Opinion Jam, where conference speakers and attendees were invited on stage to deliver two-minute rants pertaining to the games industry.

Stand-out talks included an amusingly self-deprecating rant about the yellow-shirted helpers - by one of the yellow-shirted helpers - and a scathing attack on moral choices in games by Gamasutra’s Mathew Kumar.  Less exemplary was a load of twaddle about the word “gameplay” being meaningless, by some idiot called Lewis Denby.  The winner of the Opinion Jam, by popular vote, was IGDA founder and former GDC organiser Ernest Adams, with a plea for game developers to employ better scriptwriters and voice actors.  The entire population of the room agreed.

Adams wasn’t the only award winner, as Develop also saw the return of the Industry Excellence Awards.  It was irrefutably Media Molecule’s night: the developers took home five separate awards for their seminal, community-driven platformer LittleBigPlanet and their continuing dedication to creative development.  Elsewhere, Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar North received awards for Best Handheld Developer and Best In-House Team respectively, while Jacqui Lyons was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award. The prestigious Grand Prix went to Codemasters.

Swept Away

So, as the ferocious wind forcefully shoves us away from the shore and on to the rainy old journey home, there’s a lot to reflect upon.  Digital distribution and games as works of art have been the big topics of the year, and it’s not difficult to see why: these innovations are at the bleeding edge  of videogame design, development and consumption.

It will be interesting to witness the directions in which the industry moves between now and the next Develop Conference.  There’s certainly been a feeling in the air all week that games are on the cusp of something brilliant, something future-minded.  So the next twelve months could be very interesting indeed.  And while we wouldn’t want to wish a year of gaming away, Develop has been so insightful, so useful and - hell - so fun, that we just can’t wait for the next one.