My rant at the 2010 Game Developers Conference was entitled Please Finish Your Game. A gentleman in the audience was nice enough to video it for me:

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At the start, we present Heather Chaplin with the Duct Tape Award for her awesome 2009 rant. She couldn't make it to the GDC this year, so she sent me a video tape acceptance speech.

My rant is about how I'm worried about the fixation on development time these days, both in the indie community, and in corporate games.

On the corporate side, I reference this article where Kojima says "There is no greater crime as a game developer [than to slip once you've announced your ship date]." I dunno, I think shipping a bad game is a greater crime, not to mention killing your employees, or a whole bunch of other things I can think of. There's the famous Miyamoto quote:

A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.

I'm much more aligned with that statement.

On the indie side, I worry about the fixation on game jams and compos, for which I feel at least partially responsible.

I also talk about Cactus in the rant, using his page with all of his zillions of games listing their development times. I want to be clear, I think Cactus is really cool and creative, and I'm insanely jealous of his productivity. But, I do worry about him and a lot of these younger indies, and if I had an orbital mind control laser, I would use it occasionally to make these guys more deeply explore some of the awesome mechanics they discover with their quick prototypes.

I use the example of Braid versus a giant pile of the Indie Game Jam games, and I think Braid has more value because it explores its mechanic to the depth the mechanic deserves. I strongly feel that game mechanics have a kind of natural depth and value, and it is our duty as developers to follow the mechanic to its logical and aesthetic extent. I hope to dive to these same levels of depth with SpyParty.

I also use Spore as an example of how it's not time-on-task that's important, it's exploring the mechanic. I think Spore failed to fully explore the mechanic of what we called editor consequence, and even though I worked on that game for six years, I would have worked on it longer if we could have made it the game it should have been. It's about depth, not time invested.

I end the talk with the following statement:

We need more depth and understanding.

We don't need more wacky ideas and shallow games shipped on time.

Links

There was not as much coverage of the rant session this year, but I did find these:

• http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/15/gdc-recently-laid-off-developers-rant-about-being-laid-off/
• http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/conferences/gdc2010/7294-Ensemble-Studio-Member-Blames-Crunch-For-Failure