MIGS Day One

Today I experienced Montreal's International Game Summit for the first time. The overall experience had my brain working a lot, which had the effect to make me want to share thoughts. This whole process led me to my not active enough blog.

This post will follow this very basic structure. I will start with a small outline about the MIGS. I will then procede to relate the different events I attended during the day. Finally, I will give a general appreciation for day one of the event.

So what is the MIGS exactly?

The acronym MIGS stands for Montreal International Game Summit which is a direct translation from Sommet International du Jeu de Montréal. My guess is that the event's official name is probably the french one, as Montreal is a french-speaking crowd in majority. The event itself is obviously held in English to allow a maximum number of participants.

The MIGS is basically what its name tells us, an international game summit. It is an event where different people from the gaming industry can meet to make contacts, share ideas and attend professional conferences or other social events. The event is open to students and people working in the gaming industry.

The event is being held at the Hilton Bonaventure hotel in Montreal. Conferences are divided into five main categories, being Arts and VFX, Business, Design, Production and Technology. There is always one conference of each category during the same time period, so I was obviously not able to attend everything. As a software engineering student I tend to favor technology conferences, but I did not limit myself to only those.

More information can be found on the event's official website:
http://www.sijm.ca/2010/?language=fr

General environment

I arrived at the summit at around 9:30. This gave me enough time to get my registration, leave my stuff at the coat check, and briefly look around the waiting room hosting stands from various companies, schools etc.

Afterwards I met with other people from Polytechnique and we headed to the main room for the opening conference.

Beauty, constraint and the Atari 2600
Ed Fries, Former vice-president, Microsoft Game Studios

Alright so Ed Fries is the big guest for Monday and he's going to talk to us about the Atari 2600. Because this is the opening conference, there is no other conference at the same time. This means that everybody does not really have a choice and is going to attend this one. I have to say that at first I was not very excited with the idea of a conference on the Atari 2600. I am not really an old machine lover, nor a low-level code lover.

I have to say that I was really wrong, and that this was actually a very good keynote. The talk was divided into three main features, being old Greek vases, the making of Halo 2600 and beauty in games. (Halo 2600 is a Halo like game running on the Atari 2600 and made by Ed Fries.)

The general idea of this keynote was that humans need to give themselves constraints in art. It has been witnessed in almost any art form that at first there are some constraints, for example ink colors or memory quantity. Humans then had the tendency to try to develop new technology to be free of those constraints to be able to make what they want.

However, constraints have the effect of making people want to achieve more, and this is what can be shown with the Atari 2600. The system had so much limited hardware that programmers had to create really intense optimizations to create their games, which resulted in a form of artistic code and impressive result.

This lead Ed Fries to the hypothesis that constraints actually give more power to art. This can be easily illustrated with the fact that people are usually more impressed by an art product developed under some constraints, like a sonnet or an origami figure made from a single sheet of paper.

The gaming industry had a very impressive evolution over the past years, and we could say that it is now free from most constraints. This leads us to several game projects putting themselves under constrained development, like creating a game with only three colors.

I think this was a very interesting hypothesis, and I have to admit that it seems true. People need some constraints as a motivator to create better products. Now that the game industry is mature enough, it is able to choose its own constraints.

Collective Artificial Intelligence for Next Generation Gameplay

Jeff Orkin, PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab
Artificial intelligence being my field of study as a grad school student, I felt this conference was mandatory for me.

The conference was based on ideas very similar to my research project. In the past decades, video games were the subject of very impressive growth when it came to graphics and visuals, but progress with artificial intelligence were very limited. The goal of this conference was to propose a structure for AI progress in video games.

In graphics, the basic elements that make up what we see on the screen are triangles and textures. Over the years, better hardware and software led to better computation power, which led to better graphics. 

But what is the basic element in artificial intelligence?

The problem with artificial intelligence is not about more power in the CPU or GPU, it's about content. Artificial intelligence systems need to know what the human mind knows, what we use to decide what we are going to do.

The structure proposed in this conference was a collective AI framework, where data was accumulated from users interacting in a given environment (in this case a restaurant). The goal was then to structure all this data to be able to infer intelligent agent action.

I realize that the whole idea in this conference can be summed up quite easily. This does not make it that simple though. The solution itself is a lot of work, and for this structure to actually make its way to video game production, companies would need to share a lot more than they are currently doing, which I am not sure will happen in the near future.

The Art of the Sell : Pitching Your Ideas
Chris Ferriera, Creative Director, Artificial Mind & Movement
Based on the title, this conference seems to be about marketing. That is not exactly the case. This conference was about selling your ideas to other people in your team or your video game studio, in the context of game design. A topic that could be very useful for me in the future.

It turned out that this conference was a bit disappointing. The ideas that were covered were good and made a lot of sense, but the conference was over after about 30 minutes. This felt as though the topic lacked content, for a talk that was supposed to go on for an hour.

Overall, the basic idea is to take the time to think about your idea and share it with friends before trying to convince people that it is a good idea. You should never oppose people directly, and try to make other people make the idea their own, by allowing them to add their ideas to your idea instead of forcing your way of thinking into them.

Leaderboards Can Suck It: 7 Better Ideas for Visualizing Player Data for Fun and Profit

Todd Northcutt, General Manager, GameSpy Technology
This was one of the conferences that I really wanted to attend. The title is bold and does not fear to expose leaderboards as what they really are. I mean, anyone who played a game with a leaderboard can relate to this. You get to see the overall ranking of people, and notice that you are waaaaaay down the ranks.

The basic idea of this conference is that if you want to gather data on your players, you should put some real effort into it, instead of just taking a global score, generating a sorted list and putting it under a "Leaderboard" menu in your game. It then proceeds to give general guidelines about what to do with leaderboards.

The first problem is that most of the time, you cannot even see your ranking in the leaderboard. The list only covers the top players, and most people are not top players. This means that most players do not know their ranking, and that's not fun. It is also better if you can get data about more that a global score. People like to see what they are good at. 

Another problem is that with leaderboards, you get compared with every single person that played the game. But most people do not care that the best player is someone they will never meet in their whole life. People like competition, and they will try to compete with their friends. Thus, it is better to show only the leaderboard rankings of the each player's friends.

Finally, the general objective of leaderboards is to make people want to play the game more in order to get better at it. And people don't like to be told that they suck. Nobody gets motivated knowing that their rank is 3938199 in the leaderboard. However, they like to be told that they are above average. The player's rank is the same, but in one case, the game is actually telling the player that he's doing well.

There are probably a lot of other good ways to improve leaderboards that are still not explored and will be discovered in the future. This conference still pointed a lot of errors that I know I have seen in recent games. 

This was a very interesting conference, and I am happy that Gamespy is trying to push game developers to host better leaderboard structures.

Designing a Future-Proof Multi-Core Games Engine

Andrew Richards, Founder and CEO, Codeplay Software

This was the very technical conference of the day for me. How should we make a video game engine that can easily adapt to parallelism and future development?

The first half of the conference was actually not about multi cores and parallelism at all. Well, it was about multi cores, but not in the way that you would normally expect. It was about the memory limitations that come with using several cores. 

Using several cores intuitively seems like a very good idea to get better results. You use more that one core, so you can do more stuff at the same time, and you get your game to run quicker.

Simple? Actually, it isn't.

Video games, and in fact any computer program is not solely about the processing unit executing instructions. It's also about data, which is stored in memory. And what happens when several cores try to access the memory at the same time is that "the memory controller dies". 

The most used solution is to use caches with each core in addition to the main memory module. While this allows to limit the memory access, it can lead to very serious synchronization problems when several cores need to access the same data, as they do not use the same cache.

Codeplay proposed what seemed like a very good programming solution to this problem using C++ template meta-programming. While I was able to follow the basic ideas during the conference, I honestly don't remember enough to explain here. But it seemed like a very good solution.

Apart from resolving the memory sharing problem, the conference approached several problems that could occur when using several cores, and ways to optimize speed and parallelism using SIMD instructions.

A very technical conference, but a very interesting one for technical people. And the guy from Codeplay Software seemed to really know what he was talking about.

The Technical Challenges of Developing MMOGs

Rui Manuel Casais, Chief Technological Officer, Funcom

Finally, the last conference of the day was hosted by Funcom, and was about the technical challenges with Massively Multiplayer Games.

MMOGs deal with very particular problems because of the very large number of people that these games need to host. Funcom thinks that in the future, all games will be massively online, and that the industry needs to be ready for it.

The conference went thought a list of challenges that occur most of the time when dealing with MMOG, and proposed several tips to try to counter them. These were divided into social, security and fun categories.

The most important idea about social is that you should provide the best platform possible in order to allow people to play with their friends. Even if the game is not the best game that was ever done, people will continue to play it if they can play with their friends. However, as soon as some people stop playing, others will follow because they cannot play with their friends anymore.

Ubiquity means that the game should be everywhere. You should be able to play from any device, be it PC, console, phone, web browser. Security means that the game server should always be on, and that people should not get any of their data stolen through the game.

Fun basically means that people should have fun. This is a very simple concept, but it is probably the hardest to achieve.

I think that the problems that were featured in this presentation were quite real and accurate, and that the tips provided were actually pretty good. I unfortunately could not memorize them all, but this conference was actually better than I expected.

General Appreciation

Apart from the conferences, I had time to go around the waiting room and talk to several game studios. I discovered new game studios and I talked a bit with people that I already knew. This is not really new for me but it is always good to know people in the gaming industry.

We had a free lunch around noon. It was a basic lunch with a sandwich, a bit of vegetables, a dessert and apple juice. This was good, but I was disappointed by having to eat on the floor in some random hallway in the hotel. There were a lot of attendees, and it was really chaotic to have all of these people eating all over the place.

There were coffee breaks during the conferences and I had a coffee before the Codeplay conference. I am not sure what happened to the coffee during the day but it felt as though it had been mixed with water. That's not the best coffee I had in my life. :\

Closing Comments

Overall, I can say that I had a very great day at MIGS 2010. The conferences were really interesting, I learned a lot a new stuff, and it always feels good to have direct contacts with people from the gaming industry. 

The organization was pretty good, apart from the lunch lacking tables for people to eat, and the bad tasting coffee.
I left this first day with a lot of motivation. I feel like I should go on with my research and get good results. I also feel like I should go forward with my idea of making an Xbox Live Indie game. I also feel like I should spend more time reading software engineering books. I should be getting on with this by the end of the week.

I think this is a great event. I should have gone last year, and I would really like to attend each year from now on.