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Game Developers Conference 2008 - Visual Arts
My experience at the Game Developers Conference 2008, and how the Computer Graphics Industry is going through an unprecedented creative and effervescent phase through the “new art” of video games.
By Moses Silbiger
Article - Digital Designer Magazine
The Game Developers Conference 2008 (GDC 2008) was held in the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, USA, on February 18-22, 2008. I participated in the event as a media representative for the Digital Designer magazine, which has a special interest in the Visual Arts part of the conference. The event was divided in several tracks with hundreds of lectures, including Visual Arts, Audio, Production, Game Design, Independent Games, Casual Games, Mobile Gaming, Programming, Choice Awards, and Game Career, among others. There were also more than 120 expositors from several companies related to video games, technology, interfaces and computer graphics, including an artistic drawing contest (Art Wars) using Wacom’s new Cintiq tablet. More than 16,000 people attended the event during that week. That included all kinds of professionals related to the blooming video gaming industry, from game designers, to programmers, to academics, to fans, to entrepreneurs, to investors, to professionals of various multi-disciplinary fields, and of course, to computer graphic artists.
The video game industry today has a totally different status and profile in relation to a couple of decades and even a few years ago, and a great part of this evolution is due to the technological advances made by the computer graphics industry and graphic artists. From a gradual but exponential process of evolution and popularity since the 70s to the mid 90s, a new generation of video games has been gradually emerging in the market with the rise of the 21st century. An increasing number of people today are starting to consider these video games as a being just another (new) potential tool or medium of communication, independently of their current context and content; which in various cases have been reason of many controversies regarding the negative influences of video games, such as addiction, violence, sedentary life, etc.
Like many other media and technological tools, their influence and effects have both its pros and cons. However - and surprisingly for many - video games have gradually become one of the most powerful media nowadays in terms of their actual potentials to deliver all kinds of communication, learning and information. These potentials have been gradually able to be manifested due to the quick process of evolution of video games and their integrative embrace of all previous forms of existent media - storytelling, videos, web, music, movies, arts, acting, animations, and others - added into a singular and unprecedented technological factor: Interactivity. For we now have the ability to actually interact with a mass medium of communication that could be purposefully designed to deliver all kinds messages through direct, practical and “fun” living experiences; in contrast to just experiencing a passive process of engagement and absorption which is generally provided by other forms of media.
From all the entertainment media existent today (music, movies, books, cartoons, theater, etc), the video game industry is the fastest growing and one of the most popular, pervasive and profitable segments in the already “trillion-dollar-a-year” entertainment industry. Yes, it already surpassed the movies! This expansion has been so great that some of the big brand game companies are now starting to struggle to only use the word video game for some of their upcoming ideas and products, and opting instead for using the term interactive entertainment in order to accommodate the broader role of these new video games in the emergent market. In this exponential evolution, the computer graphic industry has a pivotal role to contribute, since it is from its technological advances and the creative work of all kinds of computer graphic designers that beautiful, exquisite and immersive virtual worlds have been, and will increasingly be conceived, developed and built. In my attendance to the GDC 2008, I was very impressed to presence the amount of video game companies from US and abroad that were immediately hiring professionals in all kinds of positions, including a great deal of computer graphic designers.
One of the key lectures at the conference was presented by Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and one of the World’s best thinkers and authorities on technology. As an inventor of the flat bad scanner, OCR and voice recognition software, Kurzweil was called “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes, the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison”, and one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” by PBS. He has received honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents, and has written five books, including the best sellers The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near.
In a very surprising way, Kurzweil stated in the GDC 2008 that “in the acceleration of technological progress, there is no industry in the world matching the video game industry today.” As odd as it may seem, the field of video games is today in the leading edge of technological advances in the planet. And of course, computer graphic advances have a lot to do with it, given its strong developmental drive (and race) towards providing more and more realism to game environments and characters.
In Kurzweil’s bombastic predictions, within 20 years the “games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality”. In resonance with other lead game designers, he thinks that the use of the term “video game” is already limiting because it makes it sound like as if it is a superfluous part of life. According to him, video games have been growing and taking over more and more aspects of human relationships, learning and creativity, which can be fully exercised by the act of “play”. In terms of arts, Kurzweil (1999) predicts that “the type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand [will increasingly be] virtual-experience software, which ranges from simulations of ‘real’ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary with the physical world”; much like The Matrix series movies managed to illustrate. He also added that video games and virtual reality simulators will be the main tools used for teaching, training and learning in the next decades, as a natural evolution of what Power Point presentations, CDs and DVDs presentations, and E-learning websites are already doing nowadays. As optimistic and farfetched some of Kurzeil’s predictions on video games and technology might possibly appear at a first glance, he is definitely a thinker that should be given consideration, due to his strong credentials in the technological community and praises by respected visionaries such as Bill Gates.
But even taking aside for a moment Kurzeil’s radical predictions, video games today are already spreading their powers of influence and persuasion not only into the field of entertainment, but in the areas of education, politics, advertisement, training, simulations, stress reduction, physical exercises, psychology, personal growth and even spirituality. As this unstoppable trend goes, computer graphics has more and more of a pivotal importance and share to contribute, given the fact that video games are bringing together various multi-disciplinary fields already being explored by computer graphic artists, such as movies, cartoons, advertisement, graphic arts, training and simulation presentations, etc. As it has been a market reality since several years ago, the video game industry is one of the main causes (if not the main) that leads the frantic technological graphic advances of the computer graphic industry; from quicker and more powerful processors to more advanced video and audio boards and, most importantly, the ongoing evolution of all kinds of 3D and graphic design software, among many other technological gadgets.
So, back to the GDC 2008… That was the first time I ever went to a video game conference, and I have to confess that I was extremely impressed by what I saw, listened and experienced. The general climate of the event was of an ebullient, abundant and creative nature, where people coming form various backgrounds had a chance to learn, teach and share their knowledge, see the most advanced technological novelties, and have lots, lots of “fun”! As I said, the abundance of this market was very transparent, given the amount of cash flow and investments running through this industry nowadays. In a way I saw it as some kind of a new “dot-com” boom but now in the area of video games, this time much more grounded in reality and various kinds of market opportunities. After all, video games are being considered as nothing more, nothing less, than a new type of revolutionary media of communication, training and entertainment, aimed to people from all kinds of ages, cultures, interests and backgrounds!
More specifically in regards to computer graphics, the conference offered a series of lectures and workshops from the Visual Arts Track. In total, there were more than 45 lectures in the five days of conference, including the practical classes. Several artists and designers shared their significant experiences and know-how to the attendants, including going through the making-offs and behind the scenes of some of the most astounding graphics and special effects that were made in recent best-selling video games. Among them were the video games Halo 3, Bioshock, Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, Heavenly Sword, God of War, Starcraft II, Far Cry 2, World in Conflict, Crysis and Eve Online, among many others. The variety of subjects covered in these lectures were impressive, covering the subjects of lighting, textures, colors, fine arts, technical arts, special effects, cinematics, virtual environments, characters’ visual and emotional realism, kinematics’ animations, and various software tips, integrations and innovations. Besides that, there were also discussions about business, organizational and production issues related to the day-by-day of the computer graphic industry as related to the video games.
Here were some of the most important highlights related to those subjects:
- Lighting:
- The importance of the trade-offs to be made in regards to the ideal balance and effectiveness of technical and artistic decisions made by the artists, exploring the future of lighting in Next-Gen games.
- Presentations of Illuminate Lab’s lighting and baking technologies, from ambient occlusion to spherical harmonics.
- Textures:
- Presentation of Maxon’s Body paint 3D techniques used to create custom 3D textures in
the game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Golden Axe, and how the software could be easily
integrated into Photoshop, Maya, Softimage and/or 3D MAX workflows.
- Presentation of Substance, a new generation of texturing middleware by
Allegoritmic after ProFX, which allows artists to produce never-seen before
living environments.
- Special effects: The art and technology behind the evolution of cutting edge special effects in the acclaimed video game Bioshock, including particle lighting systems, interactive water techniques (cascading waterfalls and rippling water), and other atmospheric effects.
- Novel artistic insights, training and concepts used in the game Final Fantasy X.
- Art outsourcing’ best practices by clients and video game studios.
- From Autodesk products:
- Integration between 3D MAX and Maya, integrating high-level shading effects, including building customized shader user interfaces in those packages, as well as tips and tricks of how artists could best use them as power users.
- Autodesk HumanIK Middleware, a standalone library extracted from the Autodesk Motion Builder, making possible to create very detailed characters in real time, including visual realism, addition of inverse kinematics and real-time retargeting.
- Autodesk Mudbox package, and how it could be integrated with 3DMAX and Maya in order to provide a more efficient workflow and optimal quality results, including data transfer and optimization in the 3D MAX.
- Creation of visually convincing crowds of people in the game Assassin’s Creed, and social environments on Eve Online’s Space Stations.
- And many others…
As for the 120+ expositors, besides the presence of most famous video game studios and some of the well known software and hardware companies related to computer graphics, an exquisite new generation of interfaces and technologies were presented. Among them included: different types of camera movement’s recognition, various body and facial expression capture technologies, a couple of brain-control headsets (Neurosky and Emotiv), virtual reality LCD glasses, 3D monitors, multi-display video games, 3D joysticks and controllers, 3D scanning devices, etc.
In the end of the conference, I was quite surprised, overwhelmed and ecstatic about the amount of information shared during the whole week. I am still “digesting” and making a clear sense of the myriad of interesting information presented there, and am sure that I would have much more to say as time goes by. In the next edition of Digital Designer magazine, I will present a brief discussion about some of the computer graphics’ special effects and techniques used in a couple of video games presented in the lectures, based on the direct accounts from the artists involved in their creation and production.
As for now, I have been joyfully playing some of those new and visually exciting video games introduced at the conference (especially Bioshock and Portal), and enthusiastically looking forward to seeing a new series of novelties and surprises in the upcoming GDC 2009…
GDC 2008 photos |
About the author
Moses Silbiger has a Masters in Integral Psychology at John F. Kennedy University (JFK) in Pleasant Hill, CA, USA, with a Certification in Life Coaching, working towards the integration of Psychology, coaching, technology and graphic design into a cross-disciplinary and broader professional framework.
He also has a bachelor degree in Architecture and a strong background in computer graphics, 3D architectural visualizations and graphic design, for more than 17 years. His passion for video games started in the early 80s, moving through Pong, Atari, Intellivision, Commodore’s VIC 20, Commodore 64 and various PC games from the 90s. After a time gap of many years, he recently renewed his “hibernated” video game passion due to the higher visual quality of a new generation of video games. He is currently exploring the new consoles XBOX 360, Playstation and Nintendo Wii, both for personal and more recently for academic research purposes.
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