***

Even though the San Francisco-based Game Developers Conference is designed to focus on developers, the amount of worldwide talent gathered under one roof makes for some newsworthy events.

2009's event, taking place March 23-27, will be no different, as event organizers revealed today Nintendo president Satoru Iwata will be hosting the keynote.

Iwata's talk is called "Discovering New Development Opportunities," but no other details about the keynote have been revealed so far. In previous years, however, Iwata has used the GDC platform to provide details worth paying attention to, including key points about what would become the Wii in 2005.

The keynote is scheduled for Wednesday, March 25, 2009 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PST, and MTV Multiplayer will be there to cover it.

Related Posts
New ‘Final Fantasy’ On Wii, DS Gets Release Date
One Year Later: ‘Endless Ocean’ (Wii)
DS, Wii Top Christmas 2008’s Hardware Sales

***

Did you know "Brutal Legend" will have multiplayer? I didn't.

The Jack Black-starring, Double Fine-developed heavy metal action game "Brutal Legend" has been heavily anticipated since its announcement. As a result of the Vivendi-Activision merger, the game was without a publisher until Electronic Arts revealed plans to publish the title in December.

We should know a little more about "Brutal Legend" soon; the Game Developers Conference website shows Double Fine is holding an art-centric panel on the game. In the panel description, I thought there was breaking news that "Brutal Legend" will have multiplayer. A quick Google search, however, proved this was already known…we just haven't heard about it since an IGN interview from November 2007.

Electronic Arts didn't even mention multiplayer in their announcement press release. But, yes, "Brutal Legend" will still have multiplayer. "Rich multiplayer," according to the panel description. Whether we'll learn anything about this "rich multiplayer" at March's panel remains to be seen, though. The full panel description is below.

The Brutal Art of Brütal Legend
Speaker: Lee Petty (Art Director, Double Fine Productions)
Date/Time: TBD
Track: Visual Arts
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: Intermediate

Session Description
A behind-the-scenes look at creating the art for a highly ambitious, Heavy Metal inspired original game, this talk examines how the look of Brütal Legend was defined and realized. Details on how Double Fine met the challenge of creating a unique, stylized look while also delivering a “AAA looking” game on the current generation of consoles are revealed. Creating the art for Brütal Legend was particularly challenging, as the game features a tightly constructed, story-driven single player campaign, a free-roaming open world environment of epic proportions, and a rich multiplayer game. Several specific problems and their solutions are presented on topics such as open world terrain fidelity, the advanced materials approach applied to characters, and the implementation of a dynamic sky, lighting and weather system.

Takeaway
Attendees will take away a detailed understanding of how Double Fine develops art from initial inspiration to final execution. Attendees will also take away the knowledge of how Double Fine solved the numerous challenges of making stylized art that feels contemporary on the current generation of consoles through several specific examples. Attendees will gain an understanding of how these approaches worked and be able to apply them to similar problems in their own productions.

Related Posts
Jack Black, ‘Brutal Legend,’ ‘God of War III’ Gameplay Footage Debuting At Spike VGAs
‘Brutal Legend’ Is ‘Fine,’ Fate of ‘50 Cent’ And ‘Ghostbusters’ Games Unknown
No ‘Brutal Legend’ At E3

So at Game Developers Conference last month I asked the founders of "Mass Effect" developer BioWare how they'll handle love and sex in future games

Their response:

Here's an excerpt for people who can't watch the video:

Ray Muzyka, General Manager, BioWare: We're proud of the mature plots that we build into our games. They're really appropriate for the type of story we're trying to convey. And romance is part of that. It's part of life. It's part of an interaction -- a healthy relationship with other people. But it's optional, too. You don't have to have romances in "Mass Effect" or in our prior games, but they're available to you if you want and if you want to progress that part of the storyline. But they're very tasteful, very appropriate. And they're certainly appropriate for the level of rating, which, in "Mass Effect"'s case was mature.

And I think we're going to continue doing those things. As an artform it's exciting that people are actually reacting -- they're feeling something as a result of seeing these kinds of mature plots developing in games now as an emerging artform. The same kind of things happened at the start of movies. The same kinds of things happened at the start television and the advent of television and music, even paintings and books going way, way, way back. The same kinds of reactions -- people were scandalized by certain things [and saying] "How can they be?" A lot of it is understanding how it can be appropriate and really not gratuitous at all. Just really appropriate and making the gameplay much better. We're very proud of the work we've put in and our teams are amazing.

Last month at GDC, EA hosted an event showcasing DICE's work, which included a live demonstration of "Mirror's Edge." The sight of the game's heroine running through a stark, gleaming city, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, taking enemies out with her hands, was impressive. Seeing it all in first-person was exciting. But, watching what it looks like when she tumbles forward into a roll and the game stays in first person was... disconcerting.

I wondered if presenting parkour in first-person might be asking for trouble. My head was spinning:

• Is this game going to make us all sick?
• In the era of "Assassin's Creed," what's the point of having a parkour game played from a "Halo" perspective?
• Where did the color green go?

I had to talk to the developers. EA PR obliged, setting me up with two quick, on-the-spot chats. We talked about several key issues and I got some intriguing answers...

(Warning to EA marketing team -- there's a possible surprise in here for you...)

Topic #1: The Game's Name

Multiplayer: Can you explain the game's name?

Owen O'Brien, Senior Producer, "Mirror's Edge": The Mirror refers to the city, the city that's a very unusual city. It's a city of very tall gleaming skyscrapers and empty streets ... Over the years people have been giving up more and more of their freedoms for this comfortable life, this utopia. But some people didn't want to conform and they were pushed to the edge of society. They exist on the edge, which is where the mirror's edge comes from.

Topic #2: The Name Of The Game's City

Multiplayer: I kept waiting for you to say the name of the city. Are you intentionally not naming it?

O'Brien: I've deliberately not named it, because it's nowhere and it's everywhere. It's an amalgamation of lots of different cities. And it's an amalgamation of lots of different things that are happening around the world.

Multiplayer: You're not saying you haven't named it to me. You're saying you haven't named it in the game.

O'Brien: We've deliberately not named it.

Multiplayer: Just refer to it as 'The city'?

O'Brien: Just refer to it as 'The city.'

Multiplayer: How did that go over with marketing people?

O'Brien: I haven't told them yet. [Laughs] I think they're going to have to be fine about it, because it's something I really strongly believe in. I think the thing is that once I start naming cities I always find that they sound sci-fi for some reason. I don't know why. It sounds weird. I'm a big fan of "Payback" from Mel Gibson. And one of the things I like about the film is that they never name what the city is. They always refer to it as "the city" …

Topic #3: Mixing First-Person And Parkour

Multiplayer: How did the idea come together to do a combination of first-person and parkour? Did one precede the other or did they both come about at the same time?

O'Brien: We definitely wanted to do something first-person because that's what DICE has a lot of experience in. But we wanted to go right back to basics and do something different from "Battlefield." We didn't want to do just another "Battlefield." So the first thing we looked at was first-person games. And first-person games aren't about people at all. They are about guns, weapons, armor. They've just forgotten the "person" in "first-person"…

If you're going to execute on that you've got to be able to move as a person. We find that there's a lot of common wisdom that you can't do these things in first person. But people haven't tried to do them. They build a first-person shooter and then they try to add movement to it. We developed movement from the word go.

Multiplayer: Right. I remember trying to platform in "Turok" on the N64 and it was a nightmare. "Metroid Prime" was the first time I felt people were beginning to get it. But now I've done parkour in "Assassin's Creed" and I've come to assume that I need third-person to do parkour well. I'm sure you've played "Assassin's Creed" ..

O'Brien: Yes.

Multiplayer: As a player, what do you gain by having that in first-person? How is it different for the player?

It's a very different feeling. It's a very immediate, visceral experience. It is you. You're there doing everything. You feel every impact. You feel when you've been shot. You get the vertigo, the dizziness. We often say it's the difference between watching an action film and being the star of one… From my point of view, because I've played "Assassin's Creed," is that it just feels very different to actually be the person rather than controlling an avatar.

Topic #4: Getting Sick From This Game

Multiplayer: What kind of issues have you guys run into in terms of disorientation and motion sickness or anything? That seems to be a risk with the design you're taking.

O'Brien: My producer who was playing the game tonight suffers from -- it's actually called "Simulation Sickness." Motion Sickness is something you actually get from motion. You have to be on a ship or something. … We've been very careful with that. Simulation sickness is when you get a difference between what you see and what you expect to see. So there are little things. Like the little bit of HUD [heads-up-display] that we have is a small reticule that gives you a focal point. If you take that out of the game, you do start to get ill. A bit like a ballerina doing pirouettes -- if they focus on something, then they're fine.

Also, the camera in our game does quite a lot of clever things. It's simulating your eyes rather than your head. I think what a lot of people have done in the past is they've stuck a camera in the person's head and they move around like robots….The field of view is very important. A lot of first-person games have a very claustrophobic point of view, usually to create tension or scares. We've got a very wide field of view which gives you much more peripheral view of the city. And you get much less disoriented.

Topic #5: The Missing Color Green

Multiplayer: The visual design is very interesting. But what did you guys do with the color green? Is it gone? Is anything green?

O'Brien:No. Actually, when you play the game and look at it more closely, even things you think would be green are not, like plants and trees. They're all white.

Multiplayer: Is that the visual design? No green?

O'Brien: Well, the visual design isn't that we targeted green to take it out. The art direction grew out of the gameplay. We wanted to give people a sense of the world very quickly and move through it very quickly. We initially stripped out all of the colors and then just put in red [to guide people to objectives]. But we needed more colors to break it up and also [because] the colors tell you how healthy you are. The brighter they are the healthier you are. When you start to take damage they start to de-saturate. So we needed more colors in the world. But it's a very restricted and deliberate use of strong primary colors and orange.

So we haven't got an anti-green policy. We're just not going down that route. We're also trying not to look like every game out there. I wanted a game where I could look at a screenshot and say, "Hey, that's 'Mirror's Edge.'" A lot of games are tending toward grim or grays and we wanted to avoid that.

Topic #6: Green-Lighting "Mirror's Edge"

Multiplayer: Was "Mirror's Edge" a hard sell internally? Did you have anyone asking you where all the grit was? Where the Unreal 3 Engine was? Did you guys have that same look from the start? And what challenges were there for you to overcome for you guys to convince yourselves or the powers that be that it was a worthwhile approach.

Sean Decker, Studio General Manager, DICE: John Riccitiello gave a speech at [the] DICE [gaming summit] in which he talked about [EA development studios] as city-states. And DICE [the game developer] has been lucky for two reasons. One, because we're out in Sweden, so -- we're out in Sweden and people don't hop in as much and say, "Hey, what are you working on?" The other thing is that it's really true. If you look at all of DICE's games, and you take all the games, every single one is in the top five percent of Metacritic.

Multiplayer: So it's capital.

Decker: John Riccitiello says, "If it works for you, do what you think is right." And that's allowed us to be able to have this leeway, try things out and say, "Look, this is what we want to do."

***

That's all I got on "Mirror's Edge." Check back next week for a little more from that DICE GDC event: a chat about "Battlefield Heroes," EA's free re-interpretation to its popular PC multiplayer first-person war series.

At GDC I asked him why, with more than a decade of development work done on "Too Human," he didn't at some point decide that this game just wasn't meant to be. This is what he said:

"Growing up, when I was younger, I've had so many people telling me that I can't do x or I can't do y. When I was in grade school, I didn't do particularly well in a couple of classes and the teachers told me I'd never grow up ...and never get out of high school. I ended up becoming more educated than they did. I have three degrees. I got a Masters degree in computer science.

"I think it comes down to never let anyone tell you you can't do something. I really mean that for everyone. It is so easy to be cynical. It is so easy to be negative. And it's so easy to say, 'This is not going to be good' or 'This is going to be trash.'

"And I think about 'Too Human and some of the rough spots we went by or just recently came through and I think about the documentary on the making of the 'Titanic' [movie] where they're interviewing the actors. Because if you remember the movie Titanic was completely panned by the press before coming out. It was going to be the next 'Waterworld,' a terrible movie. And when we were going through the tough times and before we had shown anything for Too Human we were watching that and going , 'Wow, we kind of relate to those guys. We really believe in what we're doing.' You just can't stop believing."

But why, of all things was "Too Human" an important idea not to let go of? Dyack goes on to talk about the nature of games, technology... and sewing machines. It's really interesting stuff from an interview I'll never forget.

For the kind of material that can never get on the back of a box but might make you decide if this game is for you, watch the video.

It's not uncommon for GDC attendees to start scratching off end-of-day sessions after sitting in panels for hours on end. Unfortunately, anyone who decided to passed on DeMaria's panel as day one of GDC closed missed out.

The ambitious panel asked whether games were capable of achieving more than sheer entertainment, and while everyone there had something interesting to say, it was Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor and 2K Boston's Ken Levine that found themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, yet on surprisingly common ground in regard to what designers bring to their games.

Taylor kicked things off with an untold tidbit about his breakthrough RTS game, "Total Annihilation": he purposely removed blood from its art direction. In his eyes, war wasn't meant to be cool, and even though his passion was to develop war games, real war involved young soldiers dying and never coming back. He kept this part of the design a secret. "I don't think anybody cared. I was on my own little thing," he said.

Later in the panel, Levine would come to defend the use of blood in games from an artistic standpoint. "For the healthy mind, for the thinking mind, the advantage of blood, the advantage of gore, the advantage of keeping it on a level that makes it true is powerful. [In "BioShock"] if you didn't have that level of pain and realism and nastiness, people wouldn't think about it."

Both designers are 41-years old. A key difference between the two, however, is that Taylor is the father of four boys. "As a father, there's this genetic sort of trigger that [tells me] I have four boys, and when I make games and I come home every night, I want my boys to see my work. It would really suck if they couldn't see what I did every day. That's probably got more to do with [my beliefs] than I care to admit," confessed Taylor.

One of Taylor's favorite shows growing up was "The Brady Bunch," but he found himself annoyed with the preachy tone of some episodes. As an adult, he understands why the writers took that route: they were "slipping medicine" to kids in an attempt to give back to society through their creative work. "Here I am, 41, I'm kind of slippin' a little medicine into my games and I'm hoping that kids will play the stuff that I create and they become better kids."

On the other hand, there's Levine. "I'm not the guy you want to look towards for a teaching moment," he said. Read on to find out why that is.

"Frankly, I don't really know if I have a lot to teach people," remarked Levine. "I'm not that confident in what I've learned and what I'd teach. I'm way more interested in sort of just asking a lot of questions because that's how I get through life. I look at this thing and I get confused and say 'well, I don't know. Is it this or is it that?' Once you know the answers and you think you knows the answers, that's where you're in real trouble...

"The responsibility of great literature or great fiction is to really ask those questions, not to sort of present black and whites and 'it could be this, but Goofus does that -- don't you want to do this?' Because lots of creepy stuff have come out of that kind of teaching when the teacher doesn't have their head screwed on straight. So, I'm not so confident that my head it screwed on straight enough to ask those questions."

Upon touching on games presenting their view of right and wrong, fellow panel member and designer of games with moral decisions, Peter Molyneux, chimed in to agree with Levine's assessment. Molyneux argued game makers need to be acutely aware of their intentions when attempting to teach morality. The intentions of the designer are not necessarily going to be the interpretation of the user.

"If you think you can teach them [gamers] a lesson that's going to come across exactly the way you think -- well, watch out because they may interpret it in a very different way," said Levine. "The more certain you are about what you're teaching, you can very easily be misinterpreted. And not only that, you could very likely be wrong."

And despite Taylor's differing views on his own style, he doesn't disagree. "I'm glad Ken is making the games he's making because I love 'BioShock.' We all having a calling for making the game that we think we should make," said Taylor.

At least they could agree on that.

Like... "What's your favorite video game dog?"

In our quest to find the Greatest Animal in the History of Video Games, this month we highlighted the best dogs and wolves for consideration.

First, we had Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski and Mark Rein weigh in with their picks. Then we had Lionhead Studios' Peter Molyneux talk about his favorite virtual dog, which happens to be to his own four-legged furball from "Fable 2" (and our one and only canine nominee from a game that's not yet released). See why he thinks his "Fable 2" dog deserves top prize and which other dog inspired him to create it:

On the other hand, "WolfQuest" is an online game designed to teach.

The last time I encountered "WolfQuest" was mocking it during a segment for The 1UP Show, but my actions were only somewhat in jest. "WolfQuest," an online space where players live the life of a wolf, is a compelling idea. The program's designer, David Schaller of eduweb, discussed this during a behind-the-scenes panel at GDC last month.

Ironically, Shcaller's biggest obstacle came from the education community. Educators hoped to see children hovering around a computer monitor less often, while Schaller believed it better to communicate with kids using a device they're already hooked on. For Schaller, that required a four-step process. Educators wanted it to happen in one step.

1. Children are already at the computer due to games
2. "WolfQuest" is a game, but meant to be a learning tool about wolves
3. Adventures in "WolfQuest" lead to an interest in wolves
4. Kids finally end up outside to learn about wolves in real-life

From the educator's point of view, providing children with yet another reason to sink time into a computer is counterproductive. For "WolfQuest," it's a bit of a gamble. If "WolfQuest" proves too compelling of a video game, what is the incentive for the player to leave the virtual world? Ultimately, Schaller's argument implied that if kids never left "WolfQuest" to learn about wolves at a zoo, at least they learned in "WolfQuest" itself.

Schaller pointed the audience to James Paul Gee's book "What Video Games Have to Teach Us," in which Gee introduces the same subjects Schaller is riffing on:

"In the end, then, video games represents a process, thanks to what Marx called the "creativity of capitalism," that leads to better and better designs for good learning and, indeed, good learning of hard and challenging things. ... How are good video games designed to enhance getting themselves learned -- learned well and quickly so people can play and enjoy them even when they are long and hard? What we are really looking for here is this: the theory of human learning built into good video games."

You can download a free copy of "WolfQuest" for PC and Mac at the official website. Oddly enough, now I kind of want to check it out. Who wants to be in my wolf pack (learning not guaranteed)?

Why would Tomonobu Itagaki implement a YouTube-like capture-and-share video system in the upcoming Xbox 360 "Ninja Gaiden II"? I didn't know last week. So I asked him, backstage after the Microsoft keynote at GDC.His answer -- and a classic Itagaki moment of turning the tables on the interviewer -- are above.

An excerpt from the above clip:

Itagaki: Well, we had a lot of feedback that the first "Ninja Gaiden" was a little bit too difficult. And we're taking a lot of steps for the sequel to help alleviate that. But one thing that we thought is if we give people an example, a reference, say this is how you get past this certain encounter this is the moves you can use in order to play the game better, if you give some advice in the way of a video that would help increase their proficiency in the game."

He and I mostly talked about the Xbox 360's "Ninja Gaiden 2" (and gambling). But here's my exchange with him about the famous football series, which took place right after Microsoft's GDC keynote:

Multiplayer: People back in my office would be upset with me if I didn't ask you for an update about "Tecmo Bowl." About a year ago, there was an announcement that a new game was underway for an unspecified system. What can you update people about about that beloved franchise?

Itagaki: To be honest that was a totally different division that made that announcement, so I have no idea what's going on with that.

Multiplayer: So you're not working on any "Tecmo Bowl," right now?

Itagaki: I'm in a tough position because when I am making "'Dead or Alive," for instance, all the "Ninja Gaiden" fans say quit messing around with Dead or Alive and make a sequel to "Ninja Gaiden". When I'm making a new "Ninja Gaiden," all the "Dead or Alive" fans are like, "You have to quit that and start making "Dead or Alive." And that's tough enough as it is, but I also get letters all the time for the past 10 years from "Tecmo Bowl" fans saying, "When are you going to resurrect that franchise?" So it's tough being in my position.

Somewhere in the company there are people working hard to bring that to you. So I would suggest you wait for further announcements from them.

***

That's all I could get about "Tecmo Bowl," but I will have more from my chat with the Itagaki shortly. Stay tuned.