Thursday was my busiest day of the week. I worked for six hours.

The State of Game Industry Crediting

Roundtable format. Small room. Conclusions: The industry needs to standardize crediting practices so that developers can more easily move within the industry. Don't want to copy too much from the film industry, but we need a way to verify that what people put on their resumes (I worked on X and Y games.) is true and accurate. Other issues include negotiating for credit as well as pay, crediting subcontractors and middleware providers, listing uncredited people in an IMDB-like database - perhaps hosted by the IGDA, and standardizing credits in other countries.

Nintendo Keynote (Heart of a Gamer - Satoru Iwata)

"On my business card, I am a corporate professional [sic - not sure what he really said]. In my mind, I am a game developer. In my heart, I am a gamer." Followed by much applause. He went through his history of game development accompanied with great anecdotes and photos. Then: "How have games gotten bigger? Budgets. Content. Teams. Complexity." "How have games gotten smaller? Risks. Genres. Variety." Tidbit: "Software sells hardware. Franchises sell software. The best franchises are created within the game industry, not taken from film and books." More applause.

We got to see some new footage of the new Zelda game. Looks GREAT.

The future of Nintendo: huge focus on wireless and innovative hardware and interfaces. More focus on entertainment, less focus on traditional games. The four I's: Innovative. Intuitive. Inviting. Interface.

Then they brought up people celebrating birthdays and let them play Mario Kart DS over the wireless network on stage. Wish I was one of them.

Two more game demos: Nintendogs. Click the link, it's really hard to describe. Imagine neopets^100. You use the microphone to teach your dog commands. You pet it with the stylus. You can even throw a ball for it. Then they have this game thing called Electroplankton (sp?) where you use the stylus to generate your own music. Click on fish and watery creatures and stuff. It's weirdness.

Rest of the Day

I worked a dumb talk on programming for the N-Gage. I also saw some interesting but not groundbreaking things with animating characters in Softimage|XSI.

Then sleep.