I spent the better part of last week at the DICE conference in Vegas.  DICE has such a different tone than GDC, so it makes for a good counterpoint -- one track, much smaller attendence, bigger focus on industry trends and high level topics.

Mark Ecko and Stan Lee are fantastic speakers, though neither had too much to say interesting about games per se (though Mark Ecko did have a lot of interesting thoughts on culture).

There was a demo from a guy at Sony R&D about vision input systems (like the EyeToy).  The demos of per-pixel depth detection and chroma tracking were particularly compelling.  He painted a very interesting vision of how technologies like head tracking and light probes could be used to create "fake" holographic displays, or how they could let you use something like the PSP as a window to an augmented reality.  Very fascinating stuff.

Speaking of the PSP, I spent a few minutes playing around with an import one that Graeme Devine (a fellow Ensemble person) had.  I was blown away, and can't wait to get my hands on one of my own in March.

Tim Schaefer made me very, very nostalgic for the days of games like Full Throttle and Monkey Island.  I hope Psychonauts is even remotely good as my expectations.

Ray & Greg from Bioware gave a fantastic talk of the community building efforts for Neverwinter Nights.  It was quite inspirational, and I hope that someday we can create a similar coherency and organizational focus in Ensemble's online presence... but it doesn't come cheap.

The AIAS awards (of which I was on the console RPG peer panel) was embarrassingly bad.  Again.  I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm still disappointed.  Someday they'll get that right, our industry could really use a meaningful award ceremony rather than the mishmash we have now.

One neat thing about DICE is that due to the smaller format, there is a bigger focus on Q&A with the speakers in most of the talks.  My one attempt at such question was pressing the issue of game resales and rentals (which I think are the biggest single threat to the industry).  Sadly, my question was either poorly asked or poorly understood, and didn't get any coherent response.

A bunch of Ensemble folks did quite well at Poker.  I did, um, not so well at Craps, though made up most of my losses with some good luck at the utterly skill-free slot machines.  I split a 20 at blackjack, and was roundly mocked by my peers (but won both hands anyways). 

Vegas is such a smoky city.  All my clothes came back reeking of smoke (which I find fairly repulsive).  Ugh.  Well, it was still worth it for a fun trip.  However, I do find that now that I'm a cranky old man, the time and effort involved in flying out for a conference and not seeing my kids for a few days is becoming more and more of a barrier.  It's the 21st century, where is my personal teleporter?  It's especially bad when you try and hit the "trifecta" of big conferences like I do on non-game-crunch years (GDC + DICE + E3).  Fortunately I do absorb a lot of data on these things, so I think they are worth the energy and disruption involved.


I played a lot of Civ 3: Conquests on the plane and in the hotel.  The interface is surprisingly well suited for playing on a tablet PC.  Conventions like "click to scroll" are insane normally, but work perfectly with a pen device... it almost makes me wonder if someone there was developing the UI with that in mind.  Then again, given that the new Pirates! game still virtually requires you to use ther numeric keypad, I'm guessing not. 

Unfortunately (in a good way) the flood of good games is kicking back up again after a small reprise.  Grigsby's World At War, Heritage of Kings, Xenosaga 2, Ys, Gran Turismo 4, Wario Ware Touched, Fullmetal Alchemist, Oddworld Stranger, Starfox Assault, Sims 2 University... and that's just February!  Agh!  I still need to finish Halflife 2, and even start Halo 2, Resident Evil 4, and Metal Gear Solid 3!  Yeah, I know, I'm obsessive-compulsive about all these games (as if the big lists weren't a tipoff). 

What an extraordinary time to be a gamer.