{"id":104,"date":"2006-03-24T11:57:01","date_gmt":"2006-03-24T19:57:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=104"},"modified":"2006-03-24T11:57:01","modified_gmt":"2006-03-24T19:57:01","slug":"game-developers-conference-san-jose-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/24\/game-developers-conference-san-jose-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Game Developers Conference, San Jose 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a floor pass to the Game Developers Conference<\/a> in San Jose last Thursday, courtesy of my old publisher (of Infinity and the Mind<\/i>) Klaus Peters, who, with his wife Alice, publishes an interesting line of math, graphics, and game-related books.<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I didn’t run into anyone else I knew, and felt a bit lonely and out of the loop. Zillions of young game-biz guys there, only a few women.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some of the ultra-geeks had balloon bee-hive hats.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Coming at games as a computer scientist, I get excited about the graphics — this is a demo of the Playstation 3, with flexing teapotaedrons.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The hardware is also very cool, like this water cooled, mirror-cased job.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But the uses these tools are put to always seem so tawdry and dull.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And playing them looks so geeky. I always find the most interesting games to be those in the Independent Games Festival<\/a>. You can download a lot of these for free.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

These two guys are colorful Finns, the talkative guy on the right being named Pekko Koskinen<\/a>. They entered an Unreal mod called “Dragonfly Variations.” Pekko’s real passion is for three-paragraph head-games on the back of his business card. He told me that one of the greatest Finnish novels is Volter Kilpi’s Alastalon Salissa<\/i>, sadly untranslated.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

These fellows were competing in the Independent Games Festifal too, they had a nice single-button game called Strange Attractors.<\/a> You turn the force of gravity on and off in an Asteroids-like setting, that’s all. It’s intriguing. They reminded me of the very best students I used to teach in my Game Programming course at SJSU.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Driving home, stopped at a traffic light, I saw a beautiful tree. In some oblique fashion, I'm sure that today I saw something I can use in Postsingular<\/i>. I'm still wrestling with determining the nature of the metanovel…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got a floor pass to the Game Developers Conference in San Jose last Thursday, courtesy of my old publisher (of Infinity and the Mind) Klaus Peters, who, with his wife Alice, publishes an interesting line of math, graphics, and game-related books. I didn’t run into anyone else I knew, and felt a bit lonely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}