Featured Speaker: John Buchanan of EA Games

Yesterday, Dr. John Buchanan, self described 'Research Liason Dude from EA', spoke at the School of Information Sciences and Technology about EA, the state of the industry, and games in general. I had the opportunity to sit down with John and Dr. Brian Smith earlier in the day to talk collaboration opportunities, then attended a 1-hour talk/Q&A he delivered to many of our students. Comments are somewhat blended together between the two discussions.

On Games, John expressed the importance of the story and the experience. The experience is what makes games so successful. It gives people a common experience to talk about. The story, in good games, drives the experience. John cited an example from GTA III, where he met several people in a pub one night who were all discussing a certain mission from GTA III. This encounter, John mentioned, lead to several friendships with people he otherwise might not have met.

John addressed the state of the industry, and had several charts...most depicting the usual numbers of sales, age ranges, consoles vs. pcs, etc. The one chart I hadn't seen before detailed the console market in terms of its cycles. When new hardware is released, the industry sees a 2-3 year up-swing in profits. Then after the 3rd year the hardware has been around, game sales start to take a dip. Once new hardware emerges, the cycle repeats itself. John pointed out that if you are ever on an interview for a job in the industry, ask the interviewer about the company's strategy to deal with these dips (this is when a lot of people get laid off).

John gave a personal anecdote about working in EDU vs Corporate (John was a faculty member at a University in western Canada before joining EA). Working in Education allows you to only sell a small portion of your soul, where working for a large business requires you to sell a good deal of your soul. He had this whole continuum worked out that Dr. Smith and I had a good laugh about, but it's something I'd have a tough time explaining via text.

Eventually we turned to research, and what EA is up to. John basically has a budget to travel to various universities, and try and pinpoint, license, or acquire new technologies that could benefit EA. He sometimes brings researchers to EA studios to talk to design teams, other times he'll take design teams to the researchers. We got the impression most of the research they do is around technology pipelines and tool creation. One of the big focuses is on emotion in games, and how to move the genre forward so players will actually be emotionally attached to the characters in the game world. He cited an example of a young girl crying when one of her Sims died. That's the pinnacle of gaming, to create a game that can do that at all age ranges.

After engaging with Half Life 2 for about 3 weeks now, I really enjoyed the way they immersed the player in the world. From the exceptional character modeling and emotions, to the player being active in the dialogue scenes, the game really drew you into the story. Due to not having traditional cut scenes, in the dialogue the other characters are talking directly to you, not to some character in a cut scene that is *supposed* to be you. In cut scenes, it's almost like they take you away from your character for a moment, forcing you to forfeit control, psychologically separating you from the character you've been controlling for hours on end. In terms of immersion, I think this might be a bad thing. The manner in which HL2 dealt with these scenes led to a more engaging environment then say Doom 3, where each cut scene took me out of the drivers eat.