Game Developer’s Conference

The Game Developer’s Conference has been surprising in a number of ways. I realize that talking about games has greatly evolved — it is no longer merely talking about games.

Discussions here have ranged from political advocacy to real life love stories to social interventions to philophical speculations to mathematical explorations to comedy routines to literary extrapolations.

Speaking of the latter, today Richard Evans and Emily Short presented their wonderful interaction fiction system Versu, which lets you converse with Jane Austen’s characters, and you can even mix them with characters from very different cultures and literary genres to see what will happen (imagine Mr. Collins at a dinner party with a character from “Office Space”).

At the end of their presentation, Richard (who was previously the A.I. designer for The SIMS), summed up the possibilities by asking: “Suppose Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mr. Darcy and Queen Victoria were stuck in an elevator. What would they talk about?”

When he said this, I remember thinking to myself that the answer was obvious. They would all be saying: “That phone booth was a lot larger on the inside than it looked from the outside.”

One thought on “Game Developer’s Conference”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *