I was so happy for Matsuura-san to come to Develop, coming all the way from Japan it was an honour to have him attend, especially the year that I happened to be attending Develop. His talk had an introduction for while people were entering the room, which was a video of himself playing some music.

One of the first points brought up is that he feels it's his personal mission to keep making games for the music genre. He feels that games should use music as a way of conveying information just like films do.

The music needs to be integrated into the gameplay, a game that does this well is Mario, with the speed up of music when the time is running low, mixed with the diegetic feel the music has when playing the game.

His main goal lies within implementing rhythm into the games he creates, I can say I honestly can see where he is going as his games such as Mojib Ribbon and Rhyme Rider Kerorican show this use of rhythm amazingly.

One thing he wanted to integrate into his games as well is the feeling of call and response, so that during play the player would get some feedback from the game while inputting. So for example the music would change depending on good or bad circumstances.
He has always enjoyed creating games that can generate game data from music and lyrics, this was of course addressed in Vib Ribbon.
While then also informing us of what he'd love to see in some new music games being:

• A game where you can perform with actual musicians
• A game that gives the player an opportunity to play as a musician in the London Symphony Orchestra
• A game that uses anything and everything as a musical instrument, so everything you pick up or touch creates a musical sound

Matsuura’s talk was very entertaining as he showed us 3 videos during his talk, all being very cute and entertaining, one including a talking Vibri.

I was very interested in going to Dennis Dyack's talk on games as the eight art, it seemed like a bit of a silly talk in some respects, he was explaining how he feels the telling of stories is going to become much more noticeably dominant than gameplay, which myself and I'm sure a large portion of the audience didn't really agree with. There were a large amount of questions raised on his opinions at the end of the talk.

Going back on Jenova Chen's talk and his "visual bucket" way of creating a good game through creating an even flow between each element is where I would agree. Dyack's example was of Myst being one of his favourite games, which of course being a point and click/interactive narrative/graphic adventure or what you may wish to define it as, although being a well laid out story, just like every other point and click, it doesn't captivate all players and then targets a niche market in terms of consumers.

Dyack feels that every single game has a narrative, which doesn't essentially mean the story of it, so for example his idea of the narrative of an RTS game is defined by telling your friends about what happened in the game when you played it, then creating your own unique story.

One subject he touched which I don't essentially agree with is Dyack feels that games can only really be compared alongside film once there is one console for all games, as he felt with three main consoles out they aren't broadly accepted by all. The reason he claims this will make games become more accepted is as he feels there is only one way for film to get across to the general population, which isn't necessarily true.

Although it did seem that the only reason he felt games needed to become recognised as an art form, is so that they would be taken seriously, which I don't think is hugely essential, as people's views are constantly changing on games as time passes by.

Overall it was a fairly interesting view into his view on games, the questions at the end were a little negative towards him though.

The first scheduled event of Thursday morning that I decided to go see was the Designer mash up with Jenova Chen and Masaya Matsuura. It started off with Masaya playing Flower, where he explained to us how he doesn't play a huge amount of games because he doesn't enjoy shooting and killing people. So instead of playing a large majority of games that were released he spent a large amount of his time thinking up new game possibilities. So when he played Flower for the first time he fell in love with it, as it brought up a whole host of memories from his past that touched him. He told Jenova how he was so pleased to be able to meet him, and was very surprised at how young he was, for making such an emotionally complex game.

Just like Flower, Parappa the Rapper took around two years to develop, and was created by about six people. On release they received large amounts of positive feedback, and weirdly lots of feedback saying how couples had gotten together because of his game.

An odd topic that was brought up is that Matsuura-san believes there should be a Michael Jackson of games, as there is currently not one in existence, and he feels this will bring a wider appreciation to games.
Whenever Jenova needed inspiration he would always look to Hayao Miyazaki's films, he explained that the reason he did this was because in order to understand a culture that he was not a part of, he finds the messages he needs to understand a large segment of Miyazaki's films.

It was really interesting sitting in on the designer mash-up only if it was to see a long standing person from the games industry talking with such a recent addition to games. But even though there is a significant gap in industry knowledge they're ideas are both at such interesting levels.

The Art keynote of the conference was one given by Mark Healey and Kareem Ettouney of Media Molecule, focusing mainly on what decisions were made when creating Little Big Planet. If anything the main focus of the presentation was showing us the process they went through when choosing the direction they wished the art to go in.

It started off with the idea of wanting to create a tool with a visual style that compliments it, from this they started looking into visual cultures of different countries, going over how they could integrate this into their game.

There was a lot mentioned on their early stages of development, firstly with reference to Yellowhead which was their 2D physics demo originally created to show the idea of what they wanted in Little Big Planet.

We were also shown a quick little animation that Mark had made showing what they were aiming to do in 3D. With the core gameplay then being nailed down they then went back into the art, attempting to create a virtual craft box inside of the game.

The third talk of the day that I attended was a panel on games as architecture, which was extremely interesting mainly just from hearing Viktor Antonov's explanations of what input he had on Half-Life 2. It was also made up of Alex Wiltshire of Edge, Rob Watkins of Lionhead and Rory Olcayto of The Architect’s Journal.

Viktor Antonov had always been attracted to epic scale buildings, and similar iconic architecture as found in film, and he started off working in industrial design, but decided to go into video games.

Some key points that should be known pieces of information when looking over architecture found in games, and that I agree with are:

• Everything in games are establishing shots – shots that will set up the scene that the player is about to experience.
• The main tools tools available to direct a level to the player are by using architecture and light, these will aid in telling a story while getting the player to go along the correct path.
• In order to create monumental buildings and views you must create a contrast by creating many smaller items and buildings, this helps to create the illusion of a larger presence.

Another means to lead the player is by creating strong perspectives and focal points, this then tricks the player into going the correct way through the level.
There are not enough surreal and subjective architectural experiences in games.

What was interesting was that Viktor did a talk on Futurism at an architecture school, and it then became apparent that all the students played games for a means of looking into architecture, especially Half Life 2. Which I find very intriguing as one of the questions raised at the panel was what can architecture learn from video games.