Gaming is for Grown-Ups: A View of the Industry

Jack Buser, Sr Designer, PlayStation Digital Programs

I felt like such a geek because I loved this lecture so much!

AND HE DIDN'T EVEN TALK ABOUT ANYTHING GROUND BREAKING!

But it was so cool, because he put up pictures and played trailers for games and he made nerdy jokes that I understood.

Realistic photo-representation of us.

Jack Buser was a U of I grad (apparently 75% of speakers at this university were at some point). He studied computer science (or computer engineering… or both), and started doing his projects and thesis work on audio because that is what he really loved. He got a job at Dolby Digital right out of college and worked on some audio stuff for DVD and then eventually somebody brought in a PlayStation 2 prototype to see how DVD would work on it. He convinced them to put Dolby systems in the gaming system to make the sound of games and movies phenomenal. After a few years he was hired by PlayStation to work on PlayStation Home (which is PlayStation’s virtual world, like Second Life, but on PlayStation). He then was made into the senior designer of Digital Programs and works now on PlayStation Network stuff and their new Mobile services.

Jack went over the different kinds of games which I will summarize because it is necessary to know when looking at the future.

CORE. People’s preconceived notion of ‘games.’ First-person shooters. Heavily graphic games that people get invested in.

CASUAL. “Time wasters” that people can just sit down and play for a bit. Like Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

ANCIENT. Mancala. Games have been and will be around forever.

SOLO. Pac-Man. Single-player games were a product of the 1970s. Before that single-player was basically limited to solitaire.

SOCIAL. Farmville and Facebook games. These games are redefining what it means to be ‘social.’

MASSIVE. World of Warcraft. MMORPG (Multi-Massive Online Role Playing Games). People do not consider these as “Social” games but they are. People meet people online, get into gaming guilds with them, and often consider them close friends or even get married to them.

MOBILE. Phone and handheld games that would be impossible to realize in the living room.

MOTION. Kinect, PlayStation Move (focus on getting the player active). He didn’t mention Wii even though Nintendo changed the industry by focusing on motion.

AR. Augmented Reality is the future. On the Nintendo 3DS, there are games that use the camera to capture the world in real time and then you fight things that are changing in this “world.” Down the road, this could be used for many things. For example, Jack showed a prototype photo of a street view and bubbles popped up displaying reviews for restaurants, common tips, tweets about a place, etc. Completely immersing the user in social media bullshit. Twitter is stupid… but it is still pretty cool.

FUTURE. There was a picture of a cloud? The sky is the limit… maybe?

Aside from that, Jack didn’t really expand on any ideas or breakthroughs in the industry. I did notice that he only mentioned Nintendo once and that was when bragging about how he got sound to be focused on in gaming. Feuding? He also was talking about the digital programs division and how they are re-releasing old games from previous systems so that younger audiences can discover these great games. I find this hard to believe, because my nephew is thirteen and he has no interest in playing old PlayStation games because of the graphics. I want to play them, but I’m a nerd who grew up playing video games.

Jack Buser talking about nerd stuff.

It was hard to focus because the room smelled like terrible BO. You need to shower boys and girl. I thought maybe it was just this instance, but I did some researching and heard personal anecdotes of the ripest of lecture halls. There was also a Homestuck (Homestuck is a web comic that is vastly popular among geeks and nerds on web forums right now) sitting behind us. I didn’t get a picture, but here’s kind of what she looked like (sans horns). 

Jack ended with a trailer for one of my favorite games that was just recently released. The game is so simple but it is gorgeous and was nominated for a Grammy for its soundtrack. Here’s the trailer. Watch its glory.