Why a design agency should attend the GDC
I’m writing these lines with slight exhaustion and definite information overload: last week, my plane just landed back in cold Germany arriving from — equally cold — San Francisco. And at this time of the year, this can only mean one thing: the Games Developers Conference!
As every year, it was an awesome week, packed with talks, tech and games. For me — rather an engine than a game developer — a particular highlight were the techy Unity talks they organized in parallel to the GDC tracks. However, this year was also special: I didn’t attend the conference just as a gamer and techy. For the first time, I went there to perceive the whole event through the lense of Strichpunkt, Germany’s leading design agency. And this was quite a unique experience!
First off, design is obviously a pretty broad topic. At first glance, you’ll notice that the average game is presented in a different way than other brands. While a lot of modern web design tends to use very simple shapes, games often have more playful visual styles. Just compare a page like Facebook to a game like World of Warcraft. It’s also interesting to see that each individual game — even if developed by the same studio and shipped by the same publisher — usually comes with its own distinct branding and visual art style. I’d argue that branding for games is special — and perhaps even more vital — as it also has to convey the story, message and style of the ingame universe!
From a Design Agency’s perspective, games should be of particular interest: they evolved from a collection of products to a whole medium with impressive reach. Further, many technologies and developments of modern media originate from the gaming industry. Virtual Reality experiences, for example, are essentially games and share their whole technology stack. Today, I’d like to share some of my (techy) insights from a week of gaming with you.
Something-Reality
Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Holo Reality, … I don’t even know where all these terms came from. Essentially, we are talking about enriching or replacing our perception through virtual content. Originating from the games industry, it’s a no-brainer that we saw a lot of attention on XR (the universal abbreviation for “whatever”-reality) gadgets and technologies at the GDC.
A particular new buzzword is “Spatial Computing”, summing up the improvements in sensors and XR technology so that you can have virtual elements everywhere and every time. Whether we will end up with virtual reality rooms or impressive mixed reality characters is still an open question — and I see many good applications for both.
What all these approaches have in common, however, is using games rather as a medium than a product. The technology stack of game development is broadened up and interwoven with other media! In particular, the ability to replace one’s perception (note that I’m referring to perception, not just visuals here), gives XR a much more intimate relation with the user. As such, design, user experience and representation of information become even more sensitive as they are for “good old 2D design”.
To illustrate one extreme: having an annoying ad popping up on a webpage is one thing, having an advertisement block my actual line of sight as it’s floating directly in front of my head is another. So far, most XR guidelines focus on collecting best practises and I could see a lot of room for new designs and fundamental concepts on how to use games as a channel, rather than a target in branding and design. Familiarizing yourself with the opportunities — and constraints — of XR technologies is vital if you plan to work with XR experiences in the future. Design, white-space, typography and even basic user interaction rely not only on your channel of representation (moving from 2D to 3D) but also the actual devices in use.
From Offline to Online rendering
One particular topic at this year’s GDC was the visual quality runtime rasterizers (read: game engine renderers) can produce. They improved up to a degree where they rival offline ray-tracers (read: renderers used for cinematic animation). We even saw new — and this year more promising — approaches towards AI-assisted runtime ray-tracers. If all these terms don’t mean anything to you: don’t worry, it’s mostly tech talk!
In essence, the big impact we can observe is that we are getting close to a point where we can produce computer animated video on the fly that looks just as good as the visual effects we can see in cinematic production. And this is a big game changer, as real-time video also means we can react on the audience in real-time! This could range from adjusting camera perspectives depending on where you sit in the cinema or — the other big key word — stunning VR experiences.
If we shift the spectrum more towards gaming, we saw live character synthesis, taking a human actor and projecting her facial expressions on a virtual avatar. This opens the door to a fascinating blend between computer games and theaters. Imagine some live events in an MMORPG, where famous characters are not just plain state-machines following a script but actual actors impersonating them.
From a design perspective, you could exploit the full spectrum: bringing interactivity to otherwise non-interactive media or pushing visual quality of game-like content to the level of cinemas. Sure, there are still performance thresholds and I don’t expect the technology to arrive at everybody’s Steam in the next few weeks, but we’ll definitely hear — and see — more about it throughout 2018. The tech demos already look very promising.
eSport
One of my favorite fields saw more attention this year: eSport and its integration, both into the gaming market and conventional sports. Conventional sport brands are among the most admired brands out there and they see a lot of attention from the design world. Today, eSport is in a rather unique position, as it already caters a giant — and growing — audience world wide, while just being discovered by the conventional sports investors as a potential target.
Here, I saw a definite clash of cultures! Diving deeper into the issue, one can find that conventional mass-media sports such as soccer, football or baseball are essentially symmetric games: each team is playing by the exact same rules. That’s a huge difference to virtually any eSports title. You cannot skill your soccer team to have 12 people on the field but scoring goals is on a 20 minute cooldown. In eSports games, such as MOBAs or RTS, that’s a core mechanic.
In consequence, asymmetric eSport games see more balancing cycles. When was the last time you saw the rules of soccer being patched? In eSport, such patches happen on a regular base, often “shaking up the meta” and altering a lot of the gameplay. While this is usually perceived by players as a good thing, some stakeholders might tend to disagree: if you invest a few billions into a MOBA jungle player, you don’t want that particular role to get nerfed.
I don’t inherently see such a switch in perspective as a bad thing. Conventional sports culture and eSport culture will have to merge and both will change in the longer run. In one of the talks, the perceived conflict boiled down to “billionaires are coming” v.s. “your IP is king”. Personally, I see many opportunities in blending both fields — and in particular the different design and branding philosophies behind them. We have to come up with new concepts for how enjoying sports will look like in the next few years, integrating aspects like modding, betting and real-life teams into either subculture. This is a fascinating vector for branding games and I’d expect that the “gaming way” of branding will see more impact on non-gaming products as their influence increase — and the reach of eSport could be seen as an indicator for that.
See you next frame
Puh, what can I say. I’m still overloaded by this amazing week and I’m sure it’s not the last time we’ll be talking about the connection of gaming, game development technologies, design and branding here at Strichpunkt. But let’s hop back to the headline: why should you care? Well, if you take a look at society in general, games became a huge influencer in the past decades. Economically speaking, the games industry today produces more revenue as the movie and music industry combined. As such, I’d like to see them as the dominant media of our time — something not to miss out! But even if you don’t share my enthusiasm, you’ll agree that modern branding and design is a much more holistic approach, where people expect to include technologies like Augmented or Virtual Reality. And these technology stacks are essentially games! You will encounter all the issues and opportunities the games industry already solved and exploited. That’s definitely nothing to miss out!
The future renders close, one frame at a time!
STRICHPUNKT DESIGN is one of Germany’s most honored design agencies based in Berlin & Stuttgart. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram to keep in touch with us and our latest work.
STRICHPUNKT DESIGN is one of Germany’s most honored design agencies based in Berlin & Stuttgart. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram to keep in touch with us and our latest work.
