Mr. Buchanon on Story Telling and EA

The school of IST at Penn State likes to show off their new and shiny building by having lots of interesting speakers come in. One of them was John Buchanon, from Electronic Arts, speaking on the gaming industry.

Funny Quote: "We turn pizza and coke into games"

He gave us the usual consoles drive the industry bit, and gave some interesting information about how much it costs to develop a game (which is to say, A Lot), but they have a short shelf life. This is the major reason why game companies are consolidating.

One of the interesting things he talked about was how gaming is built into our culture, the new generation being people who are ~41 years old and younger. (so, in 20 years, we'll be making games for the 60 yr old demographic).

The majority of his speech was about storytelling. He asserts that our culture is built around storytelling (you ask people how their weekend was on Monday morning), and that the draw of playing a game is that its an experience that can be turned into a story. Since many people play a game, you know have a shared memory that allows you to connect to these other people. He also talked momentarily about the problems with 'interactive' storytelling in games, which is that you have to be led eventually along specific plot points (or 'portals') or else there is no game. I wish he had gone into this in more detail, but his entire speech was cut down to fit into 45 minutes.

Factoid on Language: 90% of conversation (non business and school) is gossip. There is a theory among linguists that Humans developed language because we were bored.