Wonderland has done a wonderful job of laying out one of the keynotes from GDC. The speaker was Raph Koster, who
wrote 'A Theory of Fun'. It's a loose transcript but it does the job of catching Koster's enthusiasm just fine. He
seems to believe that games are a lot more than entertainment. In fact, he thinks they hold the key to solutions to
everyday problems - past, present and future. His conclusion launches GDC with just the right tone:
We have to figure out games that don't have one right answer, and we face our own cognitive challenges here.
Otherwise we know what the fate of games will be: they'll be the thing you stop doing when you're 25 and you get kids.
We'll be missing out on a chance to improve the human condition.
So what I want to see: the games about curing cancer. The games about how do we restructure Florida when it's
under water? That's where we need to go. In the end games stand on their own as the ONLY MEDIUM THAT TEACHES FORMAL
SYSTEMS IN THIS WAY. It is the only communicative medium that does this. It is the only fully experiential method
of learning abstract concepts.
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. If you've been falling asleep in the flood of holiday/post-holiday
titles, the speech is like a shot of caffeine.
[via boingboing]
