Gallery: Take a Lap Around GDC and Behold the Future of Gaming
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SAN FRANCISCO – Want to know where games are going? Take a lap around the Game Developers Conference floor. You'll find a few triple-A blockbusters playable in the Moscone center this week at the annual gathering of gamemakers, but not many. Mostly it's glimpses of the future: New control interfaces. Indie games. Student projects. The big game publishers are here, as usual, in full force. But this time, instead of loudly trumpeting their own ginormous games, they're here to woo the small developers that have become crucial to success in a Minecraft age, where the one-man indie project might be the next big thing. Here are some of the sights Wired saw as we strolled the expo floor on Wednesday.
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Terry Cavanagh, the developer of the [hit iOS game Super Hexagon](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gamelife/2012/09/super-hexagon/), was surrounded by fans at GDC on Wednesday. He sat at the kiosk in the Independent Games Festival booth showing his difficult and addictive action game on an iPad while fans peppered him with questions and passed the tablet around.
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The Oculus VR headset, one of [last year's big Kickstarter successes](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gamelife/2012/08/oculus-rift-kickstarter/), was on the GDC show floor in full force, with an elegant booth and hands-on opportunities for all attendees. A line wrapped around the booth as developers waited to try the virtual-reality headset.
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Another entry in the Independent Games Festival's selection, [Dys4ia](http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565) is billed as an "autobiographical game about going through hormone replacement therapy." It's a Wario Ware-inspired selection of tiny, seconds-long mini-games, each of which illustrates a particular part of the process undertaken by the game's creator Anna Anthropy.
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Although Sony has not yet shown off the actual PlayStation 4 console, it has unveiled early versions of its controller and camera for its upcoming console, which it will release this holiday season. Attendees swarmed the display case in Sony's booth to get photos of the Dual Shock 4 controllers and the PlayStation 4 Eye camera.
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One would-be GDC attendee, Bradley Rose, drummed up attention the old-fashioned way: out on the street. Dressed as Luigi from Super Mario Bros. and holding a large sign that read "Luigi Needs a GDC Pass," he greeted people in character. When they stopped to take photos, he handed them his business card, which billed him as a "content creator \[for\] social media and game design" and carried the hashtag #GDCLuigi. (According to [Rose's Twitter](https://twitter.com/bradleyrose), someone did give him a pass after an hour of panhandling.)
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Gunslinger Stratos is an elaborate arcade machine released only in Japan. The Japanese tech company [Silicon Studio](https://www.siliconstudio.co.jp/en/) brought it to Game Developers Conference as a clever way of attracting attendees to their booth -- the game is created with its middleware. The gun controllers have magnets inside; if the player sticks them together horizontally or vertically, the on-screen gun changes its shape.
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Ever watch a crew of spaceship engineers shout futuristic-sounding commands at each other, and think you'd be really good at that? Spaceteam is a cooperative, multi-device game that lets you do just that. Each player's screen has a variety of random dials and gauges and buttons, and other players will see instructions that they have to yell out to everyone else in the room. You have to listen closely to your friends or you'll all die together.
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Or, you could just work on a massive triple-A game. Representatives of Irrational Games, the developer behind this week's smash hit BioShock Infinite, greeted job seekers at a career pavilion booth on the GDC show floor. Posted in the back was this timeline of the company's releases, which seems to suggest that if you join up now, you should ship a product sometime around 2019!
