Let's Begin This Recap With a Big Fat Self-Commiserating Rant
Airline customer service plans are always quick to point out that the companies are not responsible for damages caused by delays, cancellations, lost baggage, or anything else. Which basically means that they can do whatever the heck they want, and if you're not happy, you can always dial 1-800-We-don't-give-a-crap-because-all-of-our-competitors-are-just-as-lousy-anyway.

Case in point: my flight from Montreal to San Jose, with connection in Chicago, on March 5^th. To make a long story short, I arrived in San Jose five hours late because of an incident that was solved with a foot of duct tape.

(Some baggage handler dude had backed his truck into the plane, which was parked at the gate at the time and therefore neither hard to see nor sneaking up on the truck in treacherous fashion. After careful inspection, application of the aforementioned adhesive and copious paperwork shuffling, we lifted off just in time to get to Chicago, sit helpless on the tarmac while our connection left on time - the one plane in a million to actually do so - and spend the rest of the day waiting for the next one. The kicker: between us and another group coming in from Toronto at the same time, there were thirty of us who missed that flight. By a grand total of 90 seconds.)

Qualitative Analysis
Airlines can wait an hour for one foot of duct tape, but not five minutes for thirty passengers. Duct tape, important. Customers who have non-refundable tickets, not important.

Quantitative Analysis
Duct tape costs, what, five bucks for 100 yards? That makes it about 1.5 cents a foot. It took less than a foot of duct tape to keep us on the ground in Montreal for an hour (I was sitting 8 feet away from the whole surreal process) but we'll round it up to 1.5 cents anyway. Dividing that 1.5 cents by 30 passengers, we reach the conclusion that, since the airline couldn't wait for us in Chicago, the value of a captive passenger is less than five hundredths of a cent.

My dead, desiccated remains will be worth more than that, based on atoms of trace elements alone.

Transportation is the backbone of a modern economy. You have to wonder how the USA have managed to remain a superpower, despite the airline industry's best efforts to bludgeon it back into the Stone Age.

And Now, For Something More Pleasant
But I made it to San Jose anyway, and I wasn't the only one. The hallways, the sessions and the expo floor were a whole lot more crowded than they were last year. And despite the recent rash of layoffs and studio closures, the general vibe was a lot more positive as well. Quite simply, the people I talked to were happy to be there and quite optimistic about the future. The reasons varied, but the two most important were:

[] Lots of companies moving into the somewhat safer, higher profile and more lucrative console market. The Economist recently quoted an industry insider as saying that the average price of a console game for the next generation would reach £15 million. That's a lot of jobs for a long time.

[] At the other end of the spectrum, numerous developers are now walking the indie route to escape from the hiring-overwork-layoff cycle.

The Big News
Indeed, the number of sessions catering to the indie developer, which used to hover around zero, was surprisingly high. And they were very well-attended, too: the fine folks at Gamedev.net, who presented ways to leverage online resources to develop games on the cheap, spoke to a packed room - despite being scheduled against Will Wright's always-amazing lecture.

The indie movement is not coming, it is right here. The Independent Game Festival showcased several brilliant innovations this year; the recipient of the grand prize is a beautiful and fun game of safari photography, while the audio innovation prize went to a game for the visually impaired. In general, the quality of the games featured at the IGF grows by leaps and bounds every year, and the style (this year at least) is distinctly unique. One word: YESSSS!

Other big trends included:

The Nokia Invasion
The Finnish company's new N-Gage mobile game deck looks very promising: it has a much better display than the GBA, and it gets wireless net access and cellular telephony as well. To make sure that the message got through to developers, Nokia had quite possibly the biggest booth on the expo floor, a handful of sponsored sessions, high-quality documentation, and ads everywhere, including on the sides of the conference's shuttle busses.

Now, of course, there is still the slight sticking point of the N-Gage's release price. No one at Nokia's booth was allowed to say a word about it, which hardly inspires confidence. In fact, rumor ran amok. If the true price turns out to be $150, Nokia will probably eat Nintendo's lunch. If it's closer to $300 as I heard in one roundtable, they'll be laughed out of the market.

The Console Wars
As usual, Xbox was all over the place: sponsoring conference grab bags, hosting the biggest party, and so on.

As usual, PlayStation's presence was slightly more understated, but Sony still had an enormous and well-attended booth.

As usual, Nintendo acted as if North American developers were about as relevant as airline customer service.

Middleware, Middleware Everywhere
And not only for graphics and audio, either. Criterion Software, makers of RenderWare, still ruled the expo floor, but other providers offered tools to speed up development of everything from artificial intelligence (AI Implant and SimBionic both look promising) to network security.

One particularly clever innovation was the Endorphin virtual motion capture studio – a physics-based engine that lets artists assign behaviors to characters and export the results as mocap data. You can also import data from motion capture sessions and augment the characters with moves that no human actors can simulate, or even generate fake mocap results for four-legged animals and aliens.

At several thousand dollars a seat, most of these tools are out of reach of the indies, but the free two-machine AlienBrain asset manager license was the most welcome surprise of the show.

Everyone's Writing Books
It used to be that no one would bother publishing books for game developers. Then, Prima (now Premier Press), Charles River Media and Wordware got into the act. Now, New Riders/NRG/Pearson, Morgan Kaufman, and even GAMA itself are moving into the market. Add the few others who are dipping their toes and testing the water, and the four to six books a year that we saw as recently as 2001 have turned into something like fifty.

Now, as a book writer myself, I feel that multiple outlets are a good thing. But six or seven full-scale book lines? About game development? Something has to give. We're not THAT big of a crowd that we can support so many publishers. At least one of these collections is bound to fizzle within a year or so.

Continued >>>

And, for the record, we did run into a couple of badge-checker types and food service ladies who, while friendly and charming, didn’t really have the game development insight we were looking for (although hot dogs apparently sold well this year).