techbear
10-31-2005, 07:43 AM
I attended the Austin Game Conference last thursday-friday, and after having family up for the weekend, I'm ready to do a dump of what I thought was important/interesting/memorable. Others may have come away with a completely different expereince.
1) The first keynote, by Sony prez Smedley, was lame and boring. He DID say that Sony's vision for the future was cross-platform online games. Check your characters' status on your cellphone in the morning on the way to work, play a little bit on your work computer during lunch, play at a kiosk or on a PSP at the coffeshop, go home and play on your computer, all the same game, all the same avatar.
2) My friend Mike dragged me to the first presentation of the day, a discussion of Alternate Reality Gaming (iluvbees.com, etc.). That was cool and interesting. The presenter pointed out 4 different noteable behaviors that come from such gaming:
2a: Folksonomy - like taxonomy, but created by the bottom users and pushed upward, instead of a designed taxonomy (like the dewey decimal system) which is imposed from above. Example: she designed a game where people could go to bookstores and re-shelve certain books to make a political point. Over time, she saw A FEW bookstore owners accepting this change.
2b: Pronoia - the opposite of paranoia, the feeling that everyone is conspiring behind your back to help you. Example: Players of these games will happily co-opt non players, even saying, "I'm saving Earth from the Covenent! Wanna help?" Players will also take a random helping hand as proof that they are doing the right thing, game-wise.
2c: Grooming - these live-action ARG players like to hold hands, and play simple contact games like thumb-wrestling. They feel their play experience is MUCH better if SOME touching goes on during it. Example - the latest sub-game of an ARG is Tombstone Texas Hold-em. It's a combination of Red Rover and Twister, and it's played in a cemetary. Two players each have to touch different tombstones while maintaining contact with each other. I don't know all the details.
2d: Science - as people group together in online spaces to collaboratively solve the puzzles of an ARG, they tend to apply the scientific method rigorously, even if they have to teach each other what the scientific method IS.
3: The second keynote was given by Dr. Richard Bartle. Much of his talk was about how great he was, how much multi-player games owe to him, and how he was first. Hard to tell how much of that was subtle joking, and how much was real hubris.
But his point was non-trivial. He pointed out that "hackers" (the good kind, that revel in computing, not the bad kind that crack and phreak) were the only gamers and game developers back in his day, because you had to be to have anything to do with a mainframe. These hackers had and have a "hacker ethos", a worldview and moral point of view that he called "chaotic good" (from D&D), and declared a Good Thing.
He stated that because of who we developers are (hackers), we have infused our online worlds with the Hacker Ethos, and SOME of the players who play in our online worlds become transformed by their online play experience, and become hackers themselves.
He also challenged us as online developers to admit that we COULD change the world through our game designs, by influencing the experience the players have.
4: I then attended a Casual Games roundtable discussion. I dislike the panel format; there's too much noise in the signal, with several people talking past each other.
However, one little gem jumped out at me. The panellists were each asked to define Casual Games. The one on the end (forgot his name, sorry) said that he makes casual games to that he can talk with his mother about what he does for a living. He defines Casual Games as; Point, Click, Execute. Three seperate, consecutive steps. An action game requires that those steps be concurrent, but his definition definitely sez they should be seperate.
Games that fit his description include Bookworm, by PopCap. I also realized that it fits the original Civilization, too, and I can't help but wonder if that had anything to do with Civ's popularity.
5: Then I finished the show by going to a couple of online game panels. Not a lot there, but a few things jumped out at me. First, the guy who makes A Tale In The Desert talked about user voting systems that were meta-game resistant (people making dummy accounts to vote for themselves, for instance).
His current system involves judging a voter on Freakiness, and Worldliness. Worldliness is a measure of how many votes the voter has previously participated in. Freakiness is how many times the voter has voted against the herd. These two measurements are used to weight the voter's vote.
6: In the same discussion, about user-generated content in online games, someone said, "Remember, text is the original user-generated content". That was inspirational to me.
7: In the Q&A section, someone stood up and said, "Why is the newbie experience in World of Warcraft so hard??" Everyone goggled, and assured her that the WoW newbie experience is the BEST in the industry. This stuck with me, because it shows how little the casual game market is being served for online games.
8: I was introduced to the nice folks at ZeoDesigns, a game design consulting firm. They produced this document: http://www.zeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html
It's well worth reading and arguing the merits of.
9: Overall, I saw lots of hiring. The place was jumping, there were lots of recruiting booths, and I ran into old industry friends who were starting new game companies, complete with funding. I saw lots of middleware providers, too.
10: As usual, my head is spinning with ideas, and it's gonna take a few days to settle down and decide what I want to do next. :)
1) The first keynote, by Sony prez Smedley, was lame and boring. He DID say that Sony's vision for the future was cross-platform online games. Check your characters' status on your cellphone in the morning on the way to work, play a little bit on your work computer during lunch, play at a kiosk or on a PSP at the coffeshop, go home and play on your computer, all the same game, all the same avatar.
2) My friend Mike dragged me to the first presentation of the day, a discussion of Alternate Reality Gaming (iluvbees.com, etc.). That was cool and interesting. The presenter pointed out 4 different noteable behaviors that come from such gaming:
2a: Folksonomy - like taxonomy, but created by the bottom users and pushed upward, instead of a designed taxonomy (like the dewey decimal system) which is imposed from above. Example: she designed a game where people could go to bookstores and re-shelve certain books to make a political point. Over time, she saw A FEW bookstore owners accepting this change.
2b: Pronoia - the opposite of paranoia, the feeling that everyone is conspiring behind your back to help you. Example: Players of these games will happily co-opt non players, even saying, "I'm saving Earth from the Covenent! Wanna help?" Players will also take a random helping hand as proof that they are doing the right thing, game-wise.
2c: Grooming - these live-action ARG players like to hold hands, and play simple contact games like thumb-wrestling. They feel their play experience is MUCH better if SOME touching goes on during it. Example - the latest sub-game of an ARG is Tombstone Texas Hold-em. It's a combination of Red Rover and Twister, and it's played in a cemetary. Two players each have to touch different tombstones while maintaining contact with each other. I don't know all the details.
2d: Science - as people group together in online spaces to collaboratively solve the puzzles of an ARG, they tend to apply the scientific method rigorously, even if they have to teach each other what the scientific method IS.
3: The second keynote was given by Dr. Richard Bartle. Much of his talk was about how great he was, how much multi-player games owe to him, and how he was first. Hard to tell how much of that was subtle joking, and how much was real hubris.
But his point was non-trivial. He pointed out that "hackers" (the good kind, that revel in computing, not the bad kind that crack and phreak) were the only gamers and game developers back in his day, because you had to be to have anything to do with a mainframe. These hackers had and have a "hacker ethos", a worldview and moral point of view that he called "chaotic good" (from D&D), and declared a Good Thing.
He stated that because of who we developers are (hackers), we have infused our online worlds with the Hacker Ethos, and SOME of the players who play in our online worlds become transformed by their online play experience, and become hackers themselves.
He also challenged us as online developers to admit that we COULD change the world through our game designs, by influencing the experience the players have.
4: I then attended a Casual Games roundtable discussion. I dislike the panel format; there's too much noise in the signal, with several people talking past each other.
However, one little gem jumped out at me. The panellists were each asked to define Casual Games. The one on the end (forgot his name, sorry) said that he makes casual games to that he can talk with his mother about what he does for a living. He defines Casual Games as; Point, Click, Execute. Three seperate, consecutive steps. An action game requires that those steps be concurrent, but his definition definitely sez they should be seperate.
Games that fit his description include Bookworm, by PopCap. I also realized that it fits the original Civilization, too, and I can't help but wonder if that had anything to do with Civ's popularity.
5: Then I finished the show by going to a couple of online game panels. Not a lot there, but a few things jumped out at me. First, the guy who makes A Tale In The Desert talked about user voting systems that were meta-game resistant (people making dummy accounts to vote for themselves, for instance).
His current system involves judging a voter on Freakiness, and Worldliness. Worldliness is a measure of how many votes the voter has previously participated in. Freakiness is how many times the voter has voted against the herd. These two measurements are used to weight the voter's vote.
6: In the same discussion, about user-generated content in online games, someone said, "Remember, text is the original user-generated content". That was inspirational to me.
7: In the Q&A section, someone stood up and said, "Why is the newbie experience in World of Warcraft so hard??" Everyone goggled, and assured her that the WoW newbie experience is the BEST in the industry. This stuck with me, because it shows how little the casual game market is being served for online games.
8: I was introduced to the nice folks at ZeoDesigns, a game design consulting firm. They produced this document: http://www.zeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html
It's well worth reading and arguing the merits of.
9: Overall, I saw lots of hiring. The place was jumping, there were lots of recruiting booths, and I ran into old industry friends who were starting new game companies, complete with funding. I saw lots of middleware providers, too.
10: As usual, my head is spinning with ideas, and it's gonna take a few days to settle down and decide what I want to do next. :)