AGC day two… a busy day.
Richard Bartle’s keynote–it coulda been me up there, basically. Yep, what he said. I think the tone of the conference as a whole is “change the world”–a phrase I heard used in at least four different sessions, and Richard’s presentation basically argued both that we do it whether we want to or not, and that there’s a specific culture that we are spreading, the hacker ethic, and that it’s a calling. So many people stuck around to ask questions and discuss the keynote that virtually every panel after it started 5 minutes late.
The user content panel has been discussed a few places already; it was entertaining. I thought that defining the spectrum of practices as “Vegas to Burning Man” was apt; the answer lies somewhere in between, of course. The audience was split evenly when DanielJames called for a voice vote at the end. I ended up choosing Burning Man, myself.
The panel I was on, regarding “who owns my lightsaber,” was entertaining to us panelists, at least. We were worried that we’d all just say “it’s the EULA, stupid,” but we moved past that to discussions that were interesting, I think.
The MMO rant panel once again echoed the “change the world” sentiment. Keep an eye out for Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green posting his rant, which was hysterically funny.
The presentation by the guys from PARC on key things that would improve social contact in MMOs was very useful and interesting. Eye contact, torso torque, looking where people are pointing, not staring, anims for interface actions so you can tell when someone is checking inventory, display of typed characters in real-time rather than when ENTER is hit, emphatic gestures automatically, pointing gestures and other emotes that you can hold, exaggerated faces anime super-deformed style or zoomed in inset displays of faces, so that the facial anims can be seen at a distance… the list was long, and all of it would make the worlds seem more real.
The dinner with far too many friends to mention, and then… off to jam with The Fat Man. My rendition of ‘Hotel California’ was well received, but once the classic rock segment ended when most folks had to leave, we got down to the real jamming. And as you see, here I am back at the hotel room blogging at 2:30am–that’s what a good jam will do to you.
8 Responses to “Hotel California”
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Bartle?s 5 most important folks in virtual worlds [IMG] Posted by Raph’s Website [HTML][XML][PERM] on Fri, 20 Jul 2007 03:12:38 +0000
Sounds like an interesting day. Body language enhancements to further the goal of ultimate emersion is good to hear, though I still wonder how such advancements will effect the seemingly continued move from imaginative role-playing to the more cosmetic/visual dependences.
It seems as if this push away from the imaginative resources will simply proliferate the trend of graphic tech innovation as opposed to design innovation (as you spoke of in your Games On Demand discussion).
Spot
In the discussion after the lecture (we stayed behind and discussed for a good extra 45 minutes) I did raise the issue of cost, but it was in the framework of asking the assembled whether it was worth it. Some of the academics were very surprised to hear how much money it could take to provide some of these features.
That said, if you look at something like the work Ken Perlin has done with faces, you can see that a lot of expressiveness is about bothering, rather than about graphics. You should definitely look at his demos. I am about to run off to catch a plane, so…
Thanks for the kind words, Raph. 🙂 I’ve posted my rant letter up on my blog already at: http://blog.psychochild.org/?p=92
Have fun,
I’m going to promote that info to a full post, Brian! 🙂 Plus, gotta keep up the furious posting pace…!
[…] Raph has said that the overall theme of AGD was ‘change the world’. I think that shows his idealistic side. To me, the recurring theme seemed to be ‘how can we shake users for loose change?’ Runescape, Station Exchange, and Real Money Trades came up very frequently, to the point I was tired of hearing it by the end of the first day. […]
Vegas Or Burning Man?
Were two possible futures for online games outlined by Daniel James of Three Rings Design when he moderated the User Created Content; Boom Or Bane? panel that I participated in at the Austin Game Conference. In one future, giant entertainment
[…] Raph Koster […]