Austin Game Conference
So, next week I will be at the Austin Game Conference. My schedule:
Wednesday, 1:30pm – 2:30pm
The Future of Virtual Worlds
Will Second Life get bigger than World of Warcraft? Will Multiverse get bigger than Second Life? Will Google Earth get bigger than them all? (Why not? MySpace now gets more traffic than Yahoo! and who would have bet a quarter on that?) The virtual worlds are changing drastically, atomizing through user-created content, providing end-users with business opportunities and meshing with an increasingly interoperable World Wide Web. Join us for a discussion on the future of virtual worlds with a panel that includes founders of Second Life and Multiverse, a legendary MMOG designer, and a futurist and journalist of the wider metaverse space.
- Jerry Paffendorf, Futurist, The Electric Sheep Company, (moderator)
- Corey Bridges, Executive Producer and Marketing Director, The Multiverse Network
- Raph Koster
- Cory Ondrejka, CTO, Linden Lab
- Mark Wallace, Editor, 3pointD
Mark has already blogged about his excitement surrounding this panel. I agree that it should make for a fun, and possibly contentious discussion. I suspect, however, that we’re lacking someone from the straight-up classic MMORPG business to serve as an advocate for the status quo.
Thursday, 11:30am – 12:30pm
The Age of the Dinosaurs
Are we facing an extinction level event in the near future? The business of online worlds, and indeed that of the entire game industry, is evolving in new directions, and companies that adapt will reap the rewards. Those that don’t, well, it’s better not to dwell on that. This lecture will examine business trends in the game development industry, the pressures that are changing the current publisher-developer model and the brave new world that faces us all after the fruition of current trends.
I haven’t even started my slides for this one — I have bits of research laying all around. 😛
13 Responses to “Austin Game Conference”
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The Age of Dinosaurs : I love these doom and gloom pronouncments. It always seems to come from Inside an industry too – I wonder why that is ?
TV will destroy Movies!!! Wait, it will destroy comic books!!! …ah wait.
No, Consoles will end all PC gaming as we know it!!!!… ah wait
I know! having more than one new big online game will keep anyone from ever playing online games like we do now!!! Ya thats it. That one will come true.
This is looking set to be an awesome show. I am so glad I’m going to be able to make it this year… I only wish I could attend multiple panels at one time!
For reference, does anyone know if recording devices are allowed? If not, are recordings of various sessions made available after the conference? There are several sessions that look potentially promising to pass on to instructors I know at the local high school and ITT Technical college, for example… but are there restrictions on that kind of thing? I couldn’t find any references at the conference web site itself…
I will be dropping by AGC for the first time, this year. (Seeing as how I live in Austin now, this shouldn’t be too much of a hardship. 🙂 ) Having missed GDC this year, due to crunching in Australia, it will be good to finally have a chance to catch up with everyone!
We should try to meet up at the conference. I’ll likely be attending both of those panels/presentations, and will be on one of my own Thursday afternoon (something about third party websites and what they can do for you).
[…] Comments […]
“Something about..” indeed.
Looking forward to AGC this year, the schedule looks great and I don’t see having any empty spots in my schedule, which is awesome. If I remember correctly, we need to buy Raph a birthday drink while we are there as well..
Hrm, a panel asking whether Second Life will be bigger than WoW, moderated by a prominent Second Life booster whose company makes its living operating in Second Life, with the CTO of Linden on the panel, and Mark Wallace, who writes about Second Life approximately every other post (literally) on his blog, also on the panel, but nobody from Blizzard? That’s 60% of the panel packed with unabashed Second Life types.
It confuses me to ask whether Second Life might surpass WoW I guess. Might it not make more sense to compare games that are almost there, and have actual masses of users, not just masses of registrations? (Hell, as I mentioned before, WE have had more registrations than Second Life has.)
I smell another Linden PR coup.
–matt
Good Stuff! Cant wait to see the followup articles.
Aw, man, that’s in the same time slot the panel I’m on. 🙁
But, let me do a bit of advertising: come see “The Joy and Pain of Running Your Very Own MMOG” to see the real future as described by people in the trenches running boutique games. 🙂
I didn’t see the ‘age of dinosaurs’ in the program. When is it? Is it a lecture or a panel?
Ack! I just found it and it’s at the same time as my talk! Doh!
Doh! I hope someone goes to the talk by Mr. Mellon from emergent!!
I plan on going to The Future of Virtual Worlds. That is a given but, I can’t decide between:
Community by Design: Intentionally Leveraging the Strengths of Your Player Base
or
Emerging Public Relations Strategies for MMO Games
I’ll may flip a coin…