My GDC and SXSW schedule

Well, here I am doing a whole bunch of talks and panels and stuff next week at the Game Developers Conference. What’s more, I go straight from there to SXSW Interactive, where I’ll do two more panels.

Here’s the short form, and the long form is after the jump.

GDC:

• MMOs, Past, Present, and Future: a panel moderated by Gordon Walton, with
• Sharing Control: a panel moderated by David Edery
• a new hour-long lecture entitled Where Game Meets the Web
• Jon Blow’s session on Nuances of Design: A Experiment in Visceral Communication, where I’ll be demoing and talking about Andean Bird

Alas, this means I will miss this session which may be of particular interest to some readers here. I know it has some inspiration from the talk I gave two years ago, and can’t wait to finally see what they have developed!

A Working Notation for Game Design (Sponsored by ITI Techmedia)
Speaker: Paul Sheppard (R&D Programme Manager, ITI Techmedia), Andrew McLennan (Metaforic), Chris Walton (Metaforic)

Session Description
Making games that play well is an uncertain business, widely regarded as a black art. This session proposes a working notation for game design that can be used to understand games and why they work or fail. Real examples will be shown to illustrate the notation and its practical application.

SXSW:

• A panel entitled Gamer’s Games: Microcontent and User Creation moderated by Mark Wallace of 3pointd.com
• Jerry Paffendorf’s panel On the Edge of Independent User-Creation in Gamespace

Here’s the full details on the GDC talks:

MMOs, Past, Present and Future
Speaker: Gordon Walton (co-Studio Director, BioWare), Daniel James (CEO, Three Rings), Raph Koster (President, Areae, Inc.), Mark Jacobs (VP EA, Studio GM EA Mythic, EA Mythic), Mark Kern (President & CEO, Red 5 Studios), Rob Pardo (VP, Game Design, Blizzard Entertainment)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 7, 2007) 4:00pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 3006, West Hall
Track: Business and Management
Format: 60-minute Panel
Experience Level: All

Session Description
While massively multiplayer online games have a history approaching the length of stand-alone computer games, they are suddenly one of the high growth areas of the electronic entertainment market. The panelists discuss the history that got us to today, where WoW is – the world-wide phenomenon in gaming. The majority of this panel session is reserved for the combination of audience questions and for the panelists to discuss how they see the future unfolding; specifically where is this medium going and how is it going to get there.

Idea Takeaway
The attendees learn how the MMO market has developed over the last 25+ years, but more importantly they understand where some of the most experienced MMO developers believe this medium is going, and how they see this evolution occurring.

Intended Audience
Anyone interested in massively multiplayer gaming, regardless of the client platforms used (PC, console, handheld or mobile).

Nuances of Design: An Experiment in Visceral Communication
Speaker: Jonathan Blow, Raph Koster (President, Areae, Inc.), Rod Humble (Executive Producer, Electronic Arts), Chaim Gingold (Game Designer, Maxis/Electronic Arts)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 8, 2007) 2:30pm — 4:30pm
Location (room): Room 132, North Hall
Track: Game Design
Format: 2-Hour Lecture
Experience Level: Advanced

Session Description
This session consists of a few short presentations; during each presentation, the audience actually plays game snippets that illustrate the speaker’s point, rather than just watching.

To participate fully, please bring a laptop running Windows XP with a reasonable graphics chipset (Radeon 7500/GeForce 4Go level or higher), and a pair of in-ear headphones.

Most modern games are conduits for a large amount of visceral communication: the colors and sounds that the player sees, along with the way his actions feel, convey most of the game’s information and constitute most of the experience. However, when talking about games at a conference like this one, we tend to use a classical lecture format: a presenter divides the time between talking about a game and showing demos of it. The talking is good for presenting intellectual ideas, but it’s not effective for communicating the visceral properties of a game. The demo handles part of this, showing colors and sounds. But a demo doesn’t let us experience gameplay directly; we must infer what the gameplay feels like based on what we see, and this can make it very difficult for the presenter to communicate certain kinds of subtlety and nuance.

This section attempts a different approach; by augmenting a classical presentation with play sessions, we hope to facilitate understanding that is instinctual rather than intellectual.

Idea Takeaway
Experience the presenters’ design concerns at a more instinctual level.

Intended Audience
Game designers of all levels.

Where Game Meets the Web
Speaker: Raph Koster (President, Areae, Inc.)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 8, 2007) 5:30pm — 6:30pm
Location (room): Room 3020, West Hall
Track: Business and Management
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

Session Description
We’ve all heard it, and probably even said it: games are kind of like movies. We have the blockbusters, the opening days, the big budgets and interdisciplinary teams… There are many lessons we can learn from the well-established content industries.

But games are also software, and the software world is undergoing a revolution. The Web world is in ferment – some say a new bubble – and it’s dragging content industries kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The underlying technological assumptions of the Web regarding concepts such as IP, distribution, and user participation are very different from the Big Media way of doing things. Could “release early, release often” possibly apply to the world of gamemaking?

This session is about lessons we can learn from how the Web world works, applied to the game industry, and concrete takeaways on how to leverage the brave new Web world.

Sharing Control
Speaker: David Edery (Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner, Xbox Live Arcade), Raph Koster (President, Areae, Inc.), Kim Pallister (Microsoft), Ray Muzyka (CEO, BioWare Corp.), Matt Brown (Technical Director / Design Director, Maxis/Electronic Arts)
Date/Time: Friday (March 9, 2007) 10:30am — 11:30am
Location (room): Room 3016, West Hall
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Panel
Experience Level: All

Session Description
This year’s GDC theme is “Take Control”, but this next generation of gaming should be equally remarkable for its emphasis on broadband-enabled social systems, multiplayer games, and user-generated content. This panel will grapple with the benefits and challenges of *sharing control* with gamers. Issues include: how can developers involve consumers in the design process, how can user-generated content help and harm a game, what are the best ways to prevent “low quality” UGC from frustrating the community, and how can user-driven marketing be encouraged?

Idea Takeaway
Attendees will learn the benefits and disadvantages of “sharing control”, as well as concrete recommendations for sharing control more effectively.

Intended Audience
Anyone interested in the design and/or business justifications for “sharing control” with consumers will enjoy this panel. Prerequisite knowledge is not necessary.

And on the SXSW talks:

On the Edge of Independent User-Creation in Gamespace

Room 9C

Sunday, March 11th

5:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Add this to your SXSW Calendar

We’ve got the participatory web, Web 2.0, whatever you want to call it. Millions of amateurs now routinely use the web to create and distribute their own movies, mash-ups, blogs, custom widgets, interfaces, and the like. This wave of user-created content is swelling towards video games and virtual worlds. PC games can be modded and customized, console systems are really just powerfully networked computers in the process of opening up, and virtual world platforms are emerging that allow you to create completely personalized identities and environments. More and more the means of content creation are being offloaded from traditional top-down gaming companies to independent teams and individuals for self-expression, personal projects and profit. This panel will examine the trend towards user-creation in gamespace and focus on new opportunities exemplified by virtual world platforms like Second Life and Multiverse, software developer kits for the next-gen console systems (Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and PlayStation 3), 3D map and modeling platforms like Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth, and the surrounding content creation tools, both currently available and on the horizon. If you’ve ever wanted into the game or virtual world space on your own terms, whether it’s running around Halo looking like your real life self or getting your own vision for a virtual experience off the ground, the doors are beginning to open, you don’t need a badge to get to work, and this panel is for you.

Moderator: Jerry Paffendorf , The Electric Sheep Company

Jerry Paffendorf The Electric Sheep Company
John Bacus Prod Mgr, Google
Jamais Cascio World-Builder-in-Chief, Open the Future
Raph Koster Pres, Areae Inc

Gamer’s Games: Microcontent and User Creation

Room 9C

Monday, March 12th

11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Add this to your SXSW Calendar

As with the Web’s transformation into Web 2.0, game interfaces andsoftware are becoming increasingly open; you can modify Half-Life,create a virtual skirt for sale in Second Life, or write an entireapplication to run in World of Warcraft. As development and contentcreation becomes increasingly democratized, this panel looks how gamesand virtual worlds may change over the next few years. What will itmean when every player can change the rules? How does emergentgameplay fit the picture? Is virtual commerce really all it’s crackedup to be? And what happens when everyone’s a developer and there’s noone left to play the games?

Moderator: Mark Wallace , 3pointD.com

Mark Wallace 3pointD.com
Betsy Book Dir of Prod Mgmt, Makena Technologies
Raph Koster Pres, Areae Inc
Reuben Steiger CEO, Millions of Us
Corey Bridges www.multiverse.net, multiverse.net