GDCOnline: AAA to Social Games coverage

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Oct 062010
 

A few sites covered the talk I gave on John Donham’s behalf here at GDC Online.

I do think Gamespot commenters interpret my little dig at SWTOR a bit too negatively — it wasn’t a dis but rather a gentle dig, considering that most of the team leaders there are good friends, and one of them was in the front row. 🙂

The slides are actually John’s to post, so I won’t do so here unless he tells me to, but Tami’s liveblog actuall captures the specific slides rather well.

  3 Responses to “GDCOnline: AAA to Social Games coverage”

  1. Kaige says:
    October 6, 2010 at 5:24 pm

    Nice quote of the moment! One person’s signal is always someone else’s noise.

  2. Tweets that mention Raph’s Website » GDCOnline: AAA to Social Games coverage -- Topsy.com says:
    October 6, 2010 at 5:49 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Raph Koster and Gus Mastrapa, Evan Sims. Evan Sims said: GDCOnline: AAA to Social Games coverage http://is.gd/fOLgG […]

  3. Tim says:
    October 8, 2010 at 3:16 pm

    Raph I didn’t make it up to Austin until Friday to hear the talk, but did find this quote interesting from the earlier talk…

    But by taking advantage of access to metrics, triple-A developers moving into social games no longer have to wait after years of development “to find out if something works,” Koster said. Social game makers can find out almost instantly.

    It’s better to “have your dream crushed after 48 hours rather than five years,” said Koster. “…Establish a process that gets you feedback at every stage, including before you even start.

    I love the idea, believe the concept, and I’d like to make it a strong motto for development at work. But here’s the challenge: we make products (including games and online content) for kids, and for education — specifically kids in special ed with cognitive disabilities.

    In a nutshell, ethics says we can’t experiment with kids that much. We can’t try out educational concepts and say, “Oh well, that didn’t work”, at least not without considering we might leave a mess behind that’s very hard to fix. “Sorry about Jim being a bit mixed up on that whole ‘Walk / Don’t Walk’ thing.” We also don’t always see results quickly. Students may need to repeat an exercise many many times before they begin to understand it. If a student has done something 50 times and still not got it, is that par for the course, or sign of failure?

    All in all it makes the idea of applying this idea a challenge in some ways.

    I was thinking about this too during your talk on Friday as well. Many of the 40 points you presented were based to some extent on the player or players matching a fairly average model of a person. But what if the player is extremely sensitive or extremely insensitive to the needs of others for example? Or the player has phenomenal long term memory, or none at all?

    It’s an interesting challenge to think about how tweaking the variables in an equation might change the model, and if it breaks, or just moves into new territory. Your talk and Scott Rigby’s talk after were good food for thought.

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