Speaking at GDCOnline 2011
I’ll be doing two sessions at GDC Online this year. The first and smaller one, is a panel in the Game Career Seminar:
Breaking into the Game Biz – Ask the Pros!
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 4:30- 5:30 Ballroom B
Track / Duration / Format: Game Career Seminar / 60-Minute / PanelDescription: This panel asks what it takes to break into the game companies, gathering advice from the people who actually decide whether you’re coming on-board: the creatives & hiring managers. We’ve chosen luminaries from different studios and company types to answer all your questions!
Eligible Passes: All Access Pass, Game Career Seminar Pass
The second one is the meatier one, a session in the Customer Experience track, wherein I shall attempt to show just how much of social media practice comes out of games, and if not, where it came from; and then, extrapolate out to the problems social media should be running into any day now; and wonder whether games ever will retake the lead in connecting people online; and what that all means to you, the developer, if you now are running a single-player game inside an MMO-like construct called an achievements system inside a virtual worldish thing called a social network owned by someone else.
It’s All Games Now! How Games and Social Media are Converging
Speaker/s: Raph Koster (Playdom)
Day / Time / Location: Thursday 1:30- 2:30 Room 6
Track / Duration / Format: Customer Experience / 60-Minute / LectureDescription:These days, social media is looking an awful lot like games — and we don’t mean in the gamification sense! Rather, lessons drawn from online games have driven much of the development of the social media platforms we use today, from Twitter acting like real-time chat, to “avatars” that are public profiles on social networks. The cross-pollination between Internet communication systems and games has always been there, but now we’re at the point where we are putting games inside of, well, what looks a lot like games! What does ths mean for our customer experience? In this talk we’ll look at the parts of customer experience that are under your control as a developer — and the parts that are not. We’ll talk about best practices that don’t work in the new environment. We’ll examine the trends that are pointing the way forward, and talk about the problems and pitfalls that games anticipated that Web 2.0 might need to fix in version 3. And finally, we’ll see if we can peer into the crystal ball a little bit, and see if we can predict the future of connected gaming experiences.
Takeaway:
- A bit of a history lesson: where have we come from, in terms of community experiences?
- A large chunk of science: learn about the underlying structures behind community features: synchronous and asynchronous interactions, communications, profiles, etc
- A dollop of business: a frank evaluation of how our connected experience platforms work (and don’t work) today
- A dash of futurism: where do we see connected experiences going? What is the future of community management, forums, blogs, and games-as-a-service?
Eligible Passes:All Access Pass, Main Conference Pass
Should be fun! Guess I better start thinking about writing slides for it…
4 Responses to “Speaking at GDCOnline 2011”
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Every couple decades I break into the game industry, take a quick look around to see if there’s anything worth taking, and quietly slip out again. It’s good practice.
It would be interesting to hear Stephenson speak, even though it seems both he and Gibson maybe finally off their game a bit.
Social media and games? All people really want to know is how Zygna made all that money and how they can get some. Be sure to include that.
Good to hear you are keeping your profile up. Carry on buddy.
Started playing The Sims Social this week on Facebook. All the “quests” are gated within minutes unless you cough up some dough or addict some friends who might cough up some dough.
They’re more hardcore Zynga than Zynga, and they’re raking it in.
I remember back when I was complaining that Project Entropia was a giant cash-sucking slot machine. Little did I suspect that they were the vanguard of an epic struggle for the contents of my bank account.
I always thought convergence was going to be cool, until I realized that they were converging on The Vegas Experience by way of Skinner and Pavlov.
If anyone sees a youtube of these post them 🙂