gdco

  • GDCO2011: It’s All Games Now

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    Title slide for "It's All Games Now"Here are the slides for the talk that I gave today at GDC Online. I have to warn you that more than usual, you needed the performance, I think. So keep an eye out for when the video shows up on the GDCVault — I’ll be sure to let you know. 🙂

    It seems to have gone very very well. Lots of positive feedback on Twitter and in the hallways afterwards.

    If I had to summarize my message, I suppose I would rattle off this set of bullet points:

    • We are losing (or changing) some qualities of games because of the contexts in which they exist now, particularly social media. We let the real world invade more — such as microtransactions and RMT — and we also let the real world shape design decisions — for example, giving up on the notion of not having global chat in you virtual world.
    • We’re understanding games better than ever thanks to both design theory and real-world science. And also understanding ourselves as people better.
    • That understanding is going into applying gamelike features to real life. Not just stuff like gamification, but also common features of social media that clearly draw heavily from game inspirations, such as quantified reputation systems, achievement systems, and even how our profiles look on social networking sites.
    • This is made easier because we’re in a “cloud phase” in the evolution of computing. The pendulum always swings from cloud to local.
    • But our local machines have gotten more accessible, but a lot less open over time, and the net result is that we don’t really control the cloud or our local devices now.
    • The rub there for the game industry is that we have essentially ended up recreating the console ecosystem, only with iOS and Facebook instead of Sony and Nintendo, which doesn’t bode well for several segments of the industry.
    • Instead, it just increases the odds that the process will accelerate, as we will be the product. Indeed, already our perception of reality has been greatly filtered by social media, and is less objective and inclusive.
    • But we shouldn’t forget that we are the ones who define the rules here; we’re the wizards of the game world. Games are fundamentally social media and always have been.
    • We will be OK, as long as we don’t forget that the point of games is not the points structures, but the people we played with, and the lessons we learned.

    But summarizing it that way skips the fairytale I told, and the rapid-fire science-fiction story I told, and my brief Jonathan Coulton musical quote, and much more. 🙂

    I ended on this hope from Ted Nelson:

    I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.

    You can read Gamasutra’s write-up here. I think it captures the essence pretty well!

  • Speaking at GDCOnline 2011

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    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 / Panel

    Description: 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 / Lecture

    Description: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…

  • Game Developers Choice Online Awards noms open!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments

    Step one: be a professional game developer and Gamasutra.com member.

    Step two: think long and hard about the best online game experiences you have seen since last June.

    Step three: visit the Game Developers Choice Online Awards website and nominate them!

    The categories include best online innovation, for pushing boundaries in how we play; best online visual arts; best online tech; best online game design; best online audio; best social network game; best live game; best community relations; best new online game; online games legend (for an individual’s career); and Hall of Fame, which Ultima Online got last year, for a game that, well, changed the game.

    Go, submit!