speaking

  • 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…

  • 10 Game Design Lessons for Games-as-Service, my CC2011 talk

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    Title slideThis was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.

    I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.

    I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats:

    I did try uploading it to Slideshare, but boy, did it mess up the fonts. I take a lot of care with the graphic design of my decks, and it was just too ugly to tolerate. 🙂 I am sure I could figure it out given time, but I don’t have said time. So if someone else wants to take the PPT and get it uploaded in a way that actually resembles the PDF, go for it.

    The slides should be pretty self-explanatory, but the core message is not unlike the much more detailed version of things I put forth in my recent blog on on Marketing.

  • Speaking at Casual Connect

    Hours Categories Game talk

    I’m speaking at Casual Connect tomorrow at 11:30, in the Recital Hall. Topic:

    Ten Lessons from Game Design for Games-As-Service

    Designers design inside of contexts: the business model, the distribution channel, the platform, the intended audience. Sometimes, these change, and the change profoundly affects how we create games that players like to play and pay for. Few changes have been as profound as the move from games as fire-and-forget products to services played for months if not years. Raph Koster, VP of Creative Design at Playdom, has been working exclusively in games-as-services for over fifteen years, and in this talk he’ll present to you the top ten lessons you need to learn for this environment: What does “service” really mean? What mechanics always work? Why and how do you measure things differently? And what, in the end, makes the games fundamentally different?

    I’m only at the conference for one brief day — fly up in the morning, and back in the evening. As usual, I will have slides posted up here after the talk.

  • GDC Vault posts my Social Mechanics talk for free

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    GDC Vault – Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design] is a link that takes you to the GDC Vault where you can watch a full video of the presentation, with the slides side by side, for free.

    Of course, you didn’t need that, right? Because you already paid to get access to the utterly awesome GDC Vault. 🙂

    There are a couple more free talks released today as well, including the AI rant and an inside look at the Humble Indie Bundle. You can check out all the free talks here.