February 27th, 2008 by adam
(re-posted here from the main IGDA ARG SIG blog (http://igda.org/arg), because the IGDA webserver is too weak and crappy to allow image uploads, which I needed to do :( )
The 2008 GDC Group Gathering went well, with approximately 20+ people turning up. We had a quick discussion about SIG activities and then broke out for [...]
February 27th, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speakers: Daniel James, Three Rings; Matt Mihaly, Iron Realms Entertainment
Very brief notes…
February 27th, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Jeremy Irish, Groundspeak
Entertaining, with a lot of very small anecdotes, but nothing non-obvious in this talk. Everything he gave as advice you’d probably work out for yourself within your first project without losing time from doing so.
February 27th, 2008 by adam
I work at a company where managing and directing a subset of the global core-tech is part of my day-to-day job, and I’ve been trying to find good, positive ways forwards. After a year in this role, I’m looking back and wondering whether it’s working for us, and where it’s been good and where it’s [...]
February 24th, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Derek French
Given the title, this talk came far short of my expectations. At the end of the talk I also felt extra annoyed that it felt like half the talk was just waffle, mostly towards the end with lots of repetition of the same vague opinions over and over again.
HOWEVER … when I came [...]
February 24th, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP
I want a full-time economist working for MY company.
And: CCP staff should give more of the GDC talks, they’re good. And entertaining.
In the midst of a week of depressingly dumb comments (on the topic of economy: what possessed Matt Miller to argue against microtransactions because accountants like to see x million players [...]
February 23rd, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Susan Wu, Charles River Ventures + panellists, see below for details
EDIT: just finished an editing round; I’m about 2/3 through cleaning this up. That’s why it all goes a bit funky towards the end. I promise I’ll clean up the rest of it ASAP…
Excellent panel, probably the most informative one I’ve been to at [...]
February 23rd, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Lesley Matthieson, High Impact
I didn’t find this talk at all useful, not because it was badly given (it wasn’t) but because the speaker seemed to be coming from such a rarefied environment that the ideas and suggestions would only work for a narrow set of people/projects that didn’t include me.
February 21st, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Shannon Posniewski, Cryptic
I was expecting something shockingly naive and/or stupid from the title of the session. The first thing the speaker said was that the title was completely wrong, so I ran with that. With that out of the way, the talk was fine, although small things kept coming out during the talk that [...]
February 20th, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Michael Smith, MindCandy
Another half-hour-long introductory topic talk from the Worlds In Motion summit. Short but sweet. A nice overview of lots of different things going on in the use (and sales) of real-world goods as part of online games / virtual worlds. Misses out plenty of things, but does a good job of giving [...]
February 20th, 2008 by adam
In case it’s not obvious enough, I’m tagging all my session-writeups this week with “GDC 2008″ (HTML | RSS).
Mostly I’m covering online-related and social-networking related topics, but jumping around between GDC Mobile, Serious Games, Worlds In Motion summit, Independent Games, and the Game Design, Production, and Business tracks.
February 19th, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Jeffrey Steefel, Turbine
IMHO, Jeffrey hereby strengthens the weight of evidence that Turbine is genuinely turning the corner from making poorly-guided foolish games to doing cutting-edge stuff and doing it well. Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has gone some considerable way to burying the failings of Asheron’s Call 2 (AC2) and Dungeons and Dragons [...]
February 19th, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Peter Marx, Analog Protocol/MTV
Good to hear about virtual worlds and MMOs from the perspective of a mega content / media company. Several interesting ideas and explanations that are well worth reading if you haven’t already been tracking the way that Viacom et al have been approaching the online socializing space.
Nothing fundamentally new, but the [...]
February 19th, 2008 by adam
Summary
EDIT: Slides + voiceover on Adrian’s site now – freetoplay.biz
A good introduction to people wanting to start paying attention to what’s been happening in MMO industry for the last 5 years. Didn’t delve into the recent changes in the last 1-2 years, more dwelling on the fact that the last 2 years have seen the [...]
February 18th, 2008 by adam
Summary
A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.
Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but [...]
February 18th, 2008 by adam
Summary
A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.
Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but [...]
February 18th, 2008 by adam
Summary
A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.
Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but [...]
February 13th, 2008 by adam
Today, I was pointed at an article suggesting that java is responsible for the decline in the quality of Computer Science graduates.
Specifically if you want to be a Computer Scientist, I’d say that the initial claim that “java is bad as a first language” is true, just as “C++ is bad as a first language” [...]
February 13th, 2008 by adam
http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/
At long last, the new version of my charts and analysis is now online! I don’t have numbers for every game, but there are quite a few updates, most notably to World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Dofus, Tibia, and NCSoft’s various titles. Also included are preliminary numbers for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Lord of [...]
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