June 15th, 2008 by adam
Based on my unscientific quick straw poll, the majority of computer-literate people have no idea how WLAN / wifi / wireless LAN security works and - worse - are actively exposing all their data and passwords to all services, having convinced themselves that they are “mostly” safe or secure.
I’m posting this in the (possibly vain) hope that it might persuade some more people to stop being foolish and/or lazy and perpetrating embarassingly poor security with their own and other people’s systems. I’m going to (hopefully) blow apart a popular myth. And hopefully get a decent Google ranking for it, which I’ll explain in a moment.
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June 11th, 2008 by adam
At the Casual Games conference at GDC 06, one of the audience stood up and asked the panel of Serious Games or Casual Games industry experts whether they thought that Brain Training was going to do similar numbers in the US as it had done in Japan, and how that might change the face of casual gaming.
The response from the panel was almost literally: “What? Never heard of it”, leading to shock and awe on the part of the questioner, and a collective shrug of “who cares?” from the panel. I was very surprised, but also highly amused at the ignorance of the US casual games people on the panel, and expected that sooner or later they’d get their comeuppance for not paying any attention to worldwide big trends like BT.
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June 11th, 2008 by adam
I just heard this talk at the MMOGfest academic mini-conference last week - apparently, it’s mostly the same as the talk he gave at the independent MMO conference earlier this year, but I think a lot of people didn’t manage to go to that one, so it seems worth reporting here.
Like all the other conference-talk writeups, any errors and ommissions are my fault, and my personal comments appear in square brackets throughout.
Summary
As noted in his Guardian article, “We’ve won”: games are here to stay. In the MMO space - despite all the threats and challenges - it looks like MMOs will continue to innovate and expand, and become better and better. A good, upbeat, keynote talk.
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May 22nd, 2008 by adam
Edward Hunter, comScore
Summary
Some useful stats, and some interesting issues raised in terms of privacy and practicalities of gathering stats.
A lot of good advice on how to select a target market for an online game that’s better than “any hardcore RPG players” - both better as in more precise and usable, and also better as in bigger and worth more money.
LOTS of questions afterwards; read to the bottom to see them all.
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May 22nd, 2008 by adam
Nicole Lazzaro
Summary
I think Nicole is wonderfully off the wall, and this lecture underlined that. At the very dull GDC “roundtable” (where less than 10% of the audience opened their mouths) this year on Free to play, Pay for Items, she came out with the idea that we should be looking at making buying things in online games as enjoyable as shopping is in real life, and wondered why this inherently addictive real-world activity was so dull in almost all online games.
Unfortunately, I found the lecture a bit too off-the-wall, and very hard to follow, even having briefly looked at her proprietary “language of fun” docs before.
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May 15th, 2008 by adam
Robert Mitchell, Sony Online Entertainment
Summary
Interesting to see what they’re doing, we’ve been looking at a lot of similar stuff recently. If I were in their position I’d want to try hacking the IDE to make it integrate with their build system directly - the speaker said that highly integrated build systems are a must for this stuff, but that doing everything inside the IDE with no external clicks or actions (like a “check in to perforce” action) was also essential. You can’t do both 100% without modifying the IDE; I’ve done that before for stuff we did for PXC, and it works like a dream, ONCE you’ve got it working ;).
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May 15th, 2008 by adam
I’ve been nagging game developers to writeup every game-conference session they go to, and blog it. I think this will serve a bunch of extremely valuable purposes, including:
- make sure that good talks and speakers get their work indexed by google; google isn’t great at finding stuff inside Powerpoint slides, and conferences only have a 30%-60% hit rate on managing to get the slides online anyway!
- provide rich, public, feedback on what’s both good and bad in talks, making it easier for ALL speakers to improve their technique and content choices in future.
- get the honest feedback of industry insiders on what people are saying and doing at conferences, instead of only getting the opinions of journalists and players. Most of us in the industry have lots of extra non-public information about the context of what people are or should be doing. We can’t necessarily say that explicitly, but we can let it inform our judgements and intrepretations of what people say and present.
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May 14th, 2008 by adam
John Smedley, Sony Online Entertainment
Summary
Free Realms is generically a combined Runescape / Club Penguin clone with strong elements of Black and White - but all done in the EQ 3D engine (at least the graphical quality appears straightforward EQ client level of quality - low poly.
The Agency is a spy game set in a very direct clone of Team Fortress 2, but a bit simplified and less polished. Which is not a bad thing - TF2 is exceptional, but themed as nothing more or less than a quick fast battle - bolting on a more traditional game (by adding the spy game parts) could make for a very nice game.
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May 14th, 2008 by adam
Moderator: Jason Roberts, 38 Studios
Steve Danuser, 38 Studios
Darius Kazemi, Orbus Gameworks
Troy Hewitt , Flying Lab
Osma Ahvenlampi, Sulake
Summary
This was a surprisingly good session - not only was it 9am in the morning, the night after the official conference party, but it was also a panel session (which, as several people were commenting to me yesterday, tend to be bland and sucky at games conferences. My own experience is that moderators of panels at games conferences often have silly / selfish reasons for the panel, and so they do a poor job. e.g. when they admit that they just want to meet / befriend / privately interrogate a particular person, so they create a panel session).
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May 14th, 2008 by adam
(Cross-posting to the GDC 2008 tag so it shows up in the RSS feed)
I’m at ION 2008 at the moment, the conference-formerly-known-as-Online-GDC. Just like with GDC, I’m doing full writeups for each session I’m attending. Watch this tag / RSS feed…
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