• ION Reveals Its Hidden Agenda
• Join the ION Volunteer Program
• Countdown to ION: Reason #4
• New Speakers: Craig Sherman, Rich Weil, Dr. Lars Butler, Grant Wei, John K. Bates, Wanda Meloni, Dillon Seo, Shawn Foust, Mike Sellers, Daniel Ostenso
• Meeting of the Minds: Interview with Bill Fulton of Ronin User Experience

ION Reveals Its Hidden Agenda

That’s right, we’re done keeping one of the best kept secrets about the 2008 ION Game Conference. We’re now in the open with our complete conference schedule. Almost every speaker, lecture, panel, reception and more is now posted on the 2008 ION Game Conference website. After taking a look, we hope you take away the impression that the schedule represents viewpoints from a wide range of companies, regions and disciplines within the online game industry. You name the important online game industry topics of 2008 and beyond, ION speakers will be talking about it: community, virtual worlds, social networking, addressing growing international markets, user generated content, security, the future of online gaming and much more.

Not only that, you can see the conference offers a wealth of high-powered networking opportunities throughout the day, from the first glass of milk to the last sip of wine at night.

The agenda embodies almost seventy sessions and over one hundred speakers. Beyond the agenda, on the front page of the 2008 ION Game Conference site you can take a look at how many companies are going to attend the conference. The company list reflects a snapshot of what the ION Game Conference is all about – diverse companies and attendees from all over the world showing up in Seattle to network, to share information, to do business in a professional but intimate setting.

Even with what the ION Game Conference is offering, we still have a couple big agenda-related surprises left to share. Keep an eye out for those surprises within the next week.

On a couple of related housekeeping notes, remember that the chance to register for the 2008 ION Game Conference online while saving hundreds of dollars off the at-the-door rate expires in less than two weeks. For those who want to attend the conference and stay at the official conference venue and hotel, the Seattle Waterfront Marriott Hotel, we have good news. While the official room block has sold out, we have secured additional rooms available at the special ION attendee rate until April 18th.

We hope to see you at one of the best game industry conferences that you’ll see in 2008. Now you don’t have to just take our word for it, because the agenda shows what the ION Game Conference has planned for attendees.

Peter Freese Conference Director ION Game Conference

Join the ION Volunteer Program

Attend the ION Game Conference by becoming a volunteer! Participation in the Volunteer Program will give you a backstage look into the inner workings of ION while contributing to the success of this event. In your free time, you will have the opportunity to meet and mingle with industry professionals, as well as attend conference sessions and events.

Volunteers get full access to the conference in exchange for part-time volunteer work. We need volunteers to assist with registration, bag-stuffing, room usher, and runner duties. The Volunteer Program is a great way to experience ION on a budget. It's also the only way to get a cool ION Staff shirt!

Volunteers are expected to be available for a total of 10-12 hours of work over the course of the conference. All volunteers, regardless of discipline or area of interest, are encouraged to apply. No prior experience with the games industry is required. We are looking for reliable, hard-working, self-starting, independent, enthusiastic volunteers who are excited about the conference and who want to be among the next generation of industry leaders and professionals.

Take the first step to becoming part of the mechanism that makes the ION Game Conference run. Learn more about the Volunteer Program, and fill out the online application by May 4, 2008.

Countdown to ION
Top Ten Reasons to Attend the 2008 ION Game Conference

There’s less than a month remaining before the ION Game Conference kicks off on May 13th in Seattle, Washington. While we’ve just tipped our hand to the robust agenda we have planned for attendees, there are many other reasons why the ION Game Conference should be on your “must attend” calendar for 2008. We’re now down to reason number four.

Top Ten Reasons to attend the 2008 ION Game Conference

#10. Incredible amenities
#9. Networking opportunities galore
#8. First-class content
#7. Location, location, location
#6. Tight focus on online games
#5. Keynote lunches

This week, we give you reason #4:

Stamp Your International Online Game Industry Passport at One Event

It has always been one of the ION Game Conference’s goals to not let one company, one viewpoint or one country dominate the discussion. The online game industry is a worldwide business, so why shouldn’t the conference reflect that melting pot of technological and cultural viewpoints? And, it has in 2007 and will even more in 2008.

Finding ways to make adapt online interactive entertainment between cultures, languages and countries is one of the greatest opportunities the online games business is facing.  With these opportunities comes great challenges, which is why many ION attendees are leading the charge to help educate companies throughout the game development value chain solve the major problems that keep the online game industry from moving forward.

To that end, we have influential game developers and business people from Germany, Australia, Jordan, Russia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Finland, China, India and many other countries coming together to share their unique views as both attendees and speakers. While larger game conferences can rightly claim to be as international, ION is proud of the high level and international feel we’re cultivating for 2008 – especially as a conference whose attendee count numbers in the hundreds and not the thousands or tens of thousands.

If you’re ready to register for ION, get started here:

Once you've registered for ION, we definitely recommend booking your stay at the official conference hotel, the Seattle Marriott Waterfront Hotel. Not only are you conveniently located at the center of all the official conference action, you’re staying at one of Seattle’s finest hotels at a specially discounted rate. We've negotiated a special rate of just $209 for ION attendees. Suites are also available at a discounted rate. But hurry, the special ION rate is only valid until April 18, 2008.

New Speakers Announced

We are very pleased to announce we have some amazing new additions to speaker lineup. We will continue announcing speakers over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for the complete list.

See the complete list of speakers

Interview with Bill Fulton of Ronin User Experience

Bill Fulton, Founder of Ronin User Experience, a professional in the field of user play experience, offered up a wealth of interesting thoughts about the influence of psychology in the development of games. Read on for a preview of his ION Game Conference lecture about creating better multiplayer social environments.

PAUL PHILLEO: Bill, thank you in advance for sharing your views about multiplayer social gaming with ION Connection. Which needs did you perceive in the online game industry that prompted you to create your company, Ronin User Experience?

BILL FULTON: One of the reasons I started RoninUX is to help game developers design their social environments so that it augments, rather than detracts, from the gameplay. As I mentioned last year at ION/OGDC, the growth of the online gaming industry is being severely stunted by the lack of attention to the social environment.

I'm passionate about improving the social environment online on several levels:

• As a gamer, I have to go to great lengths to avoid annoying people online--I have to mute them, drop out of chat channels, etc. because of their idiocy.
• As a professional whose livelihood is tied to the games industry, it angers me when some of our customers get driven away by the bad behavior of other customers. Griefers are, in the realest sense, taking money out of our pockets.
• As a social psychologist and game designer, I'm disappointed in how little effort is made to avoid these problems. Many of the social problems online are fixable; most games simply don't invest the resources to prevent or mitigate them.

For more details, see the article I wrote for Gamasutra on how lack of social design is hurting sales of online games and game platforms.

What basic principles of social psychology can and should apply to multiplayer online game design, in your opinion?

There are many principles that are useful. Which principles are most important is very case-by-case depending upon the design goals, target population, and resources--just like all design. But, right now, I'm focusing on the benefits and mechanisms for creating game structures that facilitate a social environment that isn't hostile to the sensibilities of the majority of players.

In order to foster a particular kind of social environment, players need to:

• Understand the social norms (which behaviors are acceptable and which aren't)
• Find it easier and/or more rewarding to behave within those norms than outside of them

I realize how un-fun this can sound--it almost sounds authoritarian and creepy, which is the opposite of what we want. But it doesn't--and shouldn't--have to be that way. Elegant social design is not heavy-handed. It should generally go unnoticed--players simply do what they always do--find the most effective means of getting what they want. But good social design will make it such that players get what they want more easily by behaving in a way that enhances the game, rather than detracts from it.

So our readers will have an idea what impact you feel social environments have within an online game, please share a couple specific examples how social experiences can add or take away from the overall game online play experience.

This is what my talk at ION will be all about. One of the premises of improving the social environment is to minimize opportunities for (bad) conflict and reduce the severity of that conflict when it does happen. Reducing conflict may sound bizarre when talking about games--which are often all about conflict--but there is Good conflict (makes players want to play more) and there is Bad conflict (makes some players want to quit).

By way of example, WoW has a wealth of excellent social design - -and I personally believe their social design is more responsible for far more of their enviable success than most people realize. Consider just two critical social design choices they made:

• You can't talk with players of the enemy faction. This is huge. Blizzard made the decision to remove the ability to 'be social' with the enemy because the rare upside of opponents who admire each other wasn't worth the onslaught of ugliness of less sportsman-like behavior it would have unleashed. Just imagine how ugly life would be in WoW if you had to listen to a player of the enemy faction chat annoying things at you while you're grinding Murlocs.
• You can't tangibly harm players of your own faction. You can't steal from or damage players in your own faction. The only harm you can do is indirect--most you can really do is be a jerk in a party, or sneak past someone and engage an enemy they've been working towards. Think of how you'd never feel safe in WoW, never able to relax, if people in your own factions could harm you. The only place you'd be safe is in an instance (by yourself or with trusted players) or while flying between flight points.

With this these two design decisions, they eliminated an enormous amount of the bad conflict in the game - -both inter- and intra-faction social annoyances that could have made WoW just horrible to endure.

Now, if they could just fix the goldseller spam in the cities…

What templates or examples of well-established MMO game or virtual world design do you think developers most often extrapolate from when creating social architectures? How might these developmental shortcuts benefit or harm game communities?

I think the most common problem is that developers don't think systematically about the social environment that they want to have. I doubt if more than a handful of game development companies have someone who is explicitly responsible for the social environment online. Most game designers love thinking about gameplay mechanics & controls, rewards structures, etc. Most don’t seem to invest much time in the 'less sexy' parts of design, like social design (or UI design, for that matter).

Which specific online games on the market do you feel make the most of both multiplayer play and social interaction at once, and why?

Right now, I think WoW has the best social design of any online game I've played. At the core, they've created the ability for many different kinds of players to play many different kinds of ways, all in the same playground, while doing a good job of minimizing (not eliminating) bad conflict.

But to be fair, most of my online play is spent on WoW and first person shooters, which have a completely different set of social problems. As a general rule, I think first person shooters are horrible at social design--most don't even seem to think about it at all.

Do the features or capabilities of certain hardware platforms lend themselves more easily than others to the design of socially fine-tuned multiplayer online gaming?

I personally think that the PC is the best platform for doing good social design right now. I say this primarily because none of the consoles have a sufficiently effective set of social design features, and yet you have to work around the features and requirements they do have. The Wii is kind of an exception, but they've decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater--as I understand it (I don't have a Wii), they've eliminated voice comm with strangers. The 360 and PSN aren't much better--neither really features that substantially reduces the social problems online.

Of what I'm aware of on the PC, Steam seems to be the gaming service that is investing in social features (they added communities to their service this past year).

For developers with an MMO game already on the market, for example, what can they realistically do to incorporate more socially attractive features in their games without having to rebuild from the ground up?

The first step is for the team to just to sit down and decide if they think it is a problem worth solving. Quite frankly, some developers are getting a sufficient playerbase to get by without out systematically doing social design. But if two games have equally compelling gameplay, marketing, etc., the game that offers a better social environment will get more players and greater player loyalty.

The second step is to appoint someone to be the 'social designer' on the project (if you don't already have one). If some *one* person is responsible (as opposed to *everyone*), then the social environment is less likely to slip through the cracks.

The social designer should determine what the biggest social problems are for their players. Doing user-research (testing the game with actual gamers) is critical here. I would be cautious about relying solely on forum posters. Posters typically represent only the most vocal 1% of your player base. It could be that the biggest problem with the social environment is that 1% of your game make the other 99% miserable. Doing user-research with new and moderate players is a good way to figure out what the problems are.

Finally, once you understand the problem, you need to come up with solutions that reduce the problem while minimizing hurting the gameplay. Like all design, good solutions are case-by-case basis. But most solutions will come in one of three classes:

• Eliminate the ability to engage in the problem behavior. Again, WoW disabled chat between the factions in WoW and eliminated an entire class of potential social problems.
• Reduce the frequency and/or severity of the problem behavior. Decrease how often social problems arise, or make it so that the negative feelings that come from social problems aren’t as intense.
• Provide players the option to control their social environment. For example, Xbox Live allows players to set chat to be 'friends only'--which lets those players who don't like the chatter to have it be muted.

As with any design, you need to be careful that you don’t lose the good while getting rid of the bad.

What developmental practices do you hope game designers will consider after spending time at your lecture, “Make Multiplayer More Fun: Designing the Social Environment”, at the 2008 ION Game Conference?

If game designers who leave my talk have a fuller appreciation of the importance of the social environment, and how to start approaching the design challenges of making players behave in the way that maximizes the social fun of the game, then I'll consider my talk a success. I wish I could give some easy-to-apply principles, but like all design, it really has to be tailored to the specific goals of the game, and fit with the other design goals.

On your own time, when you’re not speaking, what do you plan to do while in attendance at this year’s ION Game Conference?

I'm most interested in No More Walled Gardens: Facilitating Real Community That Extends Beyond Game Play. I believe enabling robust communities will play a major role in reducing social conflict online.

Discuss on the ION Network

Sponsorship Opportunities Disappearing Fast at ION 2008

Time is running out to take advantage of sponsorships, with several sponsorship deadlines ending this week. There are quite a few outstanding opportunities available that could perfectly fit your company, but time is running out, and once the deadlines pass, they'll be gone forever. For example, the conference bag, hotel room drops, Nexus meeting rooms and conference program ads are still available. In addition, there is only a single Platinum/Track sponsor slot left, which gives you the unique ability to present a sponsored session at ION. Select your sponsorship level while opportunities remain available. Ask us about our revised prospectus, which has the most up-to-date information about what we’re offering!

As an exhibitor/sponsor at ION, you will be able to expose your products and services to some of the most qualified attendees in the industry. You can enjoy meeting with the hundreds of attendees, speakers, and press — all with the common goal of promoting the online game development industry. We invite you to take a look at our prospectus and explore the advantages to our sponsorships we are offering. To learn more about fantastic marketing opportunities at ION visit the sponsorship page on our website, or contact:

Cynthia Freese
+1 425.654.4575
cynthia@ionconference.com

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