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Moderator: Jason Roberts, 38 Studios
Panelist: Steve Danuser, 38 Studios
Panelist: Darius Kazemi, Orbus Gameworks
Panelist: Scott Hartsman
Panelist: Osma Ahvenlampi, Sulake
The panel covers many of the prime considerations and questions related to improving or adding content and features to a currently running MMO in an effort to grow a subscriber base without offending the current audience. It is targeted at how to identify weaknesses in the game from all disciplines and how those need to work together to resolve problems with the released game.
Format: Panel
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 9:00 AM,
Room: Harbor
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Lecturer: Jess Lebow, Carbine Studios
The days of Pong are long gone. Our games are larger. Our worlds are bigger. And as we've grown, so too has the role of the content team. Come listen to Jess Lebow talk about how to get more out of your content—from drawing in your community, to creating great demos, to getting past the ESRB.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 10:30 AM,
Room: Salon F
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Lecturer: Sara Jensen Schubert, Spacetime Studios
If you're making a content-heavy game with business model that relies on continual play, long-term maintainability is an essential concern. The infrastructure systems that support handcrafted content like items, abilities, quests, and NPCs are the most important systems in the game. Learn how to design these systems for maximum efficiency and quality over the lifetime of the service.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 5:00 PM,
Room: Salon B
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Lecturer: Rick Buonincontri, Solid State Networks
This lecture will address the underlying value of the Game Acquisition Experience – what that means and why it is vital to the success of your game. The Game Acquisition Experience starts when a gamer clicks to download a game file. What happens in the time it takes to acquire the game through the time the game is installed has a significant impact on your bottom line.
Format: Sponsored Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 9:00 AM,
Room: Salon F
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Lecturer: Todd Northcutt, GameSpy (A subsidiary of IGN Entertainment)
This session will discuss interesting new game features, enabled by using the relationship information the buddy list provides to a developer. Examples of released games will be use to illustrate these concepts along with relevant examples of functionality from other application (web or otherwise.).
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Tuesday, 10:30 AM,
Room: Salon F
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Lecturer: Mike Goslin, Disney Online
This course discusses ways to use the power of traditional linear storytelling to make open-ended world-based games more dramatic, exciting, and engaging.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 10:30 AM,
Room: Seaport
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Lecturer: Alexander Macris, Themis Group, Inc.
Hardcore gamers may be gluttons for AAA games, but they love to snack on short-session interactive entertainment, too. See the evidence for the popularity of “gamer snacks” and how to design mini-games that can capture the core gamer’s attention, advertise traditional titles, or directly generate revenues.
Format: Mini Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 5:00 PM,
Room: Salon F
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Lecturer: Isaac Barry, Sierra Online
This session will introduce the concept of affordances, as defined by Gibson and popularized by Donald Norman. Examples will illustrate several ways in which careful design of affordances can lead to more effective interfaces and satisfying mechanics.
Format: Mini Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 5:30 PM,
Room: Salon F
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Lecturer: Joseph Ybarra, FireSky
In this session, Joe Ybarra will address the growing content divide between on and offline games and how they each follow a separate content model that can be related to Hollywood’s two primary content delivery outlets: movies and television. Joe will reveal details of the model that will be used by the upcoming massively multiplayer online roleplaying game from FireSky, Stargate Worlds, to illustrate that the television model is the best option for MMORPGs.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 10:30 AM,
Room: Salon B
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Lecturer: Bill Fulton, Ronin User Experience
The fun of a multiplayer game comes from two sources: the fun from gameplay itself and the fun from social interactions between players. However, most multiplayer games appear to treat social fun as an afterthought rather than an opportunity. It is as though ‘multiplayer’ is viewed primarily as an engineering challenge and not a design challenge separate from gameplay design. This talk will define ‘social design,’ disentangle it from game design, and demonstrate how principles of social psychology can provide insight into creating the social fun that is essential to player acquisition and retention in multiplayer games.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 9:00 AM,
Room: Seaport
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Moderator: Adam Boyden, Xfire, Inc.
Panelist: Patrick Ford, K2 Network
Panelist: Andrew Sheppard, Outspark
Panelist: Karl Mehta, PlaySpan
Panelist: Chris Early, Microsoft
Panelist: Bharat Vasan, EA Online
Virtual item sales are becoming one of the most important elements of MMO communities as companies look for new revenue streams surrounding their games and develop new business models to support running an online game. In order to support virtual item sales companies are considering a number of novel solutions introduced by these new business models. Supporting microtransactions, selling items in a primary market, and dealing with exploitative secondary markets are all challenges that need to be addressed when introducing an item based economy. This panel will discuss the challenges associated with harnessing an online game for profit, and the many solutions to incorporating a microtransaction system while preserving the community's fantasy appeal.
Format: Sponsored Panel
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 9:00 AM,
Room: Harbor
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Lecturer: Brandon Reinhart, Spacetime Studios, LLC
This talk provides tools to aid the expression and visualization of game vision. Using narrative tools and concept collaboration, the designer will learn to identify the aspirations of the player and reflect them in his characters and conflicts, visualize his world, and fire the imagination of the audience.
Format: Mini Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 4:00 PM,
Room: Salon F
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Lecturer: Joe Ludwig, Flying Lab Software
It took five years, but Flying Lab Software has finally launched its Age of Sail MMO. Come hear the ups and downs of the project and all the things the team learned along the way. All of the successes and failures encountered while building a new MMO with a new team are presented.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 3:30 PM,
Room: Seaport
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Moderator: Jay Minn, AristoDigital
Panelist: Isaiah Cartwright, ArenaNet
Panelist: Toby Ragaini, Big Fish Games
Panelist: Mike Sellers, Online Alchemy
Panelist: Osma Ahvenlampi, Sulake
Free to play with microtransaction revenue generation is a new and emerging model for MMO and Virtual Worlds. Will this be the new model that replaces the subscription model? How about advertising? How can designers weave the money making as part of the design process? As game designers take on the role of economists, we need to examine the player motivators, gold farming, MUDflation and other critical design issues that can make or break our projects. Our panel of designers with experience from the trenches of current online game projects will share their thoughts on this critical topic.
Format: Panel
Track: Design
Date/Time: Tuesday, 5:00 PM,
Room: Harbor
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Moderator: Dave Elchoness, Association of Virtual Worlds
Panelist: Erik Bethke, GoPets Ltd.
Panelist: John K. Bates, Mindark / Entropia Universe
Panelist: Craig Sherman, Gaia Online
Panelist: Rob Lanphier, Linden Lab
Why are Virtual Worlds so often viewed merely as esoteric play spaces? What is missing that keeps them from being far more broadly accepted, now? We will examine language & definitions, usability issues, payment models, branding, bringing play & tasks that are fulfilling, and we'll broach the question: Are virtual worlds games? Should they be? Are they social networks? Should they be? What Virtual Worlds learn from MMOs, from social networking, and from other virtual worlds?
Format: Panel
Track: Design
Date/Time: Tuesday, 10:30 AM,
Room: Harbor
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Lecturer: John Smedley, Sony Online Entertainment
Reinventing the MMO
Format: Keynote
Track: Design
Date/Time: Wednesday, 12:30 PM,
Room: Grand Ballroom
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Lecturer: David Ryan Hunt, Flying Lab Software
A look at various game systems – some old, some new – and relationships between them that improve a game’s ability to retain players.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Tuesday, 9:00 AM,
Room: Seaport
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Lecturer: Paul Boustead, Dolby
Lecturer: John Griffin, Dolby
As social interaction increasingly becomes an important part of online games and virtual worlds, voice communication is emerging as a must-have feature. Dolby interactive voice technology enables developers to go beyond basic channel-based chat to deliver an immersive, high-quality 3D voice experience that opens up new online experiences and game play possibilities.
Come to this session hosted by Paul Boustead, Director for Interactive Voice technologies at Dolby Australia and John Griffin, Director of the Games Market Segment at Dolby to learn about this exciting new technology.
Format: Sponsored Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 9:00 AM,
Room: Seaport
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Moderator: Anne Toole, The Writers Cabal
Panelist: Sande Chen, The Writers Cabal
Panelist: Sam Lewis, Cartoon Network
Panelist: Katie Postma, FireSky
Narrative designers, a systems designer, and a community director debate the importance of player story versus game story in MMOs. This session explores ways to combine these elements in a way that is most compelling to the player and the player community.
Format: Panel
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 3:30 PM,
Room: Salon B
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Lecturer: Hermann Peterscheck, NetDevil
Lecturer: Scott Brown, NetDevil
As the playing field for MMOs becomes more and more competitive, going after a large market share becomes a more critical component which both producers and designers must consider. This talk details specific reasons to consider lowering your minimum spec, the tradeoffs and necessary considerations and the potential implications on product success. We will also discuss past and current games from the point of view of visual appeal and minimum spec and demonstrate that sacrificing the high end technology does not mean making an inferior game experience.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Tuesday, 3:30 PM,
Room: Seaport
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Lecturer: Yat Siu, Outblaze
Mr. Siu’s keynote will focus on the integration of social networks, casual gaming, and massively multiplayer online games, and will examine three very important trends in gaming.
Format: Keynote
Track: Design
Date/Time: Thursday, 12:30 PM,
Room: Grand Ballroom
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Lecturer: Nicole Lazzaro, XEODesign, Inc.
Think WOW players get emotional from whacking trolls? Think again. What gamers like most is how games create emotion from decisions players make. WOW attracts 9 million paid subscribers. Facebook has 50 million free ones. Is social play one of its secrets? To find out XEODesign's new study compares the emotion profile for WOW and Facebook. Beyond fiero and schadenfreude emotion rich verbs drive participation in Web 2.0 from Flickr to Facebook in ways that usability cannot measure.
Format: Lecture
Track: Design
Date/Time: Tuesday, 5:00 PM,
Room: Seaport
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