The day started out well enough. Met up with Brenda for breakfast and met a few of her fellow designers. Went to the World Summit keynote given by Raph Koster. I was extremely happy about Raph’s talk. I’m of the school of people that really does want to see the full power of gaming go beyond entertainment. Raph talked about the virtual world/real world convergence; specifically about how we, as designers, are behind the curve. His “predictions” from a couple of years ago have already come true. And the thought process that many are using is not an updated model of what is actually happening in the real world right now.
The next talk of note that I attended was about the use of Facebook and social gaming. Honestly, I had no idea about the numbers that social gaming pulls, but it really doesn’t surprise me that much. Seeing the impact that casual games have, social games, which I now think of as “casual games lite”, can have a much broader appeal to a much larger market. Games are inherently social (look at the success of the board game in everyday life); it makes sense that games based around social interaction are so popular.
Also had dinner with some of the GDC scholarship people. It was really interesting meeting what will hopefully be my peers in the industry. Everyone was very friendly. I loved the fact that we could all sit down and talk about games and the game industry and no one was left behind.
February 19, 2008 at 5:42 pm
[...] 2: 3d on the Web Cheap. Jeff McNab. And Massively’s coverage comes the closest, I think, to capturing the tone and narrative of [...]
February 23, 2008 at 1:57 am
Just a thought, but you were talking about social gaming and “the numbers that [it] pulls”… you were the one who once told me that the most successful (read largest) gaming community was Yahoo! Games. I remember being surprised but your explanation made sense. The games appeal to the broadest spectrum of the populace and require mostly intuitive skills. The largest gaming section of the population were middle aged wo/men who play these games… not WoWers like I wanted!