cast42: GDC'08 : Day 1

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

GDC'08 : Day 1

First, I went to the talk by Ralph Kostner in the "World in motion Summit" titles "Why Gamers should care about Virtual World". The talk had a new title "High Windows". I guess this talk is what they call "thought provoking" ? Next talk was by Peter Marx (Analog Protocol MTV). He said that 80% of the downloads of the client to install a virtual world never register on their server. Meaning that 80% of potential players have a problem with installation.
Then I listened to "The power of free to play" by Adrian Cook (adriancook@gmail.com) who has a blog : http://www.freetoplay.biz
His advice for games that want to be free was to be browser based (or having a small download) and to defere user registration as late a possible. He also said that the game "battlefield heroes" pushes the barrier on quality of free online games.

Next talk was by Gabe Zichermann (game@rmbr.com) of rmbr.com. He said that Ebay, Facebook and Yahoo Answers are in fact online games. He said that Facebook is the McSalad of games. You can play games on it but it's not known as a gameplatform, hence is socially more accepted to be on Facebook. Like the McSalad is the excuse for the mom to take the kids to a McDonald. He said the strong point of Facebook are:

Really easy : effortless, 2D, HTML
Real: tangible benefit in real life (McSalad)
Free
Fun: socially - propagated story
Status: the ultimate fireplace mantle

He quoted some research that 70% of teenager girls prefer 2D over 3D.

Then I went to "Videogames to build & retain TV audiance" in the Serious Games Summits. Swen Vincke from Larian Studios gave a nice presentation about Ketnetkick from the VRT, the Belgian broadcaster. Another example was about a fiction program of Discovery Channel Canada about a space trip to mars. The game they showed was Race to mars. Another game was about Virtual Heroes.

I guess it was the chairman of the session that made a Marshall McLuhan quote from his book "Hot & Cool" (a book as old as I am): "It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking onto the matter."

We finished the day with: