05.14.07
Nordic Game Ep. 1
Tomorrow I attend the Nordic Game conference in Malmö (a portion of Denmark currently occupied by Sweden), where representatives of the entire nordic game industry will convene to discuss matters of digital entertainment and plot the downfall of the great retail chains (okay maybe not that last part). The conference is split across two days with topics categorized into three areas of interest: Production, Development, and Academics.
My plan for Tuesday is to attend the following presentations:
[Edit 05-19-07] Added my notes and some photos.
9:30 - 10:15
Paulina Bozek
Keynote entitled: “My Everything” - From Play Lists to Profiles and Virtual Worlds. Mass Customization: The Explosion of Choice and Creativity
Summary: Personalization and the power of choice have become a sweeping trend across media and entertainment industries. New game platforms and online distribution are poised to enable this new age of mass customization and player participation. As game creators, what can we do to embrace this?
My notes: Can’t say I’m a great fan of SingStar, but Paulina has personality, and what she had to say on Mass Customization was pretty damn interesting. It’s the future, don’t you know? Oh, and Barbie frickin’ scares me :S
10:30 - 11:15
Magy Seif El-Nasr
Lecture entitled: Game Modding as a Gateway to Computing and Media Literacy: A Myth or Reality
Summary: There has been a current increase in the number of game environments or engines that allow users to customize their gaming experiences by building and expanding the games’ content, design, and behaviour. In the recent years, there is a move towards using these game engines in computer science, architecture, history, and media studies classes. However, there has been little research on measuring the learning outcomes through the use of these engines. In this talk, Magy will discuss results of studies conducted to evaluate the use of game modding to promote learning of programming, design, mathematics, and visual design concepts.
My notes: I took 2 pages of notes on this. She basically went over her results from several years of using game modding in extra-curricular high school classes and senior level college courses, and she even went over 4 specific engines (including my favourite, Unreal) listing their pros and cons as education tools.
11:30 - 12:15
Jesper Juul
Lecture entitled: Seeing the Game in a New Light: Content in the Player’s Mind
Summary: Players have little knowledge of the resources that go into developing games; they buy games based on the experience and content they believe a game provides. Using concrete examples, Jesper will examine some traditional methods for creating game content with little effort (especially changing level layouts), and link this to studies of how challenge can make players feel that a game has more to offer. In a nutshell: a simple theory of how players estimate the amount of content in a given game.
My notes: Juul’s presentation was clearly targetted at developers, which was both sensible and interesting. Very practically applicable stuff, but the most interesting part was definitely the conclusions from his studies of difficulty in casual games.
13:15 - 14:00
Adrian Hon
Lecture entitled: Alternate Reality Games Are for Everyone
Summary: Alternate Reality Games have enjoyed critical success, but have not yet broken into the mainstream. What sort of innovations will happen this year to expand the audience, and make ARGs even more fun?
My notes: This was mostly a history of ARG’s and an overview of his own ARG PerplexCity. He packed the speak with crazy anecdotes from the games, which was highly entertaining. Exciting category, this ARG stuff. Not my style though (right now).
14:15 - 15:00
I haven’t decided yet! It’s killing me, there are two really interesting presentations in this slot:
Masaya Matsuura: When You Catch the Blinking of Sunlight: The Inspiration of Music on Game Development and Its Advancement into the Future and
Aki Järvinen: Communities of Nurturing: How to Design Empathy?
My notes: I ended up going to Matsuura’s talk. His English was horrible and he was reading from his laptop; I didn’t understand half of what he said. He did, however, end the presentation with a small performance, singing a duet with an Aibo dog. It was extremely unexpected and really just… crazy. Hilariously crazy though. Rasmus got it on video, awesome stuff.
15:15 - 16:00
Joonmo Kwon
Keynote entitled: Asian Online Game Market and NEXON’s Strategy
Summary:
1) Online game market status in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China and SE Asia
2) Major games of NEXON
3) NEXON Corporation
4) Diversified Business Strategy of NEXON Corporation
My notes: This sounded like it’d be pretty boring, but was actually really enlightening. The man is CEO of a company with 16 published online games and around 320 million subscribers! Madness!
16:15 - 17:00
Daniel Paladin
Lecture entitled: Sidescrollers from Start to Finish: Art & Game Design Approaches Intertwined
Summary: Dan describes his approach in creating art assets, as well as the game design elements that affect it directly in his sidescroller work.
My notes: Paladin is basically doing what I’m doing - creating games online with a team that’s very geographically scattered - only in a different genre, and he’s making money off of it. I wanted to ask him how he coordinates it afterwards, but I didn’t get around to it.
And then there’s the Nordic Development Support Grants Ceremony at 17:15, followed by dinner. It will be a long but frickin’ epic day. My only regret is that we didn’t manage to book a room in time, so we need to skip Tuesday’s party to catch the train home, and we need to get up extremely early on Wednesday to take the train to Malmö again. Thank God it’s relatively close to Copenhagen (about 40 minutes by train).
EER said,
May 14, 2007 at 22:47
Since I am seperated from Malmö by just a little bit more than a freaking huge bridge, I probably won’t be attending (surprise! :P)
The entire day seems to be very interesting (until 15.00 that is, I’m not really into asian online stuff and sidescrolling games), but I wouldn’t comment if I didn’t wonder about a few things:
1) wth is an ‘Alternate reality game’? Doesn’t every game offer an alternate reality in which you are the hero? (I’m talking Fable, Oblivion, GTA, or maybe even Pacman, just for the heck of it)
2) When you nordic folks are on a nordic convention, what language do you speak? English? Or ancient norwegian perhaps?
Btw, when I was at fosdem in Brussels earlier this year I got a room at some youth hostel (well, actually I slept on a couch in the hallway) which was a fairly cheap option and was not completely booked. But I don’t know how it is up north in those occupied territories ofcourse.
Jonas said,
May 15, 2007 at 20:43
I am back!
First of all, Kwon’s lecture was awesome (except his laptop couldn’t handle rendering his videos on the big screen, which caused an embarrassing break in the middle). He’s CEO of NEXON, which is a frickin’ huge online game company in Korea, with over 320 million subscribers worldwide (yes, million). The sidescroller lecture was less groundbreaking for me, but it was cool to see how The Behemoth works, and the guy is a pretty young (he can’t be more than 25) indie developer whose team is spread across several states, so he’s almost as awesome as OTP.
1) Alternate Reality Games are games like The Beast (the original A.I. promotion game) or ILoveBees. Check out argn.com or unfiction.com for more info. Hon himself heads up Mind Candy (mindcandydesign.com) which has created PerplexCity, that you may have heard of because it included a few live events where eg. helicopters was hired as part of the game in real life (perplexcity.com). Another cool anecdote from PerplexCity is that one of the riddles involved breaking a cypher of a type that you normally use to encrypt credit cards with. For this, the players programmed a distributed computing client that was set up on the PC’s of 1600+ users which took several months to break the cypher. It’s all pretty crazy, so check it out.
2) We speak English, but sometimes we regress back to our native languages which are mostly understandable by each other. I mean I can understand Swedish when I put my mind to it, and Norwegian is easier than that. Finnish is complete gibberish though, because their language stems from the same roots as Russian and such, so it’s definitely English for them. The congress has many German, British, and Asian delegates as well though, so mostly we stick to English. And btw, it would be ancient Norse, you proletarian.
We didn’t actually check into the hostels around Malmö, it’s reasonably cheap to take the train between Copenhagen and Malmö, so we figure it breaks even.
EER said,
May 15, 2007 at 22:14
320 M, holy crap! Anyway:
1) I have never heard of any of those games, so I took a look at the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
And it seems a LOT like it’s some Dungeons and Dragons type of game on a massive scale with people who actually come outside once in a while, it’s really all pretty crazy
2) Damn you bourgeois pig, ancient Norse it is.
Jonas said,
May 16, 2007 at 20:03
1) Yeah pretty much.
2) Thank you.