Layman at the Gates - AGC Diary #2
John 'Deljarum' Downing, 2005-11-10

Continued from Part #1...

Day 2: Being the final encounter of our youthful hero with the Conference, goods of questionable purpose, fighting as well

The rest of the previous night was rather uneventful, save for the fortunate discovery of a tasty restaurant that served noodles and tea. Clothes were again ironed to within a mile of their very life, TV was watched for an inordinate amount of time while I tried to gather my thoughts concerning my first encounter with the game industry, and a new day eventually dawned.

Coincidentally, my sleep number is 35, according to the hotel's fancy bed. Who knew?

Though I registered primarily for the Game Writers Conference, my registration also granted me the privilege to go to the Austin Game Conference proper as well, which opened on that day. The keynote speaker for that day was John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, who would be giving a speech entitled "The Future of Online Gaming." Being who I am, and the editor for this particular site, I felt it my duty…nay, my privilege, to attend.

On the whole, if John Smedley has his way, we will never stop playing games. Titles of the future will be playable on consoles, personal computers, cell phones, and probably patterns in the ceiling tiles, and games will work seamlessly throughout all of these platforms to deliver a uniform and satisfying experience. With the widespread availability of WiFi, I should never rightly be disconnected from, say, Everquest IV. All the time is time to slay the dragon.

There was also an increased focus on alternate methods of revenue and increased globalization of titles, and it was revealed that EQII actually made a fairly substantial sum from item sales and periphery and expanded services. This will be a larger factor in the future, and monthly fees will likely fall to the wayside as payers play for bonuses, not for the game itself. The massive growth of the Asian market could not be ignored as well, and so SOE is working on a title exclusively for that market, and increased sensitivity is called for in localizing the titles of the future.

There's also a little something called DC Comics online. You know…whatever.

The Exhibition Hall was officially open that day, and I took full advantage of that fact. In between sessions I spoke with representatives, watched presentations for 3D modeling companies, played the Xbox 360, and ninja-looted all manner of shwag, both useful and confusing. The loot pile included a shirt from OGaming.com, pens from GameDev and Activision, and a purple monkey stress ball from Gametrust. The last one confused me, as their shwag also included banana pens and a veritable "pooton" of bling-esque necklaces. I'm still not sure what that company does, other than possibly traffic in minor goodies.

I couldn't stay in the Exhibit Hall all day, despite the flashing screens and free draft drinks, and so I made my way to several of the multitude of interesting sessions going one. The "Writing for MMO's" panel was incredibly illuminating, and it would appear that the future of MMO writing will not involve a greater focus on authored content, much to the chagrin of some of the authors present, but instead will hinge upon giving the players the narrative tools and power to craft their own story lines, with the game's author laying the backdrop and insuring the quality of those tools.

Next came a Feature Postmortem concerning Dark Age of Camelot's graphical upgrade. This was a far more technical endeavor that the previous sessions I had attended, led by Matt Shaw, Director of Technology at Mythic Entertainment. Though many of the nuts and bolts eluded me, it was very enlightening to see exactly how many considerations they have to made when executing such a large update, and how often programmers, artists, and designers butt heads with each other. There was a special focus on the latter, as Matt Shaw wishes that more designers and artists knew the technical limitations of the engine they were working with, to prevent confusion as to why thousands of unique characters with flashy armor can't battle at once, despite the wishes of the designers/artists.

My final session for the conference was "Community Relations: Talking to the Masses," in which Sanya Weathers of Mythic, EM Stock of NCsoft, Jonathan Hanna at Turbine, and Richard Aihoshi from IGN Vault Network discussed the trials and tribulations of the role of the community manager. This was a particularly important session for myself, as Community Manager is a title I'd like to see under my name one day and all of the panelists had very helpful pointers on how to deal with problem players and to expand your focus past the forums alone, using other methods to get the word out.

Though there was one more day left of the Austin Game Conference, I was due back home on that day, as I had already missed a rather substantial amount of work. They're finicky about that. I would be remiss, however, if I didn't mention one booth of the Exhibit Hall in particular, and that booth represented, it seems, the entirety of the city of Daegu, South Korea. They did have several particular games on display, such as the cute Tales Runner (in which you race with other players on various fairy tale-themed tracks), and the equally cute Grand Chase, praised as "Korean first online fighting game with various characters," but the booth itself was dedicated to selling the idea of Daegu to any party that stopped long enough in front of their booth to listen. The employees there were incredibly nice, and took time to show you how to play the games they had set up. Many of these games will be coming to the States soon, so be on the lookout for those.

Several of their games, however, deserve special mention, if only so I don't perish alone due to the confusion they bring about. First of all, did you know Daegu is "producing an opera, with a story about Daegu's National Debt Repayment Movement?" I bet you didn't. While Daegu itself seems to be a happening place that is in the process of "embracing the world," I have to worry about some of the games coming from there. I'll highlight two titles from Coolnet, a company specializing in mobile games based in Daegu. Fasten your seatbelts:

CATCH ME, BABY: The CATCH ME BABY game is about love quarrel between PPOK-SUN(girl) and PPOK-DDOL(boy). PPOK-SUN is always running for escaping from PPOK-DDOL's kiss. PPOK-SUN must escape by jumping obstacles and using items."

K1 SEX FIGHTER: Our K1 SEX FIGHTER game is motivated K-1 that is popular to people. It includes the strip show of round-girls and sex affairs, fighting as well. So, people can enjoy a fight and sex in the same time."

If only that were true.

-Del out.