GDC 2008 Featured Speakers
Featured Speakers
 Allan AlcornCTO, IMMI Session: How to Create an Industry: The Making of the Brown Box and PONG Track: Game Design The year was 1966. Television had a huge installed user base, but only featured a single, passive application with only a few channels. Ralph Baer decided there needed to be something more. He created the Brown Box, the world's first electronic console that enabled people to not just watch, but play Ping Pong on screen using connected controllers. In 1972, Magnavox launched it to retail as the Odyssey. Later that year, Atari and designer Allan Alcorn separately released PONG as a stand-up coin operated arcade unit. The success of both directly created this industry. Join Ralph and Allan as they describe what went right and what went wrong in engineering, designing, and championing their vision – and our reality -- of interactive games.  Ralph Baer Session: How to Create an Industry: The Making of the Brown Box and PONG Track: Game Design The year was 1966. Television had a huge installed user base, but only featured a single, passive application with only a few channels. Ralph Baer decided there needed to be something more. He created the Brown Box, the world's first electronic console that enabled people to not just watch, but play Ping Pong on screen using connected controllers. In 1972, Magnavox launched it to retail as the Odyssey. Later that year, Atari and designer Allan Alcorn separately released PONG as a stand-up coin operated arcade unit. The success of both directly created this industry. Join Ralph and Allan as they describe what went right and what went wrong in engineering, designing, and championing their vision – and our reality -- of interactive games.  Rod HumbleHead of The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts Session: The Emergent Gamer Track: Game Design In this session, Rod Humble – Head of THE SIMS Studio at Electronic Arts – will reveal for the first time ever a new creative endeavor that makes game creation easier than ever before. Humble will discuss the rise of a new class of game creators and games, what it means to games as an art form, and how THE SIMS Label hopes to convert millions of players to game designers.  Dave Jones Realtime Worlds Session: My First MMO Track: Game Design "As designers look to make the leap from a finely crafted single player experience to a persistent living breathing world with hopefully millions of connected players what would you do to herald your entry into this space? With a rich heritage of creative IP from DMA Design/Realtime Worlds, Dave Jones walks and talks us for the first time through something a little different from the fantasy based RPG's. From the DNA of games like LEMMINGS, GTA & CRACKDOWN you should expect some thinking outside of the box."  Raph Koster President, Areae, Inc. Session: Metaplace Postmortem: Reinventing MMOs Track: Game Design In August of 2006, Areae set out to try to reinvent many aspects of the fundamental architecture and design of virtual worlds and MMOs. The goal: move away from the current model and towards systems that work more the way the web does today, using open standards and encouraging user participation. In this session, we'll walk through how it went, and how it works. We'll discuss the challenges for game developers learning to "talk web," and the implications it has on designing games that work this way.  Peter MolyneuxHead of Studios, Lionhead Studios Session: FABLE 2 - The Big Three Features Revealed Track: Game Design Peter Molyneux's stated ambition as a designer is to make FABLE 2 a landmark game. In order to achieve this three big design features have been added. The inspiration and rational behind these features will be discussed along with their evolution throughout the development process. The wider context of their impact and influence on the RPG genre with also be examined as the ambition is also to evolve the genre itself. The talk will be supported by retrospective videos as well as live game examples.
Game consoles now have always-on network connections, and consumers are ever more comfortable with making purchases online. SINGSTAR on PlayStation 3 responds to this with an innovative in-game store, with a sophisticated, user friendly interface. This case study looks at how commerce can be of benefit to a game, and explores methods for building it in to a title. The session deals with many issues that will arise during production, from concerns such as parental control and testing, to technical considerations including server configuration and the page delivery model.
HABBO is a virtual world and a website aimed at teenagers. HABBO attracts more than 7.5 million users every month, many of the whom participate in the world's economy of acquiring virtual property through micro-transactions and author content for the other players using the tools they've bought. The session describes some of the processes and principles used to design the product to support open play and end user creativity, with concrete examples of user activity and changes the service has gone through during the seven years of HABBO's existence. If you missed Sulka's 2007 Austin GDC Keynote or want to hear the latest updates of what's happening at HABBO, here's your chance to learn something new!
Game stories can matter, even in first person shooters. But first we're going to have to give up a lot of our preconceptions about what people care about when playing a game. For too long, games (especially first person shooters) have been stuck in a "game sequence followed by story sequence" mentality. Ken Levine will tell the tale of how the BIOSHOCK took a pointy-headed idea about a pseudo-objectivist utopia and turned it into one of the most compelling and succesful game worlds in recent history. What were the tools used? What compromises had to be made? Where did the shooter end and the story begin? How did we make people give a crap? How did we use story and narrative to become perhaps the most talked about game at the super-crowded E3 2006? What does this all mean for stories in games? And must of all, what hell does "Mise En Scene" mean?
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