Hey guys, David Newton here, one of the recent hires at Conduit Labs. I’ve been a art guy for the last six years, working in print, web design and illustration for social networking sites and such. You can check out more of my work over at paper raincoat. My intro into gaming kicked off four weeks ago when I joined Conduit as the Senior UI Designer.

Nabeel thought it would be a good introduction to the game industry to drop me into the Austin Game Developers Conference and wander about confused for three days in 100% humidity. So here’s my fish out of water impressions of AGDC.

Basically, the whole online gaming industry seems to live in Blizzard’s shadow, and they wasted no time reminding everyone. Michael Morhaime’s keynote launched the conference discussing problems few companies will ever deal with - organizing worldwide simultaneous expansion pack launches, leveraging a brand so customers buy your game sight-unseen and of course - scaling problems best described in scientific notation. Or more succinctly, a quote from Anchorman:

“I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal. People know me.”

Consequently, you couldn’t throw a cat without hitting world-building kits, sci-fi MMOs or WOW clones. Morhaime’s keynote was packed to the gills with aspiring orc-bashing simulation designers while web-based games (like Sulka Haro on Habbo Hotel) had crickets playing while he spoke about how to monetize virtual furniture or providing assets for roleplaying minimum-wage jobs in the virtual food service industry. That’s a shame really… Sulka’s presentation was excellent. I’m strongly web biased of course… but come on. Habbo’s users are creating their own gameplay while a small army of designers at Blizzard struggles to get enough content out to keep their players from killing each other. Literally.

So, an upcoming generation of MMOs are taking their cues from World of Warcraft. What I fear is that ALL games – console games, first person shooters and upcoming social networks will be making WoW 2.0 a.k.a. “Facebook with elves”.

I got the impression most game designers aren’t ready to label social networks as ‘games’ anyway. Several speakers described them as mere ‘tools’ – more like say… a phone, and different from ‘places’ – virtual worlds and MMOs. I can’t really follow that logic - there is no ’space’ online, and creating a sense of space is purely an aesthetic/useability consideration.

“They’ve done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works every time. “

I wasn’t actually able to find anyone talking about art, graphic design or UI. With the exception of three speakers who mentioned ‘kill the UI’ which sounded strangely ominous given my job title, it seemed this must be a largely solved problem in games. I noticed that um… showing off games is similarly outside the AGDC’s scope. Not necessarily another E3, but it might have been nice to have a few gaming demos at a gaming developing conference.

In general I was amazed by how much people can talk while sidestepping all useful information about their business. These are your peers you’re addressing who forked up $300-600 to listen to these talks. Most talks devolved into either (at best) high-level ‘Don’t ship until its ready’ or ‘Easy to learn, hard to master’ takeaways, or (at worst) marketing pitches. Just tell us what you tried to do, what you actually did, and what happened. We’d rather hear it from you than your disgruntled player base anyway.

Having worked on websites and social networks, I have to say web designers and developers are much more open with ideas, code and (especially) integration. Give away the API… let people go nuts with the data.

And lastly, bring a bat to beat off the poachers. They’re the ones that somehow manage to look simultaneously unshowered and overdressed. Next conference I’m making a shirt that says ‘Poacher’ across the front to save me some harassment. If you see that guy, buy him a drink.