First off, if you haven’t played Rock Band, play it, and if you don’t have it, get it. It may be the best party game ever made (rivaling Death Tank Zwei for the honor, anyway). And I’m not just saying that because we have two people here at Conduit who worked on it. If you like music (and that’s pretty much everyone, right?), then you will have fun. It’s so much fun we held off on setting it up in the office until we had finished launching a little Facebook toy we built called Make Me, knowing it would be impossible not to play once it was here.

My younger brother once told me that Sorry! is one of his favorite games, because inevitably, after a game, the players would hate each other for hours. Sometimes days. I mean, how powerful is that? A bunch of silly rules and plastic pieces moving into our lives, evoking real, outside-of-the-game emotions and putting strains on real-world relationships.

Rock Band is that kind of powerful. This story at the Escapist captures what a good game can do perfectly:

“This is not the revolution; it’s just something like it. It’s not about games. It’s about music. It’s a new way of listening, of trying to get in, like following the lyrics in the album sleeve or clumsily learning the chords on a beat-up guitar in the hopes of one day being that guy at a party who impresses the girls who might like the song as much as you do.”

If you can take the time, read through the whole story and count how many times actual gameplay is mentioned—hardly any! It’s about relationships that form through gameplay. Like just a couple weeks ago I was playing Rock Band with some friends; my friend Misty is our bass player. We get to a song with a particularly tricky bass line, and
she fails and we lose it. Stacie takes over for her, and manages to get through it.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” Misty says. “You guys seem to be doing FINE with Stacie on bass.” I sit down on the couch next to her. “Misty, listen to me. Boys Boning Boys is not Boys Boning Boys without you on bass. We need you.”

Misty looks up with these puppy dog eyes, “Really?”.

Needless to say, Misty came back and played, and we rocked. This was one of the most awesomely surreal and hilarious experiences of my life. I love it… and it’s what Rock Band is all about.

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”.

(more…)