Contributing Writer, Ashley “Dulidina” Highsmith.
The “Austin Game Conference” held Sept 11-12 at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, where over 600 individuals from more than 300 companies attended. The real draw was the 65+ keynote speakers sharing their knowledge on Massively Multiplayer Online Games, or MMOG’s.
We headed down and checked it out, and we were not disappointed.
The 1st annual Austin Game Conference took place on Thursday and Friday September 11th and 12th, 2003. The conference boasted over 70 speakers on a narrow range of topics all dealing with the development and delivering of massive multiplayer games for various platforms.
Thursday morning began with a keynote address from Mark Jacobs, CEO and President of Mythic Entertainment, behind the phenomenal success of Dark Age of Camelot. In his talk he noted 3 ages in the evolution of the development of MMOs. In the first age (Age of Discovery), noted by such games as Neverwinter Nights, Meridian 59, game developers and publishers first realized the potential of developing MMOs that could be financially successful. In the second age (Age of Delight), noted by the “holy” trinity of Ultima Online, Everquest, and Asheron’s Call, validated the concept of MMO as a real player in the market for gamers. He included Mythic’s own Dark Ages of Camelot as one of the final players in the market that came out of the second age.
Now, he postulated that we are entering the third age, the “Age of Disappointment.” This age comes into being with a more saturated market, much higher development costs and longer design times, and many less successful games. He also touched on some of Mythic’s plan to have ancillary items for new games, including Imperator (due 2005), such as graphic novels. He also mentioned a screenplay the he wrote. Shivers were felt.
The rest of the day was filled by presentations in 6 different tracks. The subjects ranged from how to create an MMO on a shoestring budget, to how to start developing games for wireless devices. Each presentation was followed by a question and answer session. Speakers in attendance were noted figures such as, Jessica Mulligan (Turbine), Matt Firor (Mythic), and Starr Long (NCsoft) as well as a panel discussion with Dr. Kat (Furcadia), Jason Ely (Dransik), Brian Green (Near-Death Studios, M59), and Bruce “SirBruce” Sterling Woodcock (Playnet, Inc., WW2 Online).
In the panel discussion, all four developers gave their impression on the trials of a small developer working on MMOs. From the rabid fanbase, to the “viral” word of mouth marketing necessary to promote a game from a company that has no marketing budget. A somewhat heated moment where a representative from WarCry argued with the developers on who should have the onus of spreading the viral marketing ended the Q&A; session, after a few short questions.
Matt Firor’s talk about the common mistakes made when developing an MMO echoed some of the experiences from the panel discussion. Matt felt that it was still possible for a small, focused, team to be successful at developing an MMO. He also spoke about some of the advantages Mythic had when they began developing Dark Ages of Camelot, namely the 14 other MMO titles they had produced in the previous years. For small companies he said, it was essential to not re-invent the wheel every time.
Friday, Duli and I both attended the conference, arriving too late to hear the keynote speech delivered by Raph Koster from Sony Online Entertainment. Our apologies to Raph (not the he would care), but we were really looking forward to hearing him. That’ll teach me to close the bars on a weeknight. I attended talks from Larry Mellon (EA), Jason Bell (Atari), and Richard “Lord British” Garriot.
Lord British spoke about the importance of designing a game with IP. His early Ultima games he said, contained no IP. It was not until Ultima IV when the characters began to solidify and the 3 Principles (Love, Courage, Truth) and 8 Virtues were added that Ultima as a concept began to have IP. He spoke at length about some examples of designing IP with regards to his current project, Tabula Rasa.
With Tabula Rasa, he wanted to design an idea-gram language that would be able to transcend the entire worlds various spoken language. A language that would be equally well understood in Europe as in Asia. It took months for him to design the basic core language, but as a result he was able to tell the extensive backstory of Tabula Rasa using only his ideagrams. If the detail that was put into the language permeates throughout the rest of the game, Tabula Rasa will be the new Sistine Chapel of MMOs.
Jason Bell, a veteran in the MMO industry, illustrated by the large number of other conference speakers in attendance for his very casual talk about why Atari has decided to publish MMOs, was as slick as George Hamilton in the new baked Ritz commercials. One very important message that I took from his talk is that the industry is still small enough to want every potential player to succeed, for the good of the industry.
Related to this, the games that fail, have less impact on the outlook of publishers such as Atari than do the accolades of the games that succeed. This tells of a maturing of the MMO industry because, as everyone knows, all video game genres have many more failures than successes, but that doesn’t mean a given genre is not viable.
Running all day long in the Machinima theater, animations created using (mostly) modified Quake II graphics engines offered a respite (and some darkness) during the breaks. The tech pavilion, a fancy Latin name for trade show, was a bit sparse with only 15 companies running booths. The companies ranged from server blade manufacturers RLX Technologies to Alias’ Maya booth. There is a lot of potential (and floorspace) for next years conference to expand the tech pavilion.
Ultimately, there were no big shocking secrets revealed about upcoming releases. There are other, better conferences to try to wrestle secrets away from developers. The goals for this conference was not to promote, but to help educate the next generation of gamers/programmers.
Make no mistake, if you are interested in working on a MMO, you should come to the 2nd annual Austin Game Conference next year. The presenters were very candid about the successes and failures they faced and the technical talks assured that most marketing folks would be sent running to the tech pavilion. Many of the presenters had multiple MMO production experiences, at multiple companies. There is no more focused conference for these games than what you will find at AGC.
Where you be next year, and what will you be playing?
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