Yes, I know this is a super-duper-mega delayed blog post about GDC! I was only able to post one blog article during the conference because I always ended up feeling incredibly tired at the end of the day. Then spring break happened and I basically just slept, so now I bring you the delayed blog posts about GDC and the rest of my experiences there. So, here we go!
Day Two:
After the morning meeting with Tim and Ian, I got to hang out in the CA lounge for a little while before my first shift at 10:30 for evaluation input. I thought this would be time well spent in figuring out what sessions I wanted to go to throughout the week. I actually ended up meeting two programming CAs who were former students of the famous
DigiPen Institute of Technology. One of them had graduated while the other transfered to another school. It was interesting to hear a bit of the interworkings of that school from the opinions of actual students.
Evaluation input was almost exactly what I thought it would be, pure data entry. I used the tab button a LOT! What was unexpected about the evaluation input was how entertaining it would be. There's a section on each evaluation reserved for attendee comments, which the CAs also had to enter into the database. Some of them were rude beyond all belief while others wished that particular session had gone on for hours, it was just funny to read the comments and share them with the fellow CAs working with me.
Right after evaluation input I checked in for the mysterious Game Connection shift. It was located in the West Hall of Moscone center which was all the way across the street! Walking outside to the West Hall was the first time I had been outside in the middle of the day since Sunday, which I found to be mildly hilarious. Game Connection was not what I expected at all, there was one CA manning the greeting booth while the other three of us stood around the West Hall directing people where to go and making sure they had badges and were allowed in the center. I got to interact with some interesting people while I was working, so I'm definitely not complaining.
What happened after Game Connection definitely made my whole day, and it kicked my confidence up a notch for the rest of the conference. I attended a session entitled
MMO Retention: Learning from the First 25 Years lead by Gordon Walton, who has worked at basically every major gaming company and currently works for BioWare, and Scott Hartsman, who worked on both EverQuest and EverQuest II. Both of these pros know a lot about MMOs and especially wha it takes to retain players month to month, not to mention they were both hilarious speakers. So, I'm just going to type out the notes I took during the session.
- They started by defining the word retention in terms of MMOs as how many players are returning on a month to month basis and how many months the game has kept those players there.
- MMOs are always losing customers, Gordon used a good analogy here with a bucket. He said to imagine you have a bucket with a small hole at the bottom and you're continually pouring water into it; the amount of water you're losing from the hole pales in comparison to the amount that you're continually pouring in. As long as the water, or the players, keep pouring in then the amount of players you're losing doesn't make too much of a dent. The best advice he could give for making that hole as small as possible is to not give players easy opportunities to leave.
- I believe Scott made the next point about the basics of how to attract players and keep them in the game. Your content has to be compelling, always available, a persistence of data, ongoing support and service, and gradually be evolving the play environment. This means creating a new and exciting experience for the players.
- Psychological Elements of MMOs: Finding the "horizon" of the experience or finding the edges of that experience. The value of "stuff" and other visible acheivements within gameplay. The comfort of the play experience, it must be rewarding. The repetition, or grind, and being rewarded for it. Giving people new reasons to be awesome! When it comes down to it, a lot of people enjoy MMOs when they know they're acheiving something and being recognized for it. Whether it be within their guild, group of friends, or even their entire server depending on what is acheived.
- They also spoke about masking the grind and how important that is to rentention of players. The more you cover up the grind with a good quest, excellent loot, or even a good story the more you can get players to repeat a gameplay mechanic without realising they're really doing the same thing over and over again.
- Strategies for retention: Record everything that's important like subscription data, etc. Developers taking part in the gameplay to learn what works and what doesn't as players. Learn to do it yourself and learn how to get the answers from the data you have and need. Find out what will increase retention and crank that variable to the max! With small tweaks and not pushing the players too hard, of course.
- This is what Scott and Gordon have discovered works: Reward systems such as rare items or even super rare items for long time subscribers. Looking at when people are leaving the game, and why. Rewards at every level. Rare special events, promoting involvment in the community. What makes people feel like they're winning. The ability for players to show off what they have. Make the game that you would want to play.
- What they discovered doesn't work: Changing the interface, this takes away the comfort of the player. Taking the sense of challenge too far, if it's too hard people will stop playing at that point. Creating new ways to play the game that radically change it too much.
After the session was over I actually went up to Gordon Walton and talked to him for a little bit, he was a really nice guy. At one point I asked him if he had any tips for aspiring game developers and he just said, "No, not really. Just go for it!" A simple, but inspiring response, haha. I also asked him about technical artists and what he thought about that field, he said they're always needing technical artists at BioWare so that inspired me even further to take a closer look at technical art. I also got his business card, yes!
After that I met up with my CABFF (yeah we called each other that, so what!) Lisa and we hit up the
Super Street Fighter IV tournament which was hilarious and really awesome.
And so ended my second day! I'm going to be doing multiple, albeit delayed, blog posts about the rest of my GDC experiences so stay tuned if you're interested in all this junk! :P
