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As the first in a series of interviews with speakers from this October's GDC Online in Austin, Kabam's VP of product and platform services, Sheridan Hitchens, outlines the benefits of using metrics to guide design decisions for persistent online games.

By analyzing data gathered from its existing games and players, Hitchens says that Kabam can quickly and objectively identify problems and opportunities that arise, allowing the studio to update and develop its games more efficiently.

Prior to joining Kabam (developer of popular social games such as Kingdoms of Camelot and Edgeworld), Hitchens spent four years at casual game developer and publisher PlayFirst, where he oversaw the growth of the company's community, multiplayer, and microtranscation platforms.

Before entering the game industry, he graduated from the University of Cambridge and earned an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley - Walter A. Haas School of Business.

Here, Hitchens provides some insight into Kabam's metrics-focused approach to game development, and offers a glimpse at the topics he will cover in his upcoming GDC Online session, "Data Driven: How Creating a Deeply Analytical Approach Drives Success."

Why does Kabam embrace metrics so heavily? What benefits does this strategy offer?

I think as much as anything it's a cultural norm that's driven from the top; our CEO, COO, CMO, and Chief Product Officer all are very analytical. When you make a pitch, or provide a recommendation, you're expected to have some level of data and analysis to back it up.

But there's more at work than cultural or executive biases. In our view, metrics provide an objective view of performance across a range of functions. Carefully tracking a variety of metrics, enables us to establish measures of success, and alerts us to problems and opportunities quickly. Perhaps just as importantly, it reduces the amount of subjective, "I think/you think" debate that wastes time in meetings and in running a business.

What sort of data do you look at when making internal decisions at the company?

We tend to look at a wide range of data and not just the common acquisition, retention and monetization metrics from marketing and production. We'll spend time looking at customer satisfaction data, ticket volume, even tech ops data to overlay onto our common game metrics to understand problems and identify opportunities.

We also conduct research to understand the continually shifting market; we survey our own players, survey the market, analyze market growth trends and so on.

Game Developers Choice Online Awards organizers have announced that voting for the Game Developers Choice Online Audience Award is now open, encouraging online game fans to vote for their favorite persistent online game from now until 12:00 PT on September 22.

Typically, the winners at the Game Developers Choice Online Awards are chosen by the International Choice Award Network's (ICAN) online division, a group comprised of 400 specially picked, leading game industry creators from the foremost online game companies.

The Audience Award, however, allows anyone to vote for their favorite currently-operating persistent online game, whether it be a subscription MMO, a free-to-play web game, a social network title, or anything else.

To vote, game players should simply enter the name of the game and a valid email address at the Game Developers Choice Online Awards website, and verify their vote via email.

The winner of the Audience Award will be revealed alongside the other award winners at the second annual Game Developers Choice Online Awards, which will run alongside GDC Online in Austin, Texas on the evening of Wednesday, October 12th.

Returning to host the Choice Online Awards this year is Mike Goslin of Mindspark Interactive Network, an online game veteran with experience working with popular virtual worlds including Zwinky.com, Toontown Online, and more.

In addition to the Audience Award, event organizers recently revealed the list of finalists for this year's ceremony, honoring games such as Riot Games' popular League of Legends, Zynga's FrontierVille, and Mojang's indie powerhouse Minecraft.

[Continuing his 'Tales from the Vault' series, official GDC historian Jason Scott debuts landmark videos featuring computer pioneer Danny Hillis, the 2004 Game Design Challenge, AI legend Marvin Minsky, and Peter Molyneux, among many others.]

This has been a long time coming. The past few months of this GDC Vault digitization process have been incredibly slow, especially in regard to this column and giving you new things to check out.

It turns out that rescuing the video and audio from these old tapes has been quite intense, and prone to all sorts of unexpected thrill and chills as I both unearthed rarities and found frustrating dead ends, meaning days of lost work. No history has been lost, of course -- just time, lots of time.

Now, the whole chain of digitization, clean up, compression and prep for the web can be done on a single machine, using a variety of tools (most open-source), which I can push through pretty quickly. It still takes two to three times the length of a tape to prepare it for the web, but it's dependable, and that's what matters.

With a room full of tapes ready to go, I know how the next few months are going to be spent with this material. It's obvious there are gems aplenty in this pile, and filling the GDC archives is going to be a very rewarding project.

So let's drop some GDC history, right?

Not every keynote had to be all about the latest console or the best graphics, and GDC has peppered its lineups over the years with some intellectual heavy-hitters from the academic side, to give everyone another perspective on this things they make.

In 2000, the keynote was Dr. Daniel Hillis (called Danny Hillis in basically every documentation of the event I could find), who was a co-designer of parallel computing, co-founder of Thinking Machines, and a veteran of Walt Disney Imagineering.

His talk, presented here in full, is a one-hour rumination on the importance, nay, the critical aspect of play in scientific and intellectual discovery [GDC Vault free video]. Pulling from his years of interesting with amazing people, Hillis provides us with his thesis on how the games industry can play in the advancement of the human race.

The GDC Vault service is proud to announce that videos and slides from last month's GDC Europe are now available online, including free videos from Ubisoft's Jason VandenBerghe on established IP, wooga CEO Jens Begemann on the implications and future of social games, and indie dev Thomas Grip on the design decisions that fueled the success of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Along with these free videos, slides for all of GDC Europe's sessions are now available for free, providing a glimpse into the range of notable topics discussed at the recent show.

The full catalog of video for GDC Europe is also now available to all GDC Vault members, now including All-Access Pass holders for last month's show in Cologne, Germany.

The following lectures are the first highlights to be made available for free from GDC Europe 2011:

- The lively Design track session, "The Magic Gun: Surviving IP Development Through Embracing Your Constraints" features Jason VandenBerghe, the narrative director on Ubisoft's FarCry 3, discussing the ins-and-outs of working with established IP.

No matter how familiar a developer might be with a given license, VandenBerghe encourages developers to embrace these constraints and "revel in what makes your IP different." [GDC Vault free video.]

- Elsewhere in the conference, wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann gave a keynote titled, "Playing is a Core Human Desire - How Social Games Change the Entertainment Industry," offering insight into the influence of social games on the industry at large.

During this session, social game leader Begemann (Diamond Dash, Magic Land) outlines how social games can coexist with core-focused titles, detailing how and why these games fill a new niche in the ever-evolving games market. [GDC Vault free video]

- The final session to be made available for free is a talk from Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Thomas Grip, dubbed, "Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success by Breaking All the Rules." Here, Frictional Games' Grip examines the success of his hit indie horror title, noting how the omission of some common horror game tropes made the game far more interesting -- and far more terrifying. [GDC Vault free video]

With roughly 36 hours left until early registration
for October's GDC Online show in Austin, Texas, ends at Midnight EST on
September 1, event organizers have chosen to reveal a handful of new
Main Conference talks, and detail the numerous other speakers,
tutorials, and events present at the show.

Adding to the show's Production track, Gazillion Entertainment's VP of publishing, Dan Fiden, will host "5 Things Core Designers Should Learn from Social Games,"
a lecture that will detail the growing influence of social online
titles on the industry at large. In the Business & Marketing track,
Daniel Block of EVE Online developer CCP will discuss the perils of interrupting marketing for an online game in "What Happens When You Stop Marketing Your MMO?"

The final new session this week is a Design track lecture from industry veteran (Marvel Super Hero Squad) Nikolaus Davidson, who will explore the psychology of spending money in games in "Why We Buy: A Game Designer's Guide To Transactions."

These lectures join a host of other notable talks within the show's main conference, which includes tracks spanning Business & Marketing, Customer Experience, Design, Production, and Programming, as well as a sponsored track on Monetization.

These recently-announced sessions within the Main Conference include Design-focused talks from Riot Games, Loot Drop, and Playdom, CCP and Zynga on designing and managing online games, a look at EA2D/BioWare San Francisco's Dragon Age Legends and Rovio's mega-hit Angry Birds, and much more.

In addition to these Main Conference sessions, PopCap co-founder John Vechey will host a keynote
at the event titled, "Playing Well With Others - How PopCap Creates
Compelling Social Game Experiences," a talk that will provide an inside
look at how mobile and social games have influenced the design
philosophy of the extremely successful casual game studio.

To help inspire submissions for the GDC 2012 call for papers, the event's advisory board members for the Game Design track spoke out on the biggest challenges facing game designers, and outlined what they hope to see at the upcoming March 2012 San Francisco-based event.

Canabalt creator and independent designer Adam Saltsman (pictured) and Civilization IV and Dragon Age Legends designer Soren Johnson came together to discuss the often-overlooked areas of game design, notable innovations, rising trends, and more as part of their drive to encourage submission ideas for the GDC 2012 Main Conference.

As GDC advisory board members, these industry veterans - alongside colleagues such as LucasArts' Clint Hocking and Cerny Games' Mark Cerny - oversee the show's Game Design track and ensure that each of its sessions remain relevant and hold up the high bar of quality that GDC attendees have come to expect.

The call for papers for GDC 2012 will close on September 6, with a list of Game Design-specific topics available on the official website. In the following interview, the advisory board members discuss key issues they'd like to see addressed at next March's show.

What are some key games from the past year or so that have impressed you with their new approaches to design - and why?

Adam Saltsman: Amnesia: Dark Descent and Bit Pilot are very interesting games. These are fairly hardcore horror and arcade games respectively, but neither game allows you to attack. Instead, your goal is to hide, avoid, and survive. For me this is a really welcome and interesting break from aiming and shooting games, but without sacrificing any of the awesomeness one might expect from a survival horror game or an arena shooter.

Soren Johnson: I was very impressed by Magicka's concept -- letting players cast spells by simply combing simple elements such as fire, water, electricity, arcane energy, and so on. This system encourages a sense of discovery absent from so many games; I loved trying out certain combinations just to see what would happen. That the game often supported my assumptions and guesses made the world feel alive. Allowing play based on intuition from existing knowledge instead of memorization of invented lore is always a big advantage.

The other development that stands out to me is how the best small-scale, indie games, like Frozen Synapse, Bastion, Atom Zombie Smasher, HOARD, etcetera, are creatively outpacing games from the big publishers simply because they can take risks and maintain their own vision. Many game genres and formats are simply not feasible for the big guys to make anymore, and this has surprisingly been great for the industry, because there are now so many gaps for the indies to fill.

How do you think the rise of social games will influence design in other areas of the game biz?

Adam Saltsman: One positive outcome that I am looking forward to is the expansion of our audience. PopCap helped do this, and a few years later the Wii helped do it again. Social games are having that effect right now; I think it's really great to have people that haven't played video games in a decade or more playing games again. Not everyone that plays FarmVille is going to rush out and get a PS3 next week, but there is a basic literacy thing happening that is going to have a huge long-term effect.