Latest News

With experience working on titles ranging from Ultima Online to Star Wars Galaxies, industry veteran Raph Koster has developed quite a bit of expertise on online game design, and at next month's GDC Online, he'll present a robust keynote detailing his theory for creating fun in the modern online game industry.

Alongside his keynote, GDC Online organizers have also revealed two new Design track sessions, covering the best practices for video game analytics and the evolving tastes of female players.

These new talks all fall within GDC Online's Main Conference, which offers some of the world's leading content on persistent and online games. The event will be held Tuesday, October 9 to Thursday, October 11 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas.

The full details on GDC Online's newly announced sessions are as follows:

- In Raph Koster's keynote, the 2012 Online Game Legend Award recipient will reflect on a speech he gave 10 years ago at the very first GDC Online - then known as the Austin Game Conference. In that keynote, Koster explored why games matter, how they teach players, and what fun is.

In his upcoming presentation, dubbed "A Theory of Fun 10 Years Later," he'll revisit those ideas and address how his theory has changed over the last decade, reexamining the importance of how games interact with their players.

- Elsewhere, Bigpoint's Christian Godorr and Stefanie Hels will host "Separating Signal from Noise: Leveraging Creative Analytics for Game Design." Here, the pair will explain how to look past cliched terms like "Monthly Active Users" and "Lifetime Value" to find the proper way to blend data-driven analytics with real, creative game design.

- Finally, Real Life Plus creative director Terry Redfield will examine female player demographics in "It's Not Your Game, It's Me: How a Woman's Taste in Games May Change As She Ages." Redfield, who has also worked on titles such as Psychonauts and Gardens of Time, will use the latest research on female hormone and neurological studies to examine how certain game mechanics appeal to distinct female age groups.

With GDC China 2012 just a few months away, the show has debuted the first sessions in its quickly expanding lineup. For this first update, show organizers have added a robust level design tutorial featuring developers from Bethesda, Valve, and The Fullbright Company, as well as game design talks from companies like EA Sports and Virtuos.

These debut sessions -- along with the rest of GDC China -- will take place November 17-19 at the Shanghai International Convention Center in Shanghai, China, and will bring together the world's leading developers to share knowledge and ideas that will benefit the Asian game industry and beyond.

The full details on GDC China's initial sessions are as follows:

- First, the show will host the in-depth "Level Design Workshop," an interactive tutorial session examining the best practices for successful level design. During this session, Bethesda's Joel Burgess, Valve's Matthew Scott, and The Fullbright Company founder and Bioshock 2 designer Steve Gaynor will discuss fundamental principles such as layout, flow, pacing, and narrative, and will apply those concepts to a variety of game genres.

- In the Design Track's "The Business of Art Direction: 7 Critical Precepts," EA Sports executive art director Rick Stringfellow will discuss some essential guidelines that can help developers better manage their production pipelines. He'll examine everything from "debugging difficult digital content to establishing new visual processes," and will give attendees the knowledge they'll need to streamline development for all types of games, platforms, and audiences.

- Finally, Florian Dhesse of outsourcing house Virtuos will host "Improve Your Games' Quality by Managing Your Designers," offering tips to help Chinese studios lead and nurture their valuable game designers. Drawing from Virtuos' own experience working in China, the senior game design manager will outline the methods and tools studios will need to improve their products and better manage their game design staff.

GDC Online organizers have revealed that Raph Koster, a key industry veteran behind the prodigious MMORPGs Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, will be honored with the Online Game Legend Award at the third annual Game Developers Choice Online Awards.

In addition, Blizzard Entertainment's influential World of Warcraft will be inducted into the Choice Online Awards Hall of Fame during the ceremony, taking place Wednesday, October 10 at GDC Online in Austin, Texas.

These special awards categories recognize developers and titles that have had significant impact in the world of online games. Honorees were selected through open nominations from the online game community and the distinguished GDC Online Advisory Board.

Raph Koster, this year's Online Game Legend Award winner, has led a prolific career. As the lead designer on Ultima Online and the creative director on Star Wars Galaxies, his contributions helped lay the foundation for the many massively multiplayer games that followed. Koster's professional credits span nearly every facet of game development, including writing, art, soundtrack music, programming and design.

Raph Koster is considered a thought leader, as he is a frequent lecturer and published author on topics of game design, community management, storytelling and ethics in game development. His A Theory of Fun, published in 2004, is considered seminal by educators and members of the art game movement, as well as being one of the most popular books ever written about games.

In his youth, Koster taught himself programming on an Atari 8-bit computer that he used to create the first game he ever sold (It was purchased by a fellow classmate). His early professional years include work on the award-winning multi-user dungeon LegendMUD, which he later parlayed into a position as lead designer on the seminal MMO Ultima Online. Koster's varied interests in writing, art and graphic design served him well when he joined Sony Online Entertainment in the role of creative director on Star Wars Galaxies, a game praised for its lush graphics, authentic movie-based soundtrack, expansive in-game world, customization options and sophisticated gameplay mechanics.

After serving as chief creative officer at Sony Online Entertainment, Koster established his own firm, Metaplace, a software platform developer for social worlds and the company behind popular Facebook games Island Life and My Vineyard. In 2010, Metaplace was acquired by Disney Interactive Media Group's online social development arm, Playdom, where Koster currently serves as vice president of creative design.

Next year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has begun to take shape, and if you're interested in becoming a speaker at the upcoming show, there's still time, as the call for submissions will remain open though Tuesday, August 28.

GDC Online 2012, organized by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, is just a few short months away, and will host a robust schedule of more than 100 lectures, panels, keynotes, and roundtable discussions led by notables in the connected, mobile, and social game development sectors.

The annual event returns to Austin on October 9 through October 11, and Early Bird registration for GDC Online is still open through Friday, August 24.

Mobile and social games will have an increased prominence this year, reflecting developments across the games landscape. Vijay Thakkar, Zynga technical director, will lecture on the importance of searching for and developing new IP while Kabam general manager Justin Lambros and art lead Josh Viers give a joint session to offer attendees a behind-the-scenes review of the design development decisions they made while creating the studio's hardcore social-strategy game, Trojan War.

Gary Gattis, CEO of Austin-based mobile and social MMO developer Spacetime Studios, will also be on hands to detail his applied "engagement and respect" philosophy at Spacetime, which has retained more than 90 percent of its employees for several years.

GDC Online will also continue to adhere to its core focus on online games. Damien Schubert, principal lead systems designer at BioWare Austin, and one of the minds behind Star Wars: The Old Republic, and John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, will both offer lessons from their experiences developing and launching big-budget, large-scale MMO titles.

As a special treat, attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the challenges of developing, launching and maintaining a landmark MMORPG title during the Ultima Online classic game postmortem. Rich Vogel, Raph Koster and Starr M. Long, three chief members of the original Ultima Online team, will be on-hand to discuss the challenges they faced during the creation of the seminal game.

Introduced at the 2011 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, classic game postmortems provide a forum for the game creators behind legacy titles to deconstruct what they learned during the process of development.

Other key 2012 GDC Online speakers and sessions include:

- Electronic Arts' EVP of digital, Kristian Segerstrale, discussing the best approach to creating fully immersive game ecosystems that create an emotional connection with consumers.

- Zynga CTOs Jason Pearlman (mobile) and Allan Leinwand (infrastructure engineering) offering tips to game developers and engineers on how to cope with the infrastructure demands of modern online games.

The Independent Games Festival China - which will take place alongside this November's GDC China in Shanghai - has opened its call for submissions and is accepting indie game entries from the pan-Pacific area from now through September 10.

Following its success from previous years, GDC China will once again host all three main elements of IGF China, including the IGF Summit, the IGF Pavilion, and the prestigious IGF Awards.

Now in its fourth year, the IGF Summit at GDC China will feature sessions from some of the world's top developers, while the IGF Pavilion will showcase some of the region's best independent and student games.

And of course the IGF Awards - which are split into both Main and Student competitions - will honor the many talented developers in the pan-Pacific area.

The 2012 IGF China Main Competition will give out awards and cash prizes in five categories, including:

- Best Game (RMB20,000 ~ $3,150 USD)
- Best Mobile Game (RMB10,000 ~ $1,570 USD)
- Excellence in Audio (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)
- Excellence in Technology (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)
- Excellence in Visual Arts (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)

The Student Competition, meanwhile, will offer two awards, for Best Student Game (RMB10, 000 ~ $1,570 USD, 1 Winner) and Excellent Student Winner (RMB3, 000 ~$470 USD, 2 Winners).

Finalists -- who will receive two All Access passes to attend GDC China and the IGF awards ceremony on November 18, 2012 -- will be chosen by a panel of expert jurors including Kevin Li (CEO, TipCat Interactive); Monte Singman (Founder/CEO, Radiance Digital Entertainment); Xubo Yang (Director of Digital Art Lab and Assistant Professor; Shanghai Jiaotong University's School of Software), Haipeng Yu (Producer, Tencent Shanghai), and jury chairman Simon Carless, IGF Chairman Emeritus and EVP of the GDC shows, Gamasutra, and Game Developer magazine.

The lineup for this October's GDC Online continues to grow this week, as show organizers have added a trio of new design-focused sessions featuring a postmortem of Zynga's CastleVille, EVE Online developer CCP on sandbox game design, and a look at how to enhance your franchise with complementary companion games.

These new talks all fall within GDC Online's Design track as part of the show's Main Conference, which offers come of the world's leading content on persistent and online games. The event will be held Tuesday, October 9 to Thursday, October 11 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas.

The full details on these newly-announced sessions are as follows:

- In "CastleVille Postmortem: What Went Right and Wrong," Zynga designers William Lemons and Bruce Shelley will peel back the curtain on one of the social game giant's newest and most popular Facebook titles.

Zynga Dallas, the studio behind CastleVille (and formerly known as Bonfire Studios) was founded by a number of veterans from the popular Age of Empires franchise, and in this session Lemons and Shelley will explain how the team leveraged its experience working on RTS games while meeting the demands of modern social game design.

- Elsewhere, Matthew Woodward of EVE Online developer CCP Games will share his thoughts on the design theory behind sandbox online games.

His session, dubbed "The Other White Meat: Design Architecture for Sandbox Games," will pick the genre apart piece by piece, analyzing the importance of social networks, emergent gameplay, and self-sustaining systems. Woodward will also discuss a number of practical design lessons developers can apply to their own sandbox titles.

- Finally, Ben Miller and Matt Griswald, two of the lead developers behind the Resistance 3 companion web-based strategy game Global Resistance, will discuss what it takes to make a robust and successful complementary title that benefits a larger, AAA release.

Their session, "Take Your Companion Game to the Next Level," will examine the design of Global Resistance, demonstrating how the game's design, format, and online community helped draw attention to its AAA big brother on PlayStation 3.