GDC Day Two

Today I began playing “Destroy All Developers”.  So far, I have completed nine out of 20 missions and am in second place on the coders team.  The coders are in second place overall.  I am addicted to this game!  The mother lode at GDC is the care and feeding of the network. 

I met Lane Merrifield today (co-founder of Club Penguin).  In a case of total fandom, I stood in line to shake his hand so I can tell my kids that I shook his hand.  I thanked him for making Club Penguin and I told him how much, as a parent, I appreciated his work.  I told him I trusted him to keep my kids safe.  He was incredibly gracious.  Wow.  What a neat guy.  Perhaps I should have asked for his autograph.

While on a mission in the Destroy game, I “re-met” Dreamy Intel.  We met at Austin and it was fun to catch up with her.  She was responsible for managing Intel events in Second Life and she told me that they just didn’t get the ROI they needed to continue expending that level of effort.  Interesting.  She gave me lots of information on their game contest for 2008.  I look forward to getting digital copies that I can share across the system.

In the Serious Games Summit, eric zimmerman from gamelab led a panel on how to measure what we are learning from games.  He said that the NSF (I think – it could have been the McArthur foundation or another big funding source) said that this year is going to be all about measuring results.  I think this means we are inches away from having every game be a SCORM object capable of easily integrating with a learning management system.  These are exciting times.  Here were the things I heard that I felt were worth thinking about:

• Do games increase self-worth?
• How do we measure learning from a game?
• Extraneous info in game content can harm learning (humans do best keeping 5 to 9 things in short term memory at one time).
• Was the Destroy All Developers game good for me?  It feels a bit like Speed Dating.

Numbers I found interesting today:  Neopets has 22 MILLION user created shops; 750,000 transactions per day; 30,000 new users per day; 18% of their active users have been on site for more than 4 years; 45 million registered accounts.  Club Penguin has over 12 million active users; 500 to 1000 DAILY safety filter updates per day; more than 75 people in the company are dedicated to safety; 100,000 simultaneous users.

Tonight I attened a Sony Online Entertainment party in which they announced an initiative to encourage women to get into the gaming industry.  They showcased a game that is being built by women.  The trailer showed the same steroid-filled male characters and barely clothed female characters in a first person shooter that looks alarmingly similar to every other FPS…  Still, diversity in the workforce is good.  Getting more women into the game industry will have to help… Eventually.  Yeah SOE!