Bring Out Your Dead!
Last month James Hursthouse linked to my list of talks I never need to see again, so this month I thought I would be more positive and write about the talks I would like to see at LOGIN 2010. Our call for speakers will be coming up in November, and the advisory board is preparing for that process now.
The type of talk that I would like to see the most of at LOGIN is the postmortem. In my mind, any talk that tells the story of something that shipped to actual customers is a postmortem. Often these are about an entire game (like my talk at the 2008 conference on Pirates of the Burning Sea), but covering only one system or only one transition in a game's life-cycle can be just as valuable. My hope is that every talk we accept will include some aspect of postmortem in the sense that I would like to hear about the results of what people did more. Talks about what people think will happen are useful, but talks about what actually did happen are more useful. At most conferences the most interesting part is hearing war stories at a bar after the sessions for the day are over. If you have a great story to tell about something that happened during the development or operation of an online game, please submit it as a session.
The other major area I would like to see is more talks on online games that are not MMOs on the PC. Social games continue to develop in interesting ways. Mobile games on the iPhone and Android are moving online, and are often taking advantage of the unique features of mobile (like location awareness) to create games that simply would not work on a non-mobile platform. Consoles are fully online now and doing exciting things beyond simply acting as a lobby. Even non-game Web 2.0 companies are now incorporating game elements in their sites to drive user behavior. If you are involved with any of these areas we want to hear from you once session submissions opens.
The third major area that I hope to expand at LOGIN this year is the deep and specific talks. An example of this from the 2009 conference would be Nandor Szot's talk on spam filtering in Everquest II, but we have had similar talks on design and production issues. If you have solved a problem that other people in the industry are still struggling with, chances are it would make a great talk. One caveat that I should point out here is that you need to be willing to share the nitty gritty details of your solution. If you are primarly interested in selling your consulting time or middleware as the solution, then you should consider signing on as a sponsor of the conference instead of submitting a session. We are making a major push this year to get more working developers (programmers, designers, etc.) at the conference, and expanding this part of the conference is an important part of that effort.
Over the past three years I feel that the sessions and speakers at LOGIN have been getting better and better. Hopefully you can help us continue that trend in 2010.
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Joe Ludwig LOGIN Advisory Board Member Programmer, Valve Software |
