A Casual AGC

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  Conferences, Game Industry

I just got back from the Austin Game Conference. This is an event that has traditionally focused on large MMO type games. This year it was held in conjunction with the Women’s Game Conference and the Game Writer’s Conference.

Unfortunately I arrived partway through day 1 so I ended up missing what I heard were some great talks including Damion Schubert’s “What Vegas Can Teach the MMO” session (review on Raph Koster’s site).

For dinner we had a “planning” dinner for our Casual Games Evolution summit sessions the following day. We had some incredible discussion on the future (of humanity) and how we should or should not encourage further mapping of the human genome. At the very end of the meal we even managed to plan our sessions a little bit
After that it was off to the casual developer’s party hosted by Macrovision/Jessica Tams and Garage Games. There were lots of great people there and it reminded me of most smaller GDC parties in that there was a high percentage of very interesting people to talk to.

I didn’t go to the Day 2 keynote, and it doesn’t sound like I missed much. The two Casual Games Evolution Summit sessions sponsored by Game Trust seemed to go over extremely well. They were well attended completely filling the room, and we managed to have an incredibly diverse set of panelists. I was talking about advergames, Peter Glover was talking about Portals, Mark Cottam told how great they are doing with traditional publishing, Margaret Wallace gave us the casual developer perspective, and Adeo did a great job moderating and forcing everyone to share their numbers.

After lunch we had the tech panel featuring Tim Higgins from Macromedia and Chris Melissinos from Sun, along with Peter Glover and myself. I think we learned a lot, although I didn’t end up saying much as all my good questions had already been given to moderator Adeo.

That afternoon I went to the MMO rant talk which was incredible. I think Brian Green had the best rant in the form of a tongue-in-cheek letter (posted here) to Stephen King about how he could write better novels.

The final session was Larry Mellon and Nicole Lazzaro’s Fun Meters for Games (slides here). Nicole always gives incredible talks and this was no exception. She and Larry have done a lot of research on this space, and the tag team between the two of them was very informative.

That night we went to a reception hosted by the Mayor of Austin (who gave a well meaning, but hollow political speech), looked at the millions of bats living under a nearby bridge, and then had dinner where I learned about the incredible Rolling Road Show (an off the wall movie theater on wheels) from Billy Caine.

All in all this was an outstanding event, with a very high quality of attendees. There wasn’t a lot of content directly for casual developers, but almost everything was still relevant.

Update: The Thursday night party was also hosted by Garage Games, which is also a very big supporter of the game developer community.