I drove down to help out a local summer camp for kids called GameCamp on Friday. It was actually my second stint helping the guys out. It was fun. The event was held in San Marcos, 30 minutes south of here, and involved a couple dozen kids who ranged from 13 to 18. Both trips resulted in sightings of a plethora of wonderfully snarkalicious geek-0riented T-shirts.

The first time was last Sunday, when I drove down to talk about MMOs as part of a panel of other speakers. I represented designers, with other individuals speaking for programming, art and the service side of MMOs. Predictably, the service guy didn’t get many questions. A shame, since entering the service side is probably the easiest way to get into the industry.

I answered a lot of questions about MMOs, including ‘is the grind going away’ (yes, but only as soon as we find something that replaces it), ‘what’s the best exploit you’ve ever seen (breaking into UO houses with staircases built of spoons) and ‘why are the economies for these games always broken (because they’re hard). I also answered a lot of questions about how to break into the industry, although this was mostly just regurgitating what I’ve said in the past.

Friday’s trip was more fun because the kids were all covered in flopsweat. Gamecamp is structured so that the kids are divided up into teams, and they spend their days learning about games and their nights playing them. The last day of camp, though, your team has to pitch a game industry idea to a whole bunch of industry veterans, which included me as well as Todd Coleman and James Nance from Shadowbane fame (Todd now has a new gig which James is helping out on).

The kids were divided up into two teams, one consisting mostly of the older kids and the other with mostly younger. While at first glance unfair, the organizers say its somewhat necessary to keep the younger kids from being completely marginalized within their teams. So we saw two ideas, and both of them were better than I expected. Not, say, fundable at their current level, but … oh, how to put this delicately… I’ve seen worse game pitches given by people who are ostensibly paid to be experts at it.

I cast my vote for the younger of the two groups. The older group presented a cooler game that I’d rather play, but the other design was simpler and more focused, and at the end of the presentation, I had exactly two questions. The older group’s design was vastly more ambitious, but I still had a laundry list of questions left when our Q&A period expired. I guess as an experienced designer, I just learned to appreciate simplicity that much.