I spoke at the Austin Game Conference last week. While most people I talk to thought it went well, apparently not everyone agreed. As a person on both of the panels this person was disappointed with, as well as being the guy on the panel who used the word ‘penis’, I found that his takeaway from the talk was different than many others.

The first talk was about designing more inclusive games, a panel moderated by Carly Staehlin (formerly design lead of Tabula Rasa, and I was joined by Sheri Graner Ray (writer of Gender Inclusive Game Design, Daniel James (maker of Puzzle Pirates), and Mike Sellers (president of Online Alchemy). Given the rest of the panel was two very influential women and two men making very unconventional massively multiplayer titles, I figured going in I would be the lone traditionalist on the panel. I don’t know how this critic could call this talk ‘male heavy’ given Carly and Sheri are two of the predominant female design voices in the industry, but then there you go.

We started off by talking about core audiences versus casual audiences. I discussed in length how to identify a market and expand that market beyond its core. I’m a firm believer that attempting to please everyone will end up with a game that fails to please anyone. However, this ‘core audience’ does not need to be the core audience that is currently playing EverQuest. The Sims (offline) has an extremely hardcore core audience which acts as the social lynchpin around which the rest of the game can grow — they create the furniture, write the stories, mail the post cards, etc. The enthusiasm of that core audienceis one of the reasons why the Sims did in fact hit critical mass. One of the problems of language that our industry has is that we actually don’t have a term for ‘hardcore’ that doesn’t include male geeks that currently play Counterstrike and EQ. But for an online game to reach critical mass, it has to reach its own version of a ‘hardcore’ audience that it can build from. How it reaches and builds that ‘core’ audience will be different for a FPS shooter designed to target current FPS fans than it would be for a pure social game trying to attract women, because the ‘core’ audience is itself so different.

Sheri then corrected me (correctly) and emphasized what I failed to, which is that while you must build for the core, you also want to identify the extended audience (i.e. more casual, incidental players) and ensure that the decisions you make there don’t alienate them. For example, if that extended audience is mostly women, you want to ensure that your content is not going to drive them away, even if your core audience is mostly men.

After this, we kind of got lost in the weeds. We all agreed that the primary thing keeping MMOs from hitting a wider audience is that they take too much time and cause too much of a moral stigma. I told a story of how I had friends who played Everquest, but refused to recommend it to their friends, and now that they had quit, were ashamed of having spent so much time in the game. Daniel talked a bit about how, even in Puzzle Pirates, the time issue is something they combat, although they feel they are doing better than the EQs and the UOs of the world. We then spent too much time talking about this issue, but the overall conclusion was something we all agreed upon: if you want to reach a mass market, you need a game that people are proud of their playing time, and that they evangelize to their friends.

The Design Risks panel was led by Raph Koster, and involved myself, Patricia Pizer (who just started on ToonTown), and Matt Firor (an Executive Producer at Mythic). This one was a lot less structured, for a number of reasons, the least of which being this panel didn’t prepare as much as the other panel — for example, Raph didn’t realize he was the moderator until the day before!This panel was somewhat frustrating, since both Raph and Matt were in gloomy moods, and they kept saying that Risk was Scary. Of course, risk is scary — that’s why it’s risk. My stance was that not taking risks is even scarier — if you just make a copycat clone of Everquest or Worlds of Warcraft, then you’re just going to get steamrolled by teams that have far more resources than you – provided you don’t get cancelled first. I pointed out that Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot were two examples of games that took big risks that managed to capture the imagination of their player base (virtual world and RvR respectively), and those risks were instrumental to their success. “So a Unique Selling Proposition is a risk?” asked Raph. To a management whose first instincts are to create clones of games, yes.

At some point, I went off on a rant, where I said that the top risk we should be taking are making games that emphasize ‘massive’. I argued that our games are still trying to mirror a tabletop experience, and a lot of the reasons our games feel derivative is that we aren’t thinking big enough. Why are we making games that mirror single-player and small-squad experiences, instead of making games that really take advantage of our competitive advantage: 3000 people playing online in the same space?

Here, I said that we should be looking at LARPs instead of tabletop games, as they involve larger group dynamics. I confess, I was mostly just trying to stir things up.

Somewhere, Patricia mentioned she wanted to introduce Permadeath to ToonTown. Whether or not dip would be involved was left unsaid.

Near the end, Raph went from being the most anti-risk person on the panel to the guy with the biggest dreams. He wanted a game that would cure cancer, or that would teach people a musical instrument, or that would find intelligent life in the stars. It was somewhat strange being next to him while he went off in his soliloqouy, given he’d spent the first 50 minutes arguing against taking chances, but I think he had surmised that people came to the talk hoping to be inspired, not to walk away discouraged.

For those wondering when I said ‘penis’, it’s when I said that we should be exploring player-created content. If you’re going to do it, you need to have a plan for how to deal with objectionable content. Rather than trying to titillate, I was mentioning the fundamental roadblock which has kept the big boys from treading in this space. Anyone who thought I was titillating has never had to work behind the scenes at UO, where dealing with player-built swastikas and penis-shaped houses were part of the CSRs job description.

As a final aside, I would have liked to have gone to some of the women dev talks. Unfortunately, the organizer’s decision to stagger the talk times made it impossible to jump from one conference to another easily (all of their talks started half an hour before talks at the AGD). Hopefully, if they do this again next year, they will work more in concert and make it easier to hop from one to another.