Yesterday was Evolve, Develop's day for evolving, emerging and other-stuff from the main fodder of the conference. It's pretty safe to say that the day could be summed up as The iPhone and Facebook Day.
At least three competing talks were on the subject of social networks and how develops can tap into the large slavering mess of people on Facebook, who are just dying to play multiplayer-with-friends games - Zynga is the number one app developer on Facebook: they're the makers of Mafia Wars (and Gang Wars and Vampire Wars and Space Wars and... yes, you get the idea).
Stuart Dredge from PocketGamer did a lovely session identifying the cool things out there that we might have missed. Of his 20 examples, the room had probably heard of 3, so this was an excellent, info-rich look into the giant world of casual gaming - mainly iPhone, some Facebook, again - as done by 25 year old types while down the pub. Again, a reminder of the huge audiences out there beyond the XBox.
To wrap, David Edery did a fantastic job of covering the gamut of interesting things happening in the online world and where the long tail might help: his presentation is here. He covered digital distribution, premium downloadable content, long tail, AB testing, multiplayer solutions and Honda's little digital trophy that the car dashboard gives you if you drive efficiently.
Gaming the real world, oh, so huge...
We finished late, after Dave Green's Never Mind The Polygons. One of the games we played was Real or Fake: IGN reviewer comments!. This one I'm having framed:
It needs to be turned into cross-stitch and hung over the front door.
A friend who was in the audience suggested we do it as a much simpler true or false next time :)
Here's the source the fake ones all come from, and many more:
http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6275
We set up a Twitter account during X48, which IGN later complained about too :)
http://twitter.com/igndotcom
Posted by: David Hayward | July 17, 2009 at 15:38
Neat presentation you did Alice (even though I'm not the target of it), I'm going to play more 1066 now ;) - if I have a chance, my notes will go up online at some point (I actually saw both your sessions, funnily enough - I have a lot of notes, good eh?), but I am sure it might be useful getting the slides too. I should have probably popped into Evolve at some point too, but there we go.
Posted by: Andrew | July 18, 2009 at 01:25
Hey, thanks! I wasn't nearly awake enough so it's nice to hear it made some sort of sense.
As for the slides - I'll stick 'em up soon when I get a chance to reg with slideshare.
Posted by: Alice | July 18, 2009 at 14:11
This is quite an interesting and informative posting. To be honest I was not at all aware of this one. :)
Posted by: WoW Accounts | July 30, 2009 at 06:51