d.Construct 2008

On Friday I headed down to Brighton for the d.Construct 'designing the social web' conference, courtesy of the Guardian (they gave away a few free tickets as sponsors, I was lucky enough to get one after the main conference had sold out). 

It was a really interesting day, with some great speakers (see the line up on the official site), I met up with some good friends and met some familiar faces from Twitter. It was especially great to meet and hang out with Mel Kirk, Michael Smith, Alex Tew and Ryan Carson. 

During the conference, the definite highlight for me was the talk by Aleks Krotoski on 'Playing the web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place'. She's a brilliant performer on stage (despite professing her nervousness), with an awesome depth of experience that goes across gaming, social media and tech. Partly her speech was a rally call to get the gaming industry to talk more to the web industry as she described the huge parallels between them, and the areas where they could both help each other out. In short, games engage people, internet connects people, do both together and make lots of money. 

A few bits I took away from her talk:

1. Graphics don't really matter, it's all about the gameplay

2. Story is the last thing though about in a game, again it's all about the PLAY - fun, enjoyment and stickiness. 

3. Some games still employ 'controlled systems', simple gameplay with linear progression. However more and more users are looking for 'open systems' where users can explore and do what they want within the game world to progress in their own way (e.g. the GTA games). These are great but can be made too big.

4. The next step again are 'enabling systems' where the social value in the game is created by users themselves; e.g species in Spore, the stories created in World of Warcraft, items and buildings in Second Life. 

If you were thinking about heading down this year but didn't get the chance, I definitely recommend going down next time - you'll see me there. 

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UPDATE: Aleks has done a full write up of her talk on the Guardian blog, go check it out.