CONFERENCE  

The final boss of Plants vs. Zombies has been conquered by gamers of all ages as well as people with no gaming background whatsoever. George Fan, designer of Plants vs. Zombies, will walk you through how he managed to get his Mom to play through a full-blown strategy game while not alienating hardcore gamers. He will present 10 techniques he uses to better teach game mechanics to players, using specific examples from Plants vs. Zombies to illustrate these concepts.

Dear Esther has carved out a position as a critically acclaimed, cult hit, despite the complete lack of anything resembling traditional gameplay. In this talk, Pinchbeck will talk about the design of Dear Esther, including the approach to story, environment and audio, and how the game uses traditional game design in a new way to create a unique, story-driven experience. By understanding games as "orchestrated experiences", Pinchbeck argues that we reconcile traditional antagonism between mechanics and world, and open the way to a new kind of game design. In it's transition from academic research project to breakout, award-winning mod hit, to commercial game backed by Valve and Indie Fund, Dear Esther is the best evidence we currently have that the pure-story game, the orchestrated experience is not just a niche experiment, but a viable approach to game design.

Ideas about how to use alternative approaches to experience design and storytelling to create new forms of game experience. Particular attention is paid to how these novel design ideas transfer to a diverse range of games. The features discussed include environment design, visual detailing, audio and music, and script including voice-over. The presentation will suit game designers, writers and producers from both indie and mainstream development teams. It is aimed at those who are interested in new design possibilities, narrative architecture, story and player experience. No prerequisite knowledge is necessary and should appeal to entry-level and experienced developers.

Over the last 20 years (and, often unobserved) modern motivational psychology has coalesced around a system called "The Big 5" (or OCEAN). Why should we care? Because unlike its predecessors, this one has a titanic landslide of repeatable, scientific evidence behind it. But how does it apply to games?

The speaker has been collaborating with academics and industry colleagues to try and answer that problem - and we have found that we can, without difficulty, connect specific game elements directly to measurable Big 5 personality "facets". By doing this, we have uncovered a completely new way of looking at the motivations of play.

The potential of this connection is broad: it guides the speaker's our game design decision-making, it helps explain why particular games satisfy (or otherwise), it offers a statistical framework for playtest evaluation, and shows us which audiences we have been missing out on, to name a few.

By 2010, social gaming had proven to be a massive phenomenon. However, the variety of game genres on the Facebook platform was very limited. Early leaders, like Farmville, set an example that other developers soon followed, leading to a landscape overrun with near-identical simulation games targeted towards casual and non-gamers. Guided by the belief that there is a huge, under-served audience of gamers using Facebook, Gaia Online set out to develop a social game that combined successful aspects of classic console games with the necessary elements of social gaming. The result was Monster Galaxy, an innovative RPG on Facebook that grew to over 20 million users. This talk will dive into the design challenges the team faced and lessons they learned, including designing for the free-to-play business model, applying insights from user and A/B testing, the need for continual content updates, and managing trade-offs to increase accessibility, retention, and conversion.