CONFERENCE

SOCIAL & ONLINE GAMES

The market for interactive entertainment on social web platforms has matured rapidly, and now the features and tropes of connected gaming are catching on across the gaming landscape – encompassing Facebook gaming, web-based online games, downloadable persistent MMOs, casual and beyond. The Social & Online Games Summit once again gathers the industry's established leaders and up-and-coming rebels for two days of illuminating sessions about the technology, design, business, marketing, and future of social and online games.

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Growing "Out" of Europe: Wooga Postmortem [SOGS Postmortem]

Jens Begemann (Wooga)

Jens Begemann, CEO and founder of Wooga, will reveal how he and his team put Wooga and Berlin on the social gaming map and became the third largest social games developer worldwide. Wooga's strong and constant growth is based based on sustainability, a core belief which has taught Jens and those at Wooga valuable lessons in the last three years. Condensed and from a European perspective, Jens will retrace Wooga's fast race to the top and offer an outlook for 2012, illustrating how the company will continue to expand into the emerging social mobile universe.

Create New Genres (and Stop Wasting Your Life in the Clone Factories)

Daniel Cook (Spry Fox)

Re-releasing old designs with pretty new graphics means me-too titles fighting off a crowd of similar products. This is the path to mediocrity. To become a master designer, you need to break past a slavish devotion of past forms and create vibrant, new experiences. This design talk covers practical techniques for reinventing game genres. The goal is the invention of a unique and highly differentiated customer value proposition that makes both strong business sense and is also deeply creatively fulfilling. We cover designing from the root, reducing design risk, and igniting original franchises. We also cover the pitfalls of design innovation including fending off shark-like fast followers and other cloners. The presentation covers personal examples from recent titles such as Steambirds, Realm of the Mad God, Triple Town and other innovative successes.

Character Assassination

Kenny Shea Dinkin (Disney Interactive Media Group/Playdom)

Zynga, Playdom/Disney, Playfish/EA, Wooga, Crowdstar - together these companies' entertaining social games have reached over half a billion people and have come to define the mass market for interactive play - but can you name a single well-known mass market character from these games?

In other gaming categories, characters like Sonic, Mario, Carmen Sandiego, Flo and Angry Birds have emerged as popular cultural icons. This talk will look in particular at characters within the sphere of narrative design for social games, and especially try to answer the question: what makes it so hard to create a compelling and beloved character in a social game?

Indiana Jones Adventure World: Making Core Gameplay for Everyone [SOGS Postmortem]

Seth Sivak (Zynga Boston)

When Zynga Boston set out to build Adventure World, they searched for a way to the bring traditional gameplay of action-adventure games to the browser. Puzzles, combat and exploration needed to be distilled so that any user could understand and navigate with only a left mouse click. In this presentation Seth Sivak, lead designer of Indiana Jones Adventure World, will present lessons learned and the challenges of bringing core game mechanics to the social genre.

Steve Meretzky

Playdom

It's hard to have a serious conversation about gaming without mention of Steve. It's also hard to have a humorous conversation about gaming without mention of him. Steve's contributions to the industry began in 1981 at the legendary adventure game company Infocom, where his titles included PLANETFALL, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (a collaboration with Douglas Adams), LEATHER GODDESS OF PHOBOS and ZORK ZERO. Prior to joining Playdom, Steve co-founded Boffo Games and held senior creative posts at Blue Fang Games, Floodgate Entertainment and WorldWinner.com. Over his prolific career, Steve also consulted with teams at Activision, Blizzard, Disney, EA, Harmonix, Hasbro and Legend, to name a few. A former board member of IGDA, Steve organized the Social & Online Games Summit, Casual Games Summit, and the annual Game Designers Workshop at the GDC. Steve holds a BS in construction project management from MIT, but otherwise assures us that he did not waste his four years there.

Frank Cartwright

K2 Network/GamersFirst

As SVP of Product and Platform Development, Frank Cartwright brings over a decade of experience in online, core and casual gaming. Most recently he served as Vice President Online Entertainment at the GameShowNetwork (GSN) where he oversaw the product development, technology implementation and administration of GSN.com, the network's emerging casual game site. Prior to GSN, he served as Vice President of Product Development and Engineering at Global Gaming League (GGL) a worldwide leader in organized competitive online and live video game tournaments and events (V-Sports). Prior to GGL, he served as Vice President of Production for SkillJam Technologies where he played an instrumental role in the company's growth and globalization efforts handling all technical development and production. Frank began his career in gaming in 1995 at Dreamers Guild as Lead Software Engineer on Turner Interactive's Dinotopia PC game. From there he joined Disney Internet Group (DIG) creating dozens of Java, Flash and Shockwave online games and building Disney's online, multi-player gaming platform. Frank has a BS degree in Business Management.

David Edery

Spry Fox

David Edery is currently the CEO of Spry Fox, a game development studio creating downloadable and online free-to-play games, and a Director on the board of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). Previously, David was Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox LIVE service, where he was responsible for content strategy and for selecting the specific games which would be accepted for distribution by the LIVE service. David co-authored "Changing the Game: How Video Games are Transforming the Future of Business", a book that explores the ways that games can be leveraged by businesses of all kinds.

Juan Gril

Joju Games

Juan heads the production at Joju Games. Joju produces online, social and multiplayer games for clients such as Atari, Shockwave.com, MTV Networks, Comedy Central, Mochimedia and Nickelodeon. Juan has more than 12 years of experience developing online games. Previously, and as one of the first members of the Yahoo! Games team, Juan was the lead producer for the downloadable games area and community manager of multi player games. In the last year of his tenure at Yahoo!, Juan was the head of Yahoo! Games Studios.

Juan is a frequent speaker at industry events, and holds a BFA in Electronic Media from the University of Illinois.

Sulka Haro

Makielab

Sulka came to Makielab from Sulake, where he was Design Lead on Habbo Hotel, the teenage virtual world phenomenon with over 200 million registered users. In addition to working on Habbo, he was the Lead Designer for Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom, created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Disneyland. Sulka occasionally blogs at Sulka's Game.

John Welch

Making Fun

John Welch is veteran leader of the games industry and one of the early pioneers of digital distribution. He is co-founder and President of Making Fun, the first full-service social games publisher, which was acquired by News Corporation in November 2010. Previously, Welch was co-founder & CEO of innovative casual game publisher PlayFirst, famous for the best-selling "Diner Dash" brand. He helped build Shockwave.com into a top game portal, and he was a key member of the Dreamcast Network team at SEGA. He created and ran a software startup in the early Internet days after starting his career at Andersen Consulting. Welch served as steering committee member and chair of the IGDA Online & Casual Games groups, and he is a regular faculty member of the annual Game Developers' Conference. He is an active advisor and investor in several startups including Secret Builders, a creative virtual world heavily endorsed by parents and teachers. He is an active member and officer of the Golden Gate chapter of the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO). John holds degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from M.I.T. and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

As a top-10 games publisher to Facebook, GSN Digital apps include GSN Games, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and the soon-to-be-released GSN Casino for mobile devices. GSN (Game Show Network) is owned by DIRECTV and Sony Pictures Entertainment, GSN Digital is the interactive division of GSN.

Android and iOS's leading social games network with a full suite of social features, diverse set of monetization tools, and the fastest 2D OpenGL cross platform game engine. PapayaMobile provides both tools for game developers and content for players on its growing social mobile network of over 40 million users worldwide.

Pokki is an application platform that is re-inventing the desktop by empowering developers to create beautiful applications and immersive games built with HTML5. Pokki offers the same kind of elegant and easy app experience you have come to expect from iOS and mobile devices right on the PC.

CONFERENCE

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2012 HIGHLIGHTED SESSIONS

SOCIAL & ONLINE GAMES SUMMIT ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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