Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Hey everyone. I’m sitting in the Parliment room at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle, having just finished listening to my friend Darius Kazemi from Orbus Gameworks talk about using data collection (metrics) from your online game for various purposes, such as tracking social connections so you can identify the people to contact with news that will most effectively spread that news via word of mouth, using graphing software to catch gold miners, setting up your database for effective SQL operations, etc. Earlier this morning I ran into Brian Robbins from Fuel Industries and later attended his talk in the previous hour on brand use in massively online games, also an interesting talk. In that he discussed how various companies like Coke, Nickelodeon, Disney and others have used their brand names to create these popular marketing games. Right now I’m waiting for the next lecture to start, which covers design techniques to help auto-balance your game play. Should be interesting.

I’ll be posting various updates today and tomorrow, and I’ll be writing a full-on coverage article that will be posted sometime next week after I return home. I won’t be detailing much, but you can at least get a preview of what I’ll be writing about in a few days.

Whoops the next session is starting – see ya!