I've been meaning to write-up a brief summary of some of the interesting names, stats and comments I jotted down in my programme of the Nordic Game Conference 2007. It was held in Malmø on May 15-16th and I came there to give a talk there on death as part of the academic track (fyi, I've started to refer to myself as "travelling in death" - I do hope I'll be talking about something more lively soon ;)).

Anyway, here's what I noted:
Paulina Bozek: Singstar will launch online community, with sharing of lipsynced karaoke-videos and download of songs on the fly come this summer. Slides for show presented via the PS3 console, very slick. She talked about the web as "MyEverything". There are 2500 Singstar videos on Youtube. Lipsync videos very popular: example Numa Numa (discovered yesterday, Nik & Jay lipsync videos very popular amongst Danish youth). Flick users: 10% actively upload content, 90% of browsers, online communities need to appeal to both. Other EA community endeavours: Home, LittleBigPlanet, Virtual Me, Spore. Forrester Research: 84% of European youth owns a mobile. "Mass customisation". "Unbundling of content"

Nexon: Biggest Online Game provider. "Kart Rider" MOG: #1 in China. And "Maple Story" more than 50 mill users worldwide, 14 mill alone in South Korea (cf Gamasutra feature). They were actually the first who launched a modern graphic MMOG, 1996: Kingdom of the Winds. 68% of people under 15 years play "Kart Rider" in Korea. 6 of 10 people in Korea play online games more than 1 hour a week. Kart Rider in a year: 20 million virtual cars sold - in comparison Hyundai only sold 4 million "real" cars...

Aki Järvinen: games as "microworlds". Need to check out: Ortony et al: "The Cognitive Structure of Emotions" (1990). Darfur is Dying game. Games where players have to nurture and care for something a design space not yet fully explored.

Papermint - a cool german chatworld, where the world and avatars are all "paperdolls", small embedded games. Very complex way of showing avatar's emotions to each other, something with showing most used recent mood states above their head. "Games to dont have to look realistic to feel real". You can print and cut-out your avatar?!! Mint plants, the currency only lasts for 24 hours, players need to nurture if they want them to proliferate. Black and white mainly, colours for clothes only if they can get them off plants in the world. "We need games with more beautiful boys". Looked very cool, still in testing version.

Mark Olilla: 850 million Nokia Users worldwide. Currently only 5% download mobile games. Trying to boost buying of games, by introducing "try before buy" option, establish community, profile reviews etc etc.

Eve Online Keynote: now introducing human avatars. "Girls dont want to be spaceship" (we could have told you that long time ago...). 200.000 current subscribers, but 3 million people have tried the game. Their goal: to surpass the amount of citizens of Island, where game originates and is produced. So far 121.753 man years spent in Eve. They plan to launch weekly TV channel where users will provide content, telling about various events in the world, this is also one way for developers to keep updated when universe is as big as EVE's.

The Mustard Corporation is a UK-based gamescript writing company that surprisingly lives of creating storylines, NPC-dialogue and other "story" aspects for various games. The speaker had discovered WoW and LOTR online but had nothing intelligent to say about them, one good example of someone that would in fact have given a much better talk, if he had taken a little time to study the research in the field.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:45