The official project launch included two keynote talks by leading industry-based speakers and an entertaining panel session. The event received local press coverage from the Yorkshire Post, the York Press and BBC Radio York. Videos from the event will be available soon.
Schedule:
1:30-2:00 Arrival and Coffee
2:00-2:30 Intro to NEMOG and its goals
2:30-3:15 Industry keynote 1:
Jeffrey Lin, Lead Designer of Social Systems, Riot Games
Title: Mining gameplay data from League of Legends: Encouraging sportsmanship and teamwork
Large-scale online games such as League of Legends provide massive quantities of gameplay data. Mining this data to understand player behaviour and preferences is an increasingly important tool in games design, with the potential for further research advances in scientific areas such as psychology and sociology. Sportsmanship helps players win games, but win or lose, sportsmanlike behavior make games more fun. Sportsmanship already widely exists in online games and online gaming communities like League of Legends. We believe that the next evolution of online game design involves making sportsmanship and teamwork the path of least resistance and supporting sportsmanlike figures among everyday players. In this talk, we'll discuss what we've learned creating features and content to amplify positive player interactions inside and outside of the game.
We'll present the latest findings in group dynamics and social psychology which show how different compositions of players can greatly affect the level of cooperation. We'll also reveal how we approach research behind the newest features in online games, as well as how collaborators can work together with us to advance research in areas such as psychology, sociology, economics and human-computer interaction.
3:15-3:45 Coffee break
3:45-4:30 Industry Keynote 2:
Charles Cecil MBE, Founder and Managing Director, Revolution
Title: Crowdfunding Broken Sword - The Serpent’s Curse
Out of the $811 million pledged to successful Kickstarter projects, $180.1 million (22.2%) was raised to back games development. Crowdfunding continues attracting game developers’ interest as they strive for an early financial commitment. Charles Cecil will talk about this exciting new business model for games.
Charles wrote his first game in 1981, and a lot has changed since then. He is going to talk a little about the history of the video games industry, from a personal perspective, and culminate with discussion of Revolution’s successfully crowdfunded project; Broken Sword - The Serpent’s Curse.
4:30-5:30 Panel on using games to achieve societal and scientific goals through analytics and new business models
5:30-8:00 Poster and Demo Session, Finger Food, Drinks and Networking