Podcast: Koster On Where Game Meets The Web

Author: by Staff

Gamasutra is proud to present the latest free Game Developers Conference recording, part of our regular weekly GDC Radio podcasts, which include both the Tom Kim-presented Gamasutra Podcast show, alongside the best lectures, tutorials, and roundtables from this and previous years' Game Developers Conferences. This week's podcast comes from this year's 2007 Game Developers Conference, with a lecture entitled Where Game Meets The Web, from ex-Sony Online Entertainment producer and A Theory of Fun author Raph Koster. Koster's latest venture, in production at his recently founded studio Areae, hopes to, as he says, marry the MMO world with the philosophies and practices of Web 2.0. "There's a lot of things wrapped up in that," Koster told Gamasutra, "everything from very low-end user costs for being able to participate, lots and lots and lots of listening to users, having them involved, having them contribute." An explanation and elaboration of many of those principles can be found in his GDC lecture. As the official lecture description reads: "We've all heard it, and probably even said it: games are kind of like movies. We have the blockbusters, the opening days, the big budgets and interdisciplinary teams... There are many lessons we can learn from the well-established content industries. But games are also software, and the software world is undergoing a revolution. The web world is in ferment - some say a new bubble - and it's dragging content industries kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The underlying technological assumptions of the web regarding concepts such as IP, distribution, and user participation are very different from the Big Media way of doing things. Could 'release early, release often' possibly apply to the world of gamemaking? This session is about lessons we can learn from how the web world works, applied to the game industry, and concrete takeaways on how to leverage the brave new Web world." You can now download the GDC lecture, Where Game Meets The Web (.MP3, 68 minutes, 15.7 MB). In addition, you can subscribe to the GDC Radio podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.