Well Wednesday night there was a greetings party in a very crowded 2 floor bar. They had Pint glasses, so Calanor me and our Expert Rose Developer all got one (remember the glasses it is important later). We return to the hotel fairly soon due to tired of standing around waiting for people. We were pretty tired due to the 4am drive to work that day to try and be on time.
It was a standing joke about how much difficulty Calanor had with the door… Seriously everyone else just opens it he fights it like a vampire without a soul trying to go through the automatic doors at a grocery store. No end of jibbing and laughter ensued from that. But the smiles stopped when I tried to check all the social stuff like blog, forums, facebook, twitter etc. No wireless, only like a 2800 baud modem speed land line.. so calls were made. The part that made me almost flip out was the statement of “the Internet is working on the floors below and above you”… Well I guess the roof was working but we didn’t have access to the roof so posting was thwarted.
Thursday we all went over and attended our classes, taking examples and offering our own situations to other game publishers, execs, developers. I know before I started working for Gravity I didn’t really understand what a convention was about, my knowledge was based on movies and stories about parties, socializing etc. Granted you could go and just use it to talk and go to afterparties, but really the sessions are pretty valuable, and the aftere parties are more about hand shakes and conversations than parties. And frankly I wouldn’t want to go if there wasn’t something of value I could take away from it to offer our community and our games.
So let me distill what I learned into a 1 liner. Social sites like Twitter and Facebook are on the rise and cool, and communities still are not all ironed out as to what they are all about. But don’t worry the industry as a whole still loves gaming (trust me we have to else the pay does not equal the effort and hours) people that get into this industry love this industry and what it does.
What will what was discussed change what we do as a company? I don’t know, certainly some food for thought and some confirmation of our already had thoughts on social networks and how to treat community.
Pictures will be forthcoming, they are a bit stale but ilustrate that this is more a class atmosphere where we are both teachers and learners and not us wasting our and your resources.
We had fun, we learned much, we traded info and handshakes with many companies, and we are glad to be back with our players to have fun in our games.
We never know how it really is unless we see with our very eyes, uh? Aside the internet issue it seems to have been fun, it’s always fun when you discuss ideas and points of view with people that share the same passion toward something, gaming in this case, even taking it seriously. Gravity is doing an excelent work within the social networks, keeping a close relationship with the players, keeping yourselves really accessible to us. That’s the ++ about this company (unecessary to mention the games, which are addicting!). Keep up with the nice work!
I was debating whether to go this year or not, I passed because I couldn’t swing a trip to Texas this year. Maybe if it goes to Denver <.< Side note, why was the pint glass important?
Please don’t ever make us rely on using Social Networks to get infromation. This trend of exclusive information only being available to you if you sign up for some silly site you have no interest in is getting annoying.
Don’t mind if you offer services to people who want them but don’t make them a integral part of playing games and being a fan. >_>
I agree with Jenn. There’s a lot of good information about Season 2 for Requiem only available on MySpace… what’s worse is that you HAVE to have an account just to see it.