interactions, and getting “truly and deeply social is more important than ever to the success of your mass market game.”
—Extra! Extra! Big Casual Gaming Developers Go Social (Wednesday, 1 pm)
Jeff Revoy (VP of social networking, GameHouse), Ofer Leidner (CSO & co-founder, Oberon Media), Will O’Brien (VP of social games, Big Fish Games), and Derrick Morton (CEO, Flowplay), discuss the changing Internet climate and how to harness the social game “phenomenon” to boost traffic, engage new players, and explore new methods of distribution and monetization.
—Hero Up! Bringing Marvel’s Super Heroes to the Masses in a casual MMOG (Wednesday, 1 pm)
Studio Gazillion Entertainment vice president Jason Robar as he discusses some of the struggles his team faced—from art design, to social space, game play, and mission—while creating Marvel MMOG (massively multiplayer online gaming) Super Hero Squad Online.
—Metagaming: The Gamification of Life. Exploring Game Mechanics Outside of Games (Thursday, 10 am)
Gabe Zichermann (Author/analyst, beamME), Amy Jo Kim (CEO, Shufflebrain), Keith Smith (CEO & co-founder, BigDoor), Naveen Selvadurai (co-founder, Foursquare), and Tim Chang (principal, Norwest Venture Partners) discuss how business can apply gaming concepts to life experiences and products can drive revenue and growth.
—Monetization: Now What? (Thursday, 9 am)
Matt Shea, the senior vice president of product development at Redmond, WA-based WildTangent, discusses how the growth and hype of social games has changed the monetization environment for social games and how developers can position themselves for success as the industry continues to evolve.
—Your Own Zombie Army—Driving User Behavior & Business Value with Game Mechanics and Behavioral Economics (Thursday, 2 pm)
Bunchball senior vice president of sales and business development David Tyler discusses how to address and leverage the fundamental human needs for status, achievement, reward, competition, and self-expression through game mechanics to increase engagement, consumption, loyalty, content creation, and more.
—Story, Narrative Design, and Dialog: What Causal Games Should Be Doing Differently (Thursday, 3 pm)
EGK Interactive game designer and “hardcore” games writer Ed Kuehnel talks about the growing important of story and narrative design in casual gaming, and the process of intertwining a creative story with gameplay and good “dialog.”
