Antipwn

I thought I had got out of the business of needing to attend games conventions but, over a year after I hung up my flameproof suit, I’ve been tapped to speak at the Community Manager Conference in Leipzig. This is held as a part of the annual Games Convention so if any of you reading this are going to be there on July 9th, drop me a line below.

My talk is going to be all about how community experience can be an asset in other areas of the games industry – either for community managers who want to move on to new roles or those who simply want to expand the scope of their current position. This is something I feel pretty qualified to talk about as I’ve worn quite a few hats over the past few years and ‘community’ has been at the core of nearly all of them. In fact, in my current role as a games designer I’m mostly responsible for creating social and retention systems. These are clearly areas where a strong understanding of player dynamics are essential.

Plenty of notable CMs will be there too, I’ll be in such august company as Donna Prior, Jörg Koonen, Sean Kaupinnen, Martin Rabl and a former colleague of mine, Fabien Alexandre. This is the first event of its kind in Europe and hopefully will become a fixture in the industry calendar – there’s certainly been a lot of lively discussion on the main CM industry forum and it looks as though Two Pi Team who are organising it intend to build on it for the future. For me it will be a nice change to be at the GC without needing to be on my feet for 14 hours a day and to be able to wander round and chat without feeling guilty.

There’s also a strong possibility that a Warmachine game between myself and Donna Prior may happen at the event. Should such a titanic struggle come to pass then it will of course be properly chronicled over on my other blog.

Two updates in three days? Surely the End Times are upon us!

I’ve been toying with the idea for a while and I finally decided that I’d launch a separate blog for my wargaming and miniature painting exploits. If you’re interested in that kind of thing then head on over to Stormy Teacups where you can keep up with my adventures at German and international wargaming tournaments as well as see my collection of painted miniatures grow very slowly indeed (unlike my collection of unpainted miniatures which grows at an alarming rate…).

I’ll still be updating this with all the clockwork regularity that you’ve come to expect but I figure splitting the wargames stuff off from the video games industry waffle was a good move. Comments and feedback are much appreciated on either site!

So here is my new site. Bear with me while I slap some paint over it and fix up some rough edges.

Please update all your bookmarks and RSS feeds to this new URL and make sure you comment if you have something to say. I’m a little busy to make a real post at the moment but I’m always up for suggestions if there’s something you’d really like to talk about here. Leave a comment below if you have feedback, suggestions or just generally want to say hi on the internet.

Seeing as it’s becoming public knowledge, I need to do a bit of rumour control. It’s true that I handed in my notice at GOA yesterday, I am for the moment still employed there and won’t actually be leaving until the end of January.  I’ll be tidying up some loose ends here in Ireland and then jumping across to Germany to start a new job which takes me back to a development/design role.  If anyone’s interested, the game I’ll be working on is Parabellum and I’m enormously happy to be part of such an exciting project.

For various reasons I’m really not interested in talking too much about the circumstances of my leaving GOA, I will say that I’m going to be sad to leave some really awesome people behind and that I will be taking a lot of very good memories away with me. Anything beyond that is a matter for my exit interview and some carefully written parting emails. I will have been here nearly five years when I leave and it’s been a valuable experience every day. Not always good times but I don’t regret any of my time here.

Finally in my last blog post Belsameth asked if I had more pictures of my Grumlok miniature in progress. I forgot to upload them for ages but I finally got around to it today so here’s a gallery of all the pictures. The darker ones were taken with my digital camera at home while the brighter ones were taken by our studio A/V guy here hence the stark difference in quality between them.

I’ve been a busy little bee over the past few weeks; beta, launch preparations, editorial stuff and the myriad of other tasks great and small that pile up as we march closer and closer to the live release have left me with little in the way of free time. One of the more pleasant items from my in tray was a trip to Valencia with some of my Spanish colleagues for the Campus Party. I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while and I figured I may as well do it here.

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A few weeks ago I ran a small survey of people’s information gathering habits about games. It wasn’t very scientific in nature and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get enough responses for the sample size to be large enough to draw meaningful conclusions from, but with 64 replies it did better than I hoped. Anyway, for those who are interested, the results are after the cut.

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I know I said I wouldn’t talk about WAR here but this is too cool to share. I’m home sick today but last night we were given a press brief to distribute from today. I hope I’m not pre-empting anything here. The brief is from the EA Mythic studio manager April de Poisson and it’s about the patch system for WAR.

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