Antipwn

In late August, I was invited to speak at the CMC conference in Leipzig. I gave a talk about how community managers could add their unique perspective to the decision making structures of their current gig or, alternatively how that experience could be translated across to other gigs in the industry. Obviously I was using my own experience of going from community to games design as a template. The CMC site has now updated with the video of all the different sessions so you can now download and view all the talks including mine for a small fee. The talks can be downloaded from the ‘Store’ section of the website while the synopses are in the ‘Conference’ section.

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.

I was in Leipzig all last week. A crazy time made doubly so by the rapidly approaching launch of the game.

We had an awesome booth and a fantastic crew, Mythic sent a sizeable contingent across too and over the week, we had about 7,500 people play the game on our stand. Pretty awesome!

I got to meet some of my fellow CMs and hang out with some of the coolest people in this industry which is always ace.

Here are my pictures, I’ll go through them over the next day or so to give them titles and descriptions. Have fun browsing!