GDC 2007: Post-mortem on my sessions

I sat on two panels, and also gave a sponsored session. Here's my thoughts on each and the results thereof.

Console/PC Distribution Gatekeepers

I sat on this panel moderated by Simon Carless. Other panelists included people from Sony,
Manifesto games, and Gametap. There was supposed to be someone from Nintendo but he backed out. The panel got covered here, here, and here, and if interested, you can buy an audio transcript here.

I think I did OK, though I gave pretty middle-of-the-road answers. Panels are more entertaining when provocative, and several people afterward picked up on the fact that I failed to bite on some obvious opportunities to stir things up a bit (e.g. I've griped about GameTap before). This was a case where I felt I was more "the Microsoft guy" on the panel, rather than just "kim pallister", and so had to take the high (less-risky-but-less-entertaining) road. Oh well.

I do think I acheived the goal of letting the indie games track attendees better understand how to get their titles on Xbox Live Arcade and MSN Games, which was the main reason I was there. We had a few hundred people in the room and I was swamped by about 20 people afterward with questions about just that.

I give myself a B+.

Casual Games and Windows Vista: The Real Story on What It Means For Casual Games

This was a sponsored session braindump on Vista, Games explorer, GDF files, etc, etc, from the perspective of casual games. Very much along the lines of what my Q&A with the IGDA Casual Games SIG Quarterly covered.

The session got covered at Josh Bancroft's blog (Intel bloggers? WTF? when did that happen. bully for them).

This type of session is a brain dump and while you can try to convey the information in an engaging manner, it's never quite as fun to give as a more creative presentation (see my post about my MIGS06 presentation for more on this).

While I think I helped some attendees, and had some positive feedback after the talk, I still give myself a B- on this one.

Sharing Control

This panel was moderated by David Edery, a co-worker of mine. However, he wasn't a coworker at the time he set up the panel and invited me. I certainly had less business being on the panel than the others up there (Raph Koster, Ray Muzyka, Matt Brown...), but pinged David about it when he was putting together the panel because at the time we were working on the details around hosting Cranium's Pop5 game - a web-based casual game featuring user-created content.

So, I was about to contribute and I think I got some positive reaction out of the audience and brought a different perspective to the table. I was happy with it overall. I give myself an A-.

The highlight for me was that I used my MIGS05 UGC anecdote, and the guy that gave the Mona Lisa comment at the MIGS session was in the audience for this panel and came up afterward to point out that he was the guy. Cool!

The session got covered here.