The second day was considerably more interesting than the first. We started the day off with Raising Our Kids on Games. It was a panel of 5 parents in the game industry who gave their opinions on how games influence their children and the approaches they take to raising their children with video games. One of them actually uses WoW as a means for keeping in touch with their kids while they are on the road. That's definitely something I didn't see coming in our culture. Ultimately, they used two techniques for handling games: 1) managing the amount of time they get to spend with all media and 2) put all such media in a public place--like the living room. When asked about the laws to prevent children from buying content not suitable for certain ages, their responses were primarily that we as a nation need good parenting and not good laws. They emphasized that age was not really a good judge of when someone is ready for certain content. Instead, it needs to be judged on a case by case basis. There was one person in the audience who advocated a completely open policy with their children and that innocence is possible without raising children up in ignorance and being over-protective. The panel, however, felt that a completely open policy may not be suitable in all cases. They used the example that showing a young child a horror movie might give him or her nightmares for weeks, which could scar the child negatively for years, so it's important to know your kids and expose them to the world when you believe they're ready. Alright, enough about that talk--needless to say, I found it quite interesting.

The next talk we went to was on Designing Virtual Worlds. This talk was hosted by two people from the tabletop industry who are now in the realtime game industry creating MMOs. They seemed really excited to be in this industry and were especially happy that iteration time was so much faster. For D&D books you would have to wait over 9 months (according to them) for a fix to unbalanced gameplay whereas you can submit patches and fixes in just a matter of weeks with video games. They also really emphasized allowing players to make persistant changes to the world. They are working on an as-of-yet unannounced title, so supposedly they are integrating more persistance in the world. As they pointed out, the MMO genre is still infantile so there is still a lot of growth to come and a lot of uncharted territory. I haven't really been a big fan of the genre, but this did excite me about the possibilities of it. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this development.

For our final talk/presentation, we went to one on the new Prince of Persia and Farcry 2. I was highly impressed with both of these titles. It was especially great to see the level editor for Farcry 2 running on the XBox 360. He implied that the developers used these same tools, but I'm wondering how well that worked and how the artists felt about it. It is really intuitive to see the game running as you create the game, but using a controller could be considerably more frustrating than a mouse and keyboard. I also wonder how well it would work with source control--it should be straightforward, but they may have had unforseen issues. As far as the audience, this is definitely one of the most enthusiastic and aggressive crowds I've ever seen. You have to be a pretty good presenter to withstand and control this crowd.