Interview with Conference Director Peter Freese

March 23, 2007

We've been bringing you a familiar format for the newsletter for a few months now, but this time, we thought we might do something a little different. I've whipped up a few interview-style questions for Peter Freese, our fearless leader for the Online Game Development Conference.

The questions attempt to be as neutral as possible and the answers are unedited and in his own words. These questions are the warm-up for a new series of what we feel are unique interviews, which give you an up-close-and-personal introduction to several of our speakers and the topics important to them, many of which you will hear about at OGDC.

Now that you know the roadmap, I hope you enjoy the ride!

Edward Van Duering

EDWARD VAN DUERING: Since you wear two hats in your work life, introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do for your day job and what role you play with Evergreen Events and the Online Game Development Conference (OGDC).

PETER FREESE: By day, I’m a lead programmer on an unannounced PS3 game at Hidden Path Entertainment. Hidden Path is a great studio to work at for many reasons: we’ve got incredibly smart people who are easy to work with, we’re working on state of the art technology, and we’re creating great titles that will ride the wave of new distribution models. My alter-ego role is that of Conference Director for OGDC and founding partner in Evergreen Events.

How does your background in game development shape your expectations for a tradeshow? Where have they traditionally succeeded and failed?

I’ve witnessed the incredible growth of our industry from its humble and nerdy beginnings into a hip, creative, and profit-driven business. Generally speaking, this growth has been positive ­– there are more opportunities, better salaries, and better recognition for talented individuals. In one sense, however, the growth has been deleterious. The amount of total information available to developers, whether it is from conferences, magazines, blogs, forums, or whatever, has grown dramatically, but the amount of quality information has not kept pace. As a result, the signal-to-noise ratio has declined significantly.

As an example, fifteen years ago, it was quite common for leading developers to exchange information on design and programming on public forums. Because our industry was so small, developers actively looked for ways to discourse and share ideas. Today, for various reasons, the most interesting exchanges of information take place in private. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part you can’t simply join in on a conversation with the developer of a AAA title about how to more efficiently cull geometry or build a better behavior system. There’s so much information out there, and so much of it is rubbish, that we actively try to ignore most of it.

Ironically, it is my background outside the games industry that really shapes my expectations for conferences and tradeshows. I think that other, albeit less interesting, but equally challenging areas of software development do a much better job of sharing their scholarship.

As you know, the game industry has plenty of conferences on its collective calendar -- more than ever before -- even without the former E3 event. What prompted you to create OGDC this year and what new can this event bring to the table?

I see the proliferation of multiple conferences a natural and inevitable consequence of our industry’s growth. The industry’s largest developer event, CMP’s Game Developer Conference, has become a victim of its own success. Everyone wants to go, and so it has grown so large that it has difficulty fulfilling its ostensible purpose, which is to enrich developers. Nearly every developer I know wishes the event could be smaller in attendance, but how can GDC manage that – by raising prices? Limiting attendance to “qualified” participants? It’s another E3 situation all over again.

The breadth of our industry has increased as well, to the point where one conference cannot reasonable meet the needs of all developers. How can you reasonably focus on PS3 and mobile phone development at the same event?

I think that conferences are one example where smaller is better. Would you rather attend an event with 5,000 attendees of whom 200 are people you might want to converse with, or would you rather try your odds of talking to those same 200 people at an event with only 500 total? For me, tightly focused boutique events are the way to go. They hearken back to the days when you attended GDC and everyone you met was someone who gave you a new idea or inspired you in some way to better your craft.

This was the primary motivation behind the Online Game Development Conference. I wanted to create an event that would become a natural forum for the most talented and experienced developers in the online space – where they could mingle, interact, and network without all that irrelevant noise. No other event was servicing the needs of veteran online game developers, despite the fact that online is the fastest growing segment of games. GDC basically ignores the online space, and AGC’s content is too light for serious developers.

Why did you feel online game developers needed to be focused on specifically, as opposed to any other segment in the game business?

The answer to this question is why I like the online game space. Essentially, it is all the factors that make up good game and software development. You need great gameplay, simple accessibility, and rock-solid stability. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing a subscription-based MMO, a micro-transaction based mid-session game, or a free-to-play casual game; you won’t be profitable unless the players like your game. You can’t ship a shoddy product in a pretty box and be successful just because your publisher gets you more shelf space than the competition.

From a software development point of view, online game development is generally significantly more complex and requires more engineering discipline than non-online games. It’s easy to demonstrate this with the example of a MMOG. You have a set of asynchronous simulations that are expected to have continuous uptime and complete failure recovery, handle millions of persistent objects in real-time, be secure from malicious attacks, and provide the players with the credible illusion of instantaneous response to their actions despite hundreds to thousands of milliseconds of variable latency between all the machines in the collective simulation.

As a programmer, are there any particular sessions for OGDC planned which you feel you might benefit personally from?

There are so many great talks planned for the conference that I’m already wishing we could have another day, just so I wouldn’t have to choose between sessions. Fortunately, we’ll be putting the conference proceedings on CD-ROM, so even if the attendees are forced to skip some sessions, they’ll still get to bring home the materials from the lectures.

I’m a big fan of post-mortems, especially when they talk about failure. This is not simply a case of schadenfreude; I think there is real value in learning from the missteps of others. I’m particularly interested in hearing Scott Brown and Hermann Peterscheck’s post-mortem of Auto Assault: Dissecting Our Baby – the Good, the Bad, and All the Ugly. The NetDevil team is a smart group and they had a world-class publisher in NCsoft; I’m sure it will be fascinating to hear their thoughts on why Auto Assault failed to meet expectations and what lessons they learned along their post-apocalyptic road. On a related theme, but more live vivisection than post-mortem, we have Joe Ludwig’s Adventures in Middleware and Joe Ybarra’s Building a World Class MMO While Building a Company.

From a purely technical point of view, I’m looking forward to Ramon Axelrod’s Intelligence for Changing Worlds lecture, Bart House’s session covering Shadowrun’s technique for limiting bandwidth usage: Dynamic Bandwidth Throttling in a Client/Server Platform Shooter, and the ever-popular Dave Weinstein’s Culture Clash: When Security Comes Knocking.

Beyond all of these, I’m really thrilled about our soon-to-be-announced technical keynote, and I think other programmers will be as well. The identity of our speaker will need to stay confidential for a bit longer, but I will give you a teaser: he will be quite exceptional. Subscribers to the OGDC Updates will be the first to know who he is.

What do you hope OGDC will accomplish as an event this year?

I hope that every developer leaves the event feeling it was the most useful and satisfying conference they have ever attended. That’s setting our sights quite high, but the alternative would be for us to attempt deliver a mediocre conference. We want every attendee to tell their colleagues how good it was and to plan on attending in 2008. In short, much like an online game, we want the event to succeed because it has quality content, is accessible, and delivers what it promises, not because we marketed it well.

Put on your forecasting hat for a second, if you would. Personally, in general where do you feel the online games industry is headed?

I think we’re precariously poised at a point at which we could head down several paths, and the actual route will become clear later this year. There are several factors involved in this.

First, we have the tremendous growth of the online games industry in Asia. Although their games industry is quite young and they lack an experienced games development workforce compared to the west, they clearly have more market growth and inertia, and it is quite possible that they will dwarf the West in significance. They have developed incredibly successful monetization methods, such as Tencent’s QQ points, which the West considers “new”, but were launched in the last millennium in China.

Second, each of the new consoles integrates online features as linchpins of their success. While Microsoft clearly has the functional lead with XBOX Live, Sony’s Home looks promising, and I expect we’ll hear an announcement from Nintendo regarding new online game content by the time of OGDC. Online games have been the main distinguishing feature of PCs versus consoles for gamers, and that distinction has been decidedly blurry in the past four months. It will all but disappear on May 9 (coincidently the day before OGDC) when Microsoft launches Games for Windows – Live and allows XBOX and PC users to play together in the same online space with unified gamer tags.

The third factor is the WoW gold rush. Blizzard makes an announcement of x million global subscribers, and every VC analyst, angel investor, and college student grabs their pans, sluice boxes, and picks and heads for them thar hills. There will be corpses of startups by the dozen in every boomtown, but maybe some of these new Argonauts will find the golden fleece. Even if they don’t, there’s money to be made selling prospecting supplies – things have never looked better for MMO middleware vendors.

Lastly, what thoughts would you want to share with anyone who might consider attending OGDC?

May is a great time of year to be in Seattle, so I encourage out-of-town attendees to consider spending a weekend enjoying our great city. Hotel accommodations can be scarce, though, so don’t delay making your reservations at the Fairmont. Once the rooms are sold out, you miss the ready opportunity for networking at the official conference hotel and venue. I look forward to seeing you in Seattle!

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