On Saturday, Yujing and I went for two master classes which were part of the 1st Serious Gaming & Social Connect 2012 Conference. It was a good experience and I'm glad 3216 gave us the opportunity to attend such stuff (for free!!!)
First thing first, what is a master class? From wikipedia, it says that:
A master class is a class given to students of a particular discipline by an expert of that discipline—usually music, but also painting, drama, any of the arts, or on any other occasion where skills are being developed.
I was quite surprised by the term master class since it's something that we see more often in the arts. But anyway, it just refers to development of skills for people who are already in the field, i.e. not for beginners. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm really involved in either of the two things they were covering.
The first talk was about creating Virtual Worlds for Teaching and Training. The first part was on what has already been done, while the second was a "hands-on" session, where he showed us how to use Open Wonderland (which seems easy to use!) I really liked the first part, because through his presentation, we managed to explore what Virtual Worlds could do, that we were unable to do in the real world. I think he gave an example of a really poor school (90% in poverty) who could not afford field trips, so they ended up making an aquarium world for the children there. But what was really cool was that instead of just "walking" around the aquarium and seeing fishes through the glass (like you would in a normal aquarium), the team made it such that the children could actually turn into fishes and swim around, exploring the aquarium. You really can't get that in real life!
Another cool thing is that you can configure the settings such that the sound of a person's voice can become louder when your avatar is near a person who is currently speaking and softer when the person is far. One other cool thing is also time-skipping. They had a sort of teaching tool for architecture students, where they were supposed to build a house inside the application. If you had to build a real house, that could take days (and resources), but using the simulation, they managed to build a house in 2 hours. What was good was also the fact that the person evaluating their work could tell who built what exactly, and give marks more fairly.
The speaker gave a lot of examples, and I think I have really learnt a lot. Of course, currently Virtual Worlds aren't very ubiquitous, but I await the day that more people will use them. ^^ (Also, they have to improve the current standards of rendering worlds, because based on your engine, your world will be rendered differently. It's kind of like how different web browsers render your website differently.)
The next talk was by a person who has been promoting games for quite a while. The first part of it was focused on the PR opportunities, and I've realised that PR is VERY different from advertising. Also, she talked about the differences in PR strategies for different sorts of games. (e.g. For core games, they may be promoted 2 years before their release dates. For Facebook games, PR has less opportunities and advertising would do more work there.) I think the most important thing in PR is to "think of what the audience wants, and give it to them". For example, to try and get the application/game to be featured in newspapers, there should be something interesting about your own application, and this can range from the actual game (game design/engine is good etc.) to people who are working on the project (who's developing the characters for the game, are there any bands featured in the game etc.) This is important to the reporter whose job is to write interesting articles. It's also incredibly useful if you also research into your target media (like which reporter is more likely to feature your type of game (FPS, children's games etc.)) so as to promote your application better and to build up a media list.
Another important I learnt was to do exclusives. E.g. for the really popular news site/magazines etc., reserve assets for them exclusively. In addition, there are many, many ways of promoting an application. Since our final project is something related to parenting/kids, the speaker suggested for us to look towards certain magazines about parenting. Also, she suggested mom bloggers too. (Not sure how popular they are in Singapore though...)
After that, we were given a chance to attempt writing headlines, press releases and pitches. Um, I found out while I had a good idea of PR, I am rubbish at writing. So yes, PR is not my cup of tea.
But PR is actually in a way, very cool. Like, you don't have to come up with anything new, but it's just a reorganisation of whatever assets you have at hand, and putting things into perspectives.
In any case, the two master classes were very useful! Hopefully, I get to put some of it to use in my final project perhaps. :D
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