The developer mixer yesterday afternoon was … fascinating. A great chance to keep my yap shut and just listen for a change, as designers, producers, and developers from teams all across SOE mixed and mingled. Though the player influencers undoubtedly had a good time talking with the folks that worked on their game, I was perfectly happy just to absorb what everyone was saying.

And my goodness the things I heard. More than any other time this weekend the NDA sat like a weight across my shoulders as the blog posts I’ll never write just kept flying past my head.

Hey, I kept copious notes after the fact, at least. Maybe sometime I’ll be able to tell you what I heard about notable designers, or production concerns on some of SOE’s in-development titles. And the reminiscing about EverQuest back-in-the-day? Fantastic. Realize, of course, that a lot of the folks working on these games now were the guild leaders of EQ in its heyday. I was even privy to a conversation that had one gentleman visibly irked when his past guild affiliations were mentioned … jokingly irked, but his reaction was fantastic.

In short, it was a rare chance to talk about a couple of games I love with the passionate men and women who make them. Hearing the jokes, listening to tales of life on the other side of the fence … it’s all incredibly interesting stuff for a games dork like me. I’ve gotten cynical and jaded enough to the point where I don’t feel like I made an ass of myself. That said, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy myself. I’ve noted before that beyond the simple joy of making money doing something I’m incredibly passionate about, there are few tangible rewards for my efforts.

This was a great opportunity to once again immerse myself in the culture of game creation. And you know what? It further reinforced to me how much better I serve myself and the people who read what I write by not being a part of that process. The fact that nobody on that side of the fence *would* hire me helps, of course. I’m no designer, I’m certainly no developer; even seeing the task of community management up close the past few days, in the offhand comment or reference by the CMs, makes me think that’s not the job for me.

One topic of discussion that came up several times was the skewed perception players and (even to some extent games writers/bloggers) have of the folks making games. The designers, the developers, the producers … even the community folks, sorta … they’re all just people. There’s no special clergy of savants making these games; as I just mentioned, a lot of them started as ‘mere’ players.

When a game company releases a product, it does well or fails based on the efforts of the people that made it - good or ill. Fantastic successes are just as much a result of human effort as catastrophic failures. On the smaller scale, things like deleted posts, game crashes, and design imbalances are just the same. There’s no grand plan in place at SOE (or any other company) to screw one portion of the playerbase or overly reward another; sometimes people just make mistakes.

I’m trying to avoid that this weekend by keeping these posts coming, and my hope is that you will see another before the day is through. Today (Saturday) was the big presentation day; while many elements I saw were NDA’d, there’s still plenty to write about. I even have some audio that will probably end up as an episode of the MN Broadcast.

Quickly - overall I was impressed by the community team’s vision and the potential of SOE’s future titles. And Free Realms? It’s … wrong that a 27 year old should be so excited about that game.