IMGDC 2007 - The good, the bad, the ugly
by Tony Richards · 04/17/2007 (6:11 pm) · 20 comments
First, huge thanks to Jonathon Stevens, Last Straw Productions and all of the IMGDC sponsors for a great first year conference. I'll definitely be going next year. I walked away with tons of new insight, inspiration and ideas on MMO game development.
The good
The highlight of the entire conference was the session titled "Slaughtering Sacred Cows" led by Richard A. Bartle, Ph.D.
If you get a chance to listen to the audio tape of this session, do it... buy it if it's for sale, whatever it takes. This was hands down the most insightful 60 minutes on game development I've ever experienced.
The session started with a few people misunderstanding what a "Sacred Cow" really is and a few people insisting on keeping the session off topic, but once the topic got on track a lot of great ideas and conversations came out of it. It turned into a brilliant light bulb "wow, why didn't I think of that?" moments.
The bad
The Twin Cities, despite being touted as a destination spot for food, had a depressingly poor choice of restaurants. Of course, since I was there for only a couple of days, it's possible I simply went to the wrong places, so that would be my fault, not the destination's, eh? I'll try harder next year.
The only other bad thing was the horrible weather in New York on Sunday... my flight was delayed by several hours and for awhile I was unsure if I was even going to make it home without a two or three day delay. The final hair-raising white-knuckle 20 minutes flying into La Guardia airport through 30 mph gusts resulted in a touchdown where all of the passengers erupted in applause and a huge sigh of relief.
The ugly
And yes, as with every conference, there's always something ugly.
The open forum titled "Battle of the OSes" hosted by Multiverse's CTO, Rafhael Cedeno, turned into an hour long poorly organized forum that would've been more appropriately titled "The Battle of the Game Engines and Why You Should Choose Multiverse" except for the fact that no other game engines had any representation whatsoever.
Rafhael seemed to be a nice enough, intelligent guy, but the presentation was full of one-sided arguments and a bunch of conjecture, suppositions and opinion. I nearly walked out on several occasions.
One example, and I can't quote him verbatim but you can listen to the tape and hear it for yourself, but he basically stated as fact that he's heard of several people using Torque for MMO games with mixed results, yet when I signaled that I had something to say in an attempt to speak up on behalf of TGE I was politely ignored. No mention of Minions of Mirth, Fractured Universe, Ruin or any of the other MMO games in varying levels of completion that use TGE.
Even though I'm not a GG employee or associate, in an open forum I'd be happy to debate TGE vs Multiverse any day. Both have their strengths and weaknesses and Multiverse beats stock TGE as an MMO engine in the pure technical sense, but with some minor modifications (most of which are freely available as resources on this website) Torque is the clear winner in client and server performance, extensibility, diverse tool-chain support, stability, documentation, community, technical support and overall quality.
A few words of advice to Multiverse and Rafhael:
If you want to educate someone, make sure you have all of your facts straight and make sure you stick to the facts and keep your opinions to yourself.
Be very careful hosting public one-sided debates without giving your opposition a chance to respond. No matter how politely you do it, it still comes across as "bashing."
If you want to host a forum to have a one hour advertisement on your product, don't sucker people into the room by misrepresenting the topic.
There's nothing worse than slimy business practices and deceit is the worse kind of slime.
At any rate, in an attempt to end on a good note, if you missed IMGDC, make sure you check out the videos / audios if and when they become available. There was some really great stuff covered for indie developers, even if you're not making an MMO.
The good
The highlight of the entire conference was the session titled "Slaughtering Sacred Cows" led by Richard A. Bartle, Ph.D.
If you get a chance to listen to the audio tape of this session, do it... buy it if it's for sale, whatever it takes. This was hands down the most insightful 60 minutes on game development I've ever experienced.
The session started with a few people misunderstanding what a "Sacred Cow" really is and a few people insisting on keeping the session off topic, but once the topic got on track a lot of great ideas and conversations came out of it. It turned into a brilliant light bulb "wow, why didn't I think of that?" moments.
The bad
The Twin Cities, despite being touted as a destination spot for food, had a depressingly poor choice of restaurants. Of course, since I was there for only a couple of days, it's possible I simply went to the wrong places, so that would be my fault, not the destination's, eh? I'll try harder next year.
The only other bad thing was the horrible weather in New York on Sunday... my flight was delayed by several hours and for awhile I was unsure if I was even going to make it home without a two or three day delay. The final hair-raising white-knuckle 20 minutes flying into La Guardia airport through 30 mph gusts resulted in a touchdown where all of the passengers erupted in applause and a huge sigh of relief.
The ugly
And yes, as with every conference, there's always something ugly.
The open forum titled "Battle of the OSes" hosted by Multiverse's CTO, Rafhael Cedeno, turned into an hour long poorly organized forum that would've been more appropriately titled "The Battle of the Game Engines and Why You Should Choose Multiverse" except for the fact that no other game engines had any representation whatsoever.
Rafhael seemed to be a nice enough, intelligent guy, but the presentation was full of one-sided arguments and a bunch of conjecture, suppositions and opinion. I nearly walked out on several occasions.
One example, and I can't quote him verbatim but you can listen to the tape and hear it for yourself, but he basically stated as fact that he's heard of several people using Torque for MMO games with mixed results, yet when I signaled that I had something to say in an attempt to speak up on behalf of TGE I was politely ignored. No mention of Minions of Mirth, Fractured Universe, Ruin or any of the other MMO games in varying levels of completion that use TGE.
Even though I'm not a GG employee or associate, in an open forum I'd be happy to debate TGE vs Multiverse any day. Both have their strengths and weaknesses and Multiverse beats stock TGE as an MMO engine in the pure technical sense, but with some minor modifications (most of which are freely available as resources on this website) Torque is the clear winner in client and server performance, extensibility, diverse tool-chain support, stability, documentation, community, technical support and overall quality.
A few words of advice to Multiverse and Rafhael:
If you want to educate someone, make sure you have all of your facts straight and make sure you stick to the facts and keep your opinions to yourself.
Be very careful hosting public one-sided debates without giving your opposition a chance to respond. No matter how politely you do it, it still comes across as "bashing."
If you want to host a forum to have a one hour advertisement on your product, don't sucker people into the room by misrepresenting the topic.
There's nothing worse than slimy business practices and deceit is the worse kind of slime.
At any rate, in an attempt to end on a good note, if you missed IMGDC, make sure you check out the videos / audios if and when they become available. There was some really great stuff covered for indie developers, even if you're not making an MMO.
About the author
I am the founder of IndieZen.org, a website dedicated to the Indie 2.0 Revolution where a number of Indie game development studios and individuals collaborate and share a suite of custom built open source game development tools and middleware.
#2
I agree with you on the state of the Multiverse engine, though they're definitely going to be going places with it when it takes off.
The other roundtables were definitely worth the time and money to get out to Minnesota. You're dead-on about the food though- but it could just be that we're both from NYC, and we get a much broader grub selection here ;)
04/17/2007 (8:01 pm)
I almost sat in on that one, until I realized I was in the wrong room and ducked out just as it was begining. Something about a roundtable named "Battle of the OSes" that turned me off. There's enough of that on the forums here from people who don't know better, I didn't want to get caught up in that at the conference. I agree with you on the state of the Multiverse engine, though they're definitely going to be going places with it when it takes off.
The other roundtables were definitely worth the time and money to get out to Minnesota. You're dead-on about the food though- but it could just be that we're both from NYC, and we get a much broader grub selection here ;)
#3
04/17/2007 (9:15 pm)
The Northwest Game Fest, another first year conference, suffered a similar flaw, where one speaker's session on what's wrong with the game industry turned into an hour-long advertisement under the guise of a session. For what it's worth I imagine it's tough go get good speakers at first year fledgeling events.
#4
The sessions that Richard Bartle did and the IP sessions from Gregory Boyd for me were worth the price of admission (ok I was a speaker so the price of airfare, hotel and steak dinners - see below). So far I'm noting no comment on either Josh Williams Keynote or my lowly Roundtable, but I'll assume that everyone just assumes that they were "awesome" and you don't want to tarnish our image.
I think I'm now known for showing up to speak at any event with indie and games in it, but I'm very proud of what was nearly 100% saturation of this conference by Torque devs (even if they used another tech they'd nearly all used Torque and could tell you the positive things about the tech). GarageGames while we didn't coin the term "indie game dev" we did put it on the map and everyone kept talking about IGC... hoping for one again in '07.
I had three amazing meals out of five... one was at Manny's and one at Murray's both steak houses (note to those not familiar with the when in Rome concept - when in Minneapolis don't go for the asian food / mexican food - eat the beef).
04/17/2007 (10:18 pm)
Like I've always said its the Indie's and the networking that makes these events worth going to. It was great to see Adrian Wright, Josh Williams, Josh Ritter (I think next time I'll warn him when I'm going to pick on him in my session), Ted Southard, Jonathan and a good number of other Torque devs at this conference. The sessions that Richard Bartle did and the IP sessions from Gregory Boyd for me were worth the price of admission (ok I was a speaker so the price of airfare, hotel and steak dinners - see below). So far I'm noting no comment on either Josh Williams Keynote or my lowly Roundtable, but I'll assume that everyone just assumes that they were "awesome" and you don't want to tarnish our image.
I think I'm now known for showing up to speak at any event with indie and games in it, but I'm very proud of what was nearly 100% saturation of this conference by Torque devs (even if they used another tech they'd nearly all used Torque and could tell you the positive things about the tech). GarageGames while we didn't coin the term "indie game dev" we did put it on the map and everyone kept talking about IGC... hoping for one again in '07.
I had three amazing meals out of five... one was at Manny's and one at Murray's both steak houses (note to those not familiar with the when in Rome concept - when in Minneapolis don't go for the asian food / mexican food - eat the beef).
#5
Ah man, Minneapolis/St Paul has EXCELLENT thai/japanese/chinese, mexican, eastern european, etc. We went out for sushi on Saturday and it was bliss.
"I think next time I'll warn him when I'm going to pick on him in my session"
I'll just remember not to put you down as a job reference. *ahem*
The conference was definitely worth it... and here's hoping for an IGC in '07 :)
04/18/2007 (2:02 am)
"when in Minneapolis don't go for the asian food / mexican food"Ah man, Minneapolis/St Paul has EXCELLENT thai/japanese/chinese, mexican, eastern european, etc. We went out for sushi on Saturday and it was bliss.
"I think next time I'll warn him when I'm going to pick on him in my session"
I'll just remember not to put you down as a job reference. *ahem*
The conference was definitely worth it... and here's hoping for an IGC in '07 :)
#6
I just wanted to post my comments about the opposite side of the coin in regards to some of the comments that you made here in your blog.
We here at MGT are actually one of the early adopters of Multiverse and continue to use it even today. We chose to use it as an engine because we felt that it was the strongest candidate for making an MMO, more than what we felt we could ever get out of Torque even with every resource and addon tacked onto it to do the same thing. This wasn't any easy choice to make, but based on our extensive knowledge and now on our experiance using both engines it was the right thing to do for us to make the MMO that we want to make and have the best chance for us to succeed.
Don't get me wrong. Torque is still a good engine if you are doing action based games and TGB is a good engine if you are doing puzzle/arcade games. We still use Torque technology on other products we are making, just not for our MMO efforts that we are working on.
With regards to defending Multiverse, Rafhael or the session itself, I will leave that for them to do. All I will say is that having worked with them they are a straight up and honest company that has been an incredible pleasure to work with thus far.
04/18/2007 (9:03 am)
@TonyI just wanted to post my comments about the opposite side of the coin in regards to some of the comments that you made here in your blog.
We here at MGT are actually one of the early adopters of Multiverse and continue to use it even today. We chose to use it as an engine because we felt that it was the strongest candidate for making an MMO, more than what we felt we could ever get out of Torque even with every resource and addon tacked onto it to do the same thing. This wasn't any easy choice to make, but based on our extensive knowledge and now on our experiance using both engines it was the right thing to do for us to make the MMO that we want to make and have the best chance for us to succeed.
Don't get me wrong. Torque is still a good engine if you are doing action based games and TGB is a good engine if you are doing puzzle/arcade games. We still use Torque technology on other products we are making, just not for our MMO efforts that we are working on.
With regards to defending Multiverse, Rafhael or the session itself, I will leave that for them to do. All I will say is that having worked with them they are a straight up and honest company that has been an incredible pleasure to work with thus far.
#7
I heard about this after the fact and the funny thing is that just before the round-table (literally 5 minutes before) Rafhael asked me if this was supposed to be a battle of the game engines (which was a round table at one point, but I dropped it a couple weeks before the conference) and I told him no, that it should focus on hardware/software considerations for MMO servers such as Windows versus Linux, SQL vs MySQL and so on.
It turns out that the conversation really had nothing to do with that and I apologize for that. We're going to have speakers submit papers next year more formally to try to eliminate the same thing happening again.
I have to agree with Josh, Minnesota has some VERY good Asian restaurants, you just have to find them. I'm going to put together a restaurant list which will include ratings of some sort for people next year.
Actually it wasn't IMHO. I think it's going to be hard to top the group of speakers we had for IMGDC 2007. The only speaker issues I had were two who had cancelled with little notice and I had to replace them quickly. It ended up being better for me because the two speakers I got to replace them were ones I had wanted more anyway since they were more related to Indie than the original two.
At least you didn't end up across from Richard Bartle (sorry Greg!).
Great write-up Tony and sorry we didn't get to sit down more. I'll be writing up a post-mortem with pix sometime this coming week as well.
04/18/2007 (9:32 am)
Quote:The open forum titled "Battle of the OSes" hosted by Multiverse's CTO, Rafhael Cedeno, turned into an hour long poorly organized forum that would've been more appropriately titled "The Battle of the Game Engines and Why You Should Choose Multiverse" except for the fact that no other game engines had any representation whatsoever.
I heard about this after the fact and the funny thing is that just before the round-table (literally 5 minutes before) Rafhael asked me if this was supposed to be a battle of the game engines (which was a round table at one point, but I dropped it a couple weeks before the conference) and I told him no, that it should focus on hardware/software considerations for MMO servers such as Windows versus Linux, SQL vs MySQL and so on.
It turns out that the conversation really had nothing to do with that and I apologize for that. We're going to have speakers submit papers next year more formally to try to eliminate the same thing happening again.
Quote:when in Minneapolis don't go for the asian food / mexican food"
Ah man, Minneapolis/St Paul has EXCELLENT thai/japanese/chinese, mexican, eastern european, etc. We went out for sushi on Saturday and it was bliss.
I have to agree with Josh, Minnesota has some VERY good Asian restaurants, you just have to find them. I'm going to put together a restaurant list which will include ratings of some sort for people next year.
Quote:For what it's worth I imagine it's tough go get good speakers at first year fledgeling events.
Actually it wasn't IMHO. I think it's going to be hard to top the group of speakers we had for IMGDC 2007. The only speaker issues I had were two who had cancelled with little notice and I had to replace them quickly. It ended up being better for me because the two speakers I got to replace them were ones I had wanted more anyway since they were more related to Indie than the original two.
Quote:That's too bad about the "Battle of the OSes" round table. It was scheduled alongside the speech I gave on scalability.
At least you didn't end up across from Richard Bartle (sorry Greg!).
Great write-up Tony and sorry we didn't get to sit down more. I'll be writing up a post-mortem with pix sometime this coming week as well.
#8
But those who choose Multiverse, was this before MMOKit or Minions hit the scene?
If so, is your opinion still the same now that MMOkit came and Minions Tech is to be released as a MMO product?
In other words, is Torque as good or better than the Multiverse Now?
BTW - Today is the first time I heard of Multiverse......
04/18/2007 (11:56 am)
Im just a curious reader here. But those who choose Multiverse, was this before MMOKit or Minions hit the scene?
If so, is your opinion still the same now that MMOkit came and Minions Tech is to be released as a MMO product?
In other words, is Torque as good or better than the Multiverse Now?
BTW - Today is the first time I heard of Multiverse......
#9
I'm sorry if it sounded like I was unbiased. And honestly, I didn't know that I would be the only one speaking until just before the session, hence the unpreparedness. Hopefully they'll post the audio/video for it and I can get a chance to review it. Oh, and if it seemed like I was ignoring you, its only because I suck at moderating :)
-Rafhael
04/18/2007 (12:15 pm)
Yikes - what controversy! Straight out - I did not mean to bash anyone. We talked about TCP versus UDP, we talked about database scalability, and we talked about failover conditions and handling, I thought, independent of any platform. I did mention that I thought Emergent had the best rendering tech for MMOs that I know of, and that BigWorld and Simultronics exists, but I know very little of them. I did say that I knew of some attempts at Torque, and there were mixed results. This means that some were successful and some weren't as successful. Here's the thing, with Torque and Multiverse, this is going to happen a lot. Unlike BigWorld, and other big names, ANYONE can get our product, not just fully formed game studios. Some people dont have the right skill set to pull off an MMO. I mentioned that I believed GG was building an MMO solution to complement Torque. Great news for all of us. I'll add, people also have mixed results on Multiverse. We're both working hard to fill out the technical and workflow hurdles that exist in MMO development, and there are A LOT.I'm sorry if it sounded like I was unbiased. And honestly, I didn't know that I would be the only one speaking until just before the session, hence the unpreparedness. Hopefully they'll post the audio/video for it and I can get a chance to review it. Oh, and if it seemed like I was ignoring you, its only because I suck at moderating :)
-Rafhael
#10
To follow up on Logans comments as to answer you specific question. We got involved after Minions was already out, and though I know the work Josh has done is awsome stuff we did not want to have to write that type of tech ourselves. The MMOKit, honestly don't know and I really don't know alot about their stuff, so I can't and won't comment on it, though I am sure there is alot of great work in the kit.
I know there is stuff coming out for Torque in the future also, which I think is very cool, but at the time and now its our solution for a MMO because of the time we have invested in working with the tech and with Multiverse.
Torque is a great dev platform, we have years of experience with it, we have released product with both TGE and TGB, we have more product we are working on with TGE/TGEA/TGB, and we will continue to work with the tech and with the folks at GarageGames cause they currently have the right solutions for many things that we do.
As for the IMGDC I think it was a great first show, met alot of good people, we had some really good food (sorry the original poster didn't) and I thought the speakers I got a chance to see all did a good job, even though a couple I went to ended up going off track a little.
I look forward to next year, and I would recommend anyone who is looking at getting into this space to go.
04/18/2007 (12:24 pm)
Surge,To follow up on Logans comments as to answer you specific question. We got involved after Minions was already out, and though I know the work Josh has done is awsome stuff we did not want to have to write that type of tech ourselves. The MMOKit, honestly don't know and I really don't know alot about their stuff, so I can't and won't comment on it, though I am sure there is alot of great work in the kit.
I know there is stuff coming out for Torque in the future also, which I think is very cool, but at the time and now its our solution for a MMO because of the time we have invested in working with the tech and with Multiverse.
Torque is a great dev platform, we have years of experience with it, we have released product with both TGE and TGB, we have more product we are working on with TGE/TGEA/TGB, and we will continue to work with the tech and with the folks at GarageGames cause they currently have the right solutions for many things that we do.
As for the IMGDC I think it was a great first show, met alot of good people, we had some really good food (sorry the original poster didn't) and I thought the speakers I got a chance to see all did a good job, even though a couple I went to ended up going off track a little.
I look forward to next year, and I would recommend anyone who is looking at getting into this space to go.
#11
04/18/2007 (1:07 pm)
Hmm. I think the best bet will be for people to decide for themselves how the felt about the session. I have now through email received as much praise for that session as I've seen criticism. We're going to be rolling out the audio and video in the next 30 days both to attendees and to non-attendees (for a fee). More on this will be in my post-mortem.
#12
I have never tried any other packages. But im always interested in the debate on Tech.
04/18/2007 (1:09 pm)
Thanks - I was just curious. I have been playing with the MMOKIT , and thought it was pretty solid. I have never tried any other packages. But im always interested in the debate on Tech.
#13
"I did say that I knew of some attempts at Torque"
There have been a bit more than some attempts :)
A team of 2 (one of which had never made a game before) and a couple independent contractors were able to create an Indie MMO with Torque in 11 months, starting from scratch. We've managed to get some decent reviews/awards and pay the bills with the game we've created. We're now in the process of making the work (and over a year of updates and enhancements) available to license.
The approach we're taking is more of the Quake/Unreal/Lithtech style of having a complete game/server hierarchy which is already tested and ready for production. The technology was specifically created with indie requirements in mind and has proven to be rock stable with 99%+ server uptime. It has also handled over 40,000 player registrations in just over a year.
I think this tech is a GREAT choice for indies/hobbyists who want to get a MMO done, shipped, and have some realistic expectations for doing so... I also think it would be great for creating/running smaller 3D MUD typed games. The later is exciting to me because I think we would actually see more 3D muds completed than full MMO games.
Multiverse looks really cool... I, of course, like the Torque MMO Kit work we're doing... and there are some others. I would say that developers should find a solution they like, stick with it, and get a game done. The whole "versus" discussions and arguments are mostly a waste of energy and time.
-Josh Ritter
President
Prairie Games, Inc
04/18/2007 (2:17 pm)
@Rafhael: Multiverse looks cool (and uses Python!). It looks like you guys have some great games being made with it. I think you guys have a winner on your hands."I did say that I knew of some attempts at Torque"
There have been a bit more than some attempts :)
A team of 2 (one of which had never made a game before) and a couple independent contractors were able to create an Indie MMO with Torque in 11 months, starting from scratch. We've managed to get some decent reviews/awards and pay the bills with the game we've created. We're now in the process of making the work (and over a year of updates and enhancements) available to license.
The approach we're taking is more of the Quake/Unreal/Lithtech style of having a complete game/server hierarchy which is already tested and ready for production. The technology was specifically created with indie requirements in mind and has proven to be rock stable with 99%+ server uptime. It has also handled over 40,000 player registrations in just over a year.
I think this tech is a GREAT choice for indies/hobbyists who want to get a MMO done, shipped, and have some realistic expectations for doing so... I also think it would be great for creating/running smaller 3D MUD typed games. The later is exciting to me because I think we would actually see more 3D muds completed than full MMO games.
Multiverse looks really cool... I, of course, like the Torque MMO Kit work we're doing... and there are some others. I would say that developers should find a solution they like, stick with it, and get a game done. The whole "versus" discussions and arguments are mostly a waste of energy and time.
-Josh Ritter
President
Prairie Games, Inc
#14
04/18/2007 (2:20 pm)
Is it just me, or would a celebrity death match of josh ritter and josh williams be friggin r0x0rz? 
#15
Glad the conference went well and everyone got a lot of good info out of it. And networking!
04/18/2007 (6:34 pm)
As for food, you should have hit the Red Sea or Dakota Jazz Club or Hell's Kitchen. There's some good stuff there, but (like anywhere) a lot of mediocre as well. I'm heading there for a week and a half next month to see more theatre in a eleven days than most people see in two years.Glad the conference went well and everyone got a lot of good info out of it. And networking!
#16
04/19/2007 (8:20 am)
It was completely awesome, being in such close contact with the indie mmo industries most forward looking thinkers. I cannot wait to go next year, I came away a changed man.
#17
04/19/2007 (8:28 am)
@Dave - If only your underwear felt as changed *cackles wildly and just couldn't resist*
#18
04/19/2007 (11:32 am)
Jonathon I have to agree you guys did a great job pulling together the show, I am glad I got to come out. If you need help with next year please let me know.
#19
04/19/2007 (1:32 pm)
@Adrian - Thank you! It was quite a hectic few weeks leading up to it (which everyone will find out as soon as I get the pics back to post to the blog I'm writing about it) Look out for next year, it's going to be significantly bigger, yet staying intimite like this year (at least that's my challenge).
#20
I've also reviewed my previous emails to Raph or contacts and it appears that I didn't really explain too well what he was even going to be talking to, which is why the confusion just before the table. This is an obvious oversight on my part and I apologize. I will be planning much longer and more carefully for IMGDC 2008 to make sure confusion stays outside the walls.
04/21/2007 (9:34 pm)
I wanted to quick post a comment about my initial response. I came across pretty harsh on Rafhael and responded based on 2nd hand information from a couple sources. I have since reviewed the tape and although I respect Tony's opinions on the talk, I do disagree. I feel that when Multiverse or 'how we did it" is mentioned, it's in context to the discussion at hand in most cases.I've also reviewed my previous emails to Raph or contacts and it appears that I didn't really explain too well what he was even going to be talking to, which is why the confusion just before the table. This is an obvious oversight on my part and I apologize. I will be planning much longer and more carefully for IMGDC 2008 to make sure confusion stays outside the walls.
Torque Owner Prairie Games
Prairie Games, Inc.
That's too bad about the "Battle of the OSes" round table. It was scheduled alongside the speech I gave on scalability. There ended up only being like 15 people for the speech. I think more people were probably in that round table :)
I did discuss some stuff with the Multiverse guys in the vendor area. They believe in their stuff and that is understandable. I do think that it gets pretty crazy on the who competitive side of things. I didn't even mention to them that we were getting into MMO technology... I really wasn't interested in some kind of debate. :)
It was really great of Jonathan and Last Straw to put on the conference.