Category: News

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Fighting games appear to be at a unique crossroad, being pulled in various directions, between their grassroots origins, esports, popular IPs, and more.

I think one of the most important things a genre can do in an attempt to grow is innovate.  Even small tweaks — hopefully in the right direction but not always — can help direct and guide games in the genre to succeed and exceed predecessors.

So, inspired by @goodFGideas on Twitter, here are some ideas — some could be interesting, others purposefully awful.

Also, apology in advance if some of these have already been done; either stated by @goodFGideas already or in an existing game.

There isn’t a lot of variation when it comes to fighting games’ business models.  Usually the game is sold at one price; extra characters are then released several months after launch with some cosmetic DLC sprinkled throughout.  There’s also special or deluxe editions that already include the aforementioned character DLC released at launch.  The other variation is free to play, where players get one or two characters to play — that sometimes change on a weekly or monthly basis — and buy the characters they want.

Lately, it seems the post-launch character releases sometimes make games feel incomplete, irritating some players such as the case with BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle’s DLC character packs.  I sort of understand the logic behind the developer’s choice.  If you launch the game at the full $69.99 price, it may appear too high and scare some more fiscally responsible players away.  This can also make supporting the game post launch with server support, balance updates, and patches more difficult.  Doing DLC character packs allow some players to buy at the lower price, and if they decide they don’t like the game, move on.  Some will enjoy the game and continue to support it by buying the DLC; others will wait until the game and/or DLC is cheaper and buy it all at once.

Anyway, here are some business models future fighting games could try (or not):

Buy Characters?  Why Not Buy Modes Too!

I think Dead or Alive 5 already did this to a degree; allowing players to buy the story mode for an additional cost in the Final Round edition of the game, but why stop at story mode?  Are you a casual who only wants to play story mode and arcade mode while you wait for a 100+ hour rpg to come out?  Then just buy Story Mode and Arcade mode, just $5 each!  Are you a pro that doesn’t care about narrative at all and just want to grind, lab, and play online?  Then just get those!  Similar to ordering a’la carte at a restaurant, you buy just the modes you want instead of a large meal with a side you’ll probably forget at the table anyway despite getting a to go bag.

Regardless, this idea focuses on the compartmentalization of fighting games.  Devs release the game at a relatively low price and see what modes are selling, need expansion, etc.  Is nobody playing the single-player content?  Then don’t make more of it!  A similar logic could be applied to cosmetic character DLC.  Why make more costumes for character X if they are the least used character?  The biggest risk is the game may appear unfinished, so upon release, a good number of these modes would need to be playable.  Not, “Oh, 6 months from now, you can buy Story Mode.”  It should probably be a day one release that’ll be expanded upon if successful.

Training Mode by the Hour?!

For professional players, training mode is probably one of the most important modes in a fighter outside of versus and online play.  And training modes have definitely evolved from earlier fighting games.  You can record inputs to be played back or program an AI to react in a variety of ways.  Though most training mode features were probably used by the developers to help debug key game features, there is still a considerable amount of UI work involved in getting these features usable to players.

Now, athletes train in gyms and on fields every day.  The use of that equipment and those facilities isn’t free, so why should training mode?!  So, similar to Tekken Revolution’s quarter system, why not use a similar system for Training Mode?  If a game could make even $0.25 for every hour players are in training mode, can you imagine the revenue?!  Heck, even just having ads pop-up could probably create decent revenue steam.

Now, will players be annoyed by this?  Yes.  Don’t do this.  This is a horrible idea that I hope a company, no matter how hungry for profit, never does.  Though I liked Tekken Revolution’s quarter system to a degree  — free to play with quarters you kept by winning or gained back every hour — doing this for training mode would probably cause lasting damage to any IP that tries it, except Street Fighter or Tekken; these two brands could maybe survive the backlash from hourly training mode fees.

Player Cards & Paid Modifications

Player cards are pretty common in fighters.  They show your gamertag, wins, losses, achievement-based banners, and more.  My idea:  Let players modify them more freely.  If you don’t wanna show how many losses you have, don’t.  Want to keep your number of wins a secret?!  Remove it.  Want multiple labels?!  Go right ahead!  Obviously, there’d be a limit.  I imagine you’d have to fit items on the card similar to Resident Evil 4’s inventory system.

So the business model portion?  Well, most banners and labels are earned through playing the game — beat arcade mode with this character on hard, win 100 ranked matches, etc.  Why not just let people buy these?  They don’t need to be expensive.  If you like a label, just buy it.  “But they didn’t EARN it,” you may decry.  Who cares? (Obviously the person asking, but I digress.)  A player earning a banner by doing something like beating arcade mode on Expert is good for them, but getting a dollar because the player didn’t want to do is good for the developer (but could also speak to a poorly designed arcade mode or AI.)

Also it could create an interesting headgame during online matches.  “Wait, they have the banner for doing all of that character’s challenge combos?!  They must be really good with them!” Are they, or did they buy that label?  Well, you’ll quickly learn once they drop a combo or two, but you were a little nervous, right?  No?  Fine.

Furthermore, wanna clear the number of losses you have?  You can pay to have your criminal record expunged — or at least a Google search tells me that — why not you loss record?  Or even your win record!  

You may ask, couldn’t this create an atmosphere of distrust?  Well, I mean, so does rage quitting, a common practice players do to preserve win streaks, even despite punishments companies implement.  And I’m pretty sure there are people who can easily figure out to mod their records somehow.

This idea is probably also very bad.  I am curious to how many players actually even care about their player card or how many would pay to expunge their losses or to get a special, difficult-to-earn-badge.  Does it cheapen said labels because some players didn’t really earn it?  Yes, but at the same time, when you earn one for real, knowing you earned it and saved money in doing so, that’s a good feeling too.  Overall, I think that’s what the idea is referring to; more concepts that you can either earn through play or just buy.  I believe Injustice 2 allowed this with Brainiac.  You could either buy him immediately — useful to tournament organizers for sure — or save a few bucks — at the cost of a few hours — and earn him by completing Story Mode.

Single player content is a surprisingly contentious topic in fighting game.  To the main design of a fighting game, single player content isn’t really important.  If the actual gameplay of a fighter is boring or uninspired, having good story, arcade, or campaigns modes really aren’t going to save it.

SPC seems to really excel as expanding the brand of the game and its lore, letting players know why should they invest in this world or these characters.  Also, it can be the vehicle to crossover into merchandising, expanding the brand into other media — comics, movies, shows, etc. (Or do the opposite, get more people interested in an existing brand.)

Stop Copying NetherRealm Studios

I’ll admit, I really liked Mortal Kombat 9’s story mode.  It did a great job at exploring the rather complex (or convoluted) lore of the Mortal Kombat series and allowed players to try multiple characters, acting almost like mini introductions to the cast — or kast?  Sorry.

Though I feel after that game’s success EVERY AAA fighting game has copied that formula — do a fight, watch a cutscene, do a fight, repeat.  I can’t imagine how expensive these modes are.  With all of their animation, narrative design and writing, voice acting, and various one-off systems needed to implement just to — and I could be wrong about this — have a majority of players ignore or ridicule it.

One issue is often these fights usually aren’t anything special or unique from the basic play experience.  Maybe you’ll face someone like Peter the Cop from Street Fighter V or an unplayable boss, but they are just small snippets of unique play.  Also, cutscenes seems to get longer and longer, highlighting an already problematic flow style.  At least Guilty Gear Xrd just did away with the flow problem and made a movie with no fights.

Anyway, the “idea” is just to try something new with this.  Shorter cutscenes, more tutorialized or unique challenges, just something that’ll separate it from NRS’s current story mode implementations.  Something that’ll make players go “Hey, playing this story mode was a lot more beneficial to me than just watching it on YouTube.”

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Invisible (or Hard to See) Tutorials

“Tutorial” feels like a dirty word in game development.  It feels like a lot of developers and designers — myself included — seem to dread creating them, especially if they are leaning towards being very text heavy or requiring a lot of unique features that are only for the tutorial.  A lot of this stems from the feeling that players often ignore or rush through them, missing key points and then quitting out of frustration because they ignored said points.  I think the best tutorials are once considered to be invisible; however, implementing these ideas in fighting games seems rather difficult since the progression can’t be neatly laid out like in Half Life 2.

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Tekken 7’s Story Mode is an example of a single player content that tries to replace a tutorial — though I think doesn’t do a great job of it, particularly due to the limited character set, easy input mode, and other factors.  Regardless, I think, if a developer isn’t going to take the time to do an in-depth tutorial, some level of single player content to teach various aspects of the game is important.  Challenges such as blocking a series of attacks or fighting opponents that only take damage from juggles I think can help a player learn, but also explore different aspects of the game without feeling like they are necessarily doing a tutorial.

I feel one thing that hasn’t changed a ton over the course of fighting games has been online mode.  You have ranked, casual, and lobbies to play with friends.  Besides things like Factions in Mortal Kombat X, I’m unsure what innovation is really being brought to online play.

Mentorship

Now this idea probably already doable to a degree, but the problem it’s trying to solve is that new players often jump right online and just get demolished by more experienced players.  Those players pretty much have two options then:  try to learn and improve or just leave and move on to a different game.

What if, instead of immediately jumping online, players could learn from a mentor of sorts.  Apparently online training modes already exists, but this service would more or less allow more experience players — probably determined by rank or experience — to train and mentor newer players through private one on one online training.

This probably already exists through more experienced players Patreons — donate X per month and I’ll play with you for an hour a week or something — but what is the game could facilitate this more?  You can then rank which mentors were helpful or unhelpful, etc., and said mentors are rewarded.

Again, probably not a necessary idea as the community and players could facilitate this instead of the game; however, I think by putting it out there, it could help newer players realize that the fighters take time to learn and sometimes they just need help from some more experienced in the genre to succeed.  Also, it could be a nice alternative to videos, which don’t always work for individuals who learn more kinesthetically.  I mean, most people don’t learn martial arts through videos or books, they learn through classes with a skilled teacher, and I think fighting games taking a similar approach could be helpful in growing a lasting playerbase.  This idea also fails if the player refuses to believe they need help of any kind as finding a learning from a mentor is usually an admittance that one needs help — which shouldn’t and isn’t something to be ashamed of, yet it often is believed to be one.

Nemeses

When online, sometimes you lose, you lose bad, and you want that over seasoned rematch.  Most games do keep track of your last couple of opponents.  So you could probably find that gamertag, invite to a match, and have your revenge match, but what if the game did more?

Inspired by the Nemesis System of Shadow of Mordor / War, what if fighters had a similar system?  Every time you lose a match, you have the option to make that opponent a nemesis.  Then, in the future, you can rechallenge that player.  It probably wouldn’t go toward your in-game ranking, but you could have built-in rewards to create an incentive to challenge nemeses but also for said nemeses to accept rematches.  Though not a huge or new concept, it’s a small tweak that could make online play more interesting and motivate players in a different way, giving them a reason to come back in the future.

Asymmetrical Effects

Some fighters have special status effects such as turning a character invisible or poisoning an opponent.  I think it would be interesting that, when playing online, the effects were visually asymmetrical.  If I turn invisible, I can still see my character locally — probably with some fancy effect so I can tell the effect is still active — but on the opponent’s side, my character is completely invisible.  In the case of poisoning, the entire screen gets a slight purple hue, not only to indicate that the negative effect is active but to give an additional layer of difficult by affect the game’s visual.  This is a short idea, but I feel something small like this could make online play more interesting.

Answer “Why?”

I feel the biggest issue with fighting game online modes today is that they don’t really have strong incentives to keep playing or can feel like a grind.  They don’t give a great sense of progress nor do they really offer a reason to keep coming back. 

You get the trophies, now what?  They are usually one-and-done.  You get top rank — and if you do, you’re probably already a pro player and it doesn’t matter because you’re preparing for some tournament — but in that case, tournaments already provide the why.

But what drives average or below average players to keep coming back?  They may enjoy playing the game itself but just aren’t that great, losing online becomes tedious, and they may not have the time or resources dedicated to improving quickly.  Should they quit playing?  Developers never really want the answer to that to be “yes.”

So developers need to contemplate, besides the frustration brought on from losing, what are they getting out of it?  A lose streak and loss record already is a harsh punishment to some — something else I’ll applaud Tekken Revolution for doing away with.  If said player does feel like they are making some progress on their play and eventually will break through and end the losing streak, nothing really needs to be done; however, there will always be players that when faced with even minor frustration, feelings of regression with no accomplishment, will probably quit and move onto something else.  This is a reality some games need to face; developers can’t please everyone, but the more they can prevent players leaving and quitting, the better.

Overall, I guess the idea is give players a reason to play online, regardless of the outcome.  Sure, the subjective nature of the game being fun is there — if you can make players enjoy losing as much as winning, you’ve made great progress, but I feel like even a minor reward for losing, can help.

Some games have made efforts towards this, awarding small amounts of EXP or in game currency just for playing.  Some games offer daily challenges:  throw an opponent five times during a ranked match, win 3 matches with X character — though personally I don’t like these because they force you to change your play style to complete said challenges, ultimately serving as a distraction.  And developers can’t do what some mobile or single player games do — allow players to buy in-game currency so they can overcome the next challenge more easily.  Maybe this isn’t really a problem, but just a reality of competitive games.  You have your core players that will utilize online play the most, and more casual players who will consume single player content and move on as they make little to no progress online.

I guess this isn’t so much an idea — and it’s not really unique to fighting games.  This is more or less just expressing the opinion that online play currently can feel like a pointless grind, that some players need a better reason to come back to online mode, a “Why?”  I think the game design lens of visible progress has some good questions for this; I feel showing players their progress could help answer this too, but of course, the counter question, do players even care about their progress if said progress isn’t just win accumulation?

In conclusion, here is a list of ideas that I could have probably tweeted instead of writing this:

• Allow players to buy what modes they want to play
• Charge a nominal fee per hour of Training Mode usage
• Allow players to buy any badge for their player card as well as the ability to expunge their loss record
• Stop copying NetherRealm Studios Story Modes
• Make more single player content fights unique and/or act as invisible tutorials
• Create an online mentorship program to allow more skilled players train less skilled ones
• A nemesis system that allows players to quickly have revenge matches and rewards both players for victory and participation
• Asymmetrical networking effects between players.
• Give players a reason to play online through visible progress and/or minimal reward/punishment.

Oh and one more I didn’t feel like writing about at length — use machine learning to prevent infinites and improve balance.  I didn’t write at length on this, because I feel like machine learning is a buzzword I don’t know a ton about.  Regardless, I am curious if someone could create an AI that could take a game’s data, analyze it, and point out a lot of the initial flaws.  It probably wouldn’t find all of them, and worse, it could result in a sterile experience so it could end up being a horrible, expensive idea.

Again, some ideas are maybe okay and could extend to other genres; some ideas are awful, and I would secretly love to watch attempts at subduing the PR nightmare manifested by someone trying them.

Overall, I think the genre is in an interesting period.  I think things are exciting and great, but I also feel they could be improved and evolve, and I hope we continue to see developers attempt to evolve the genre through even the slightest changes in the future.

Nintendo is updating Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch to include support for the Toy-Con Motorbike controller that comes packed in the Nintendo Labo Variety Kit. 

The controller itself requires some assembly, however. The Toy-Con Motorbike is notably one of the many craftable cardboard creations included in Nintendo’s Labo line earlier this year. While each of the Labo kits come with their own playable Switch game, the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe update marks the first time support for a Labo Toy-Con has been included in a separate, non-Labo game.

Following the update, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe players will be able to mount their Joy-Con controllers into the Labo Motobike setup and use their cardboard creation to steer in-game. A short video showing Labo support in action can be found right above this post.

While Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the first game to pick up Labo support, Nintendo notes that it won’t be the last. The company is looking to bring Nintendo Labo compatibility to more games in the future, though it hasn’t detailed which titles it is looking at quite yet.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Gaming communities are full of surprises. Pleasant ones, mostly.

Speaking to your players is always rewarding — rewarding both to your project (in terms of brand trust and product insights you get from communication with actual people) and to yourself as a person. 2 years of community management for War Robots taught me thousands of things I never realized before.

For example, think about this: do people raging on game X’s forum actually hate the said game? Or it is, in fact, completely opposite? Let this question breathe for a bit — we’ll get back to it in a minute.

Nothing changes the fact, that speaking to people on the internet can be rather strenuous at times. And it will eat you alive if you don’t approach it properly.

When you take a quick glance at the community page of any established game, the first thing you’ll likely see is people being very upset over something. New community managers are often hit by that really hard (well, I certainly was). The knee-jerk response to that is to try fixing the situation as promptly as possible. Asking development team to implement features X and Z people are asking of right now sounds like the best bet. It clearly seems like project’s life and death depends on those… Or does it?

That’s how I thought at first, and soon I had to face reality.

Reality is always the same: let these Xs and Zs go live today, and tomorrow something entirely new will take their place. Fulfilling everyone’s expectations is impossible, as there are literally thousands of contradicting “wants” and “needs” flying around.

So what a person handling dev-to-player communications (let’s call this person a community manager, CM for simplicity) should do to remain sane and helpful to all parties?

One way to handle this is to restrict CMs working field to simply showing care. On social media or forums, steered by strict guidelines with inflexible directions like ‘in case of [this] say [that]“. Is it a good idea? Depending on what you’re looking for. This approach basically turns CMs into another line of customer support service, surely simplifying things a great deal… but also making developer-player interactions boring and mechanistic, throwing away all chances of something special emerging.

We aren’t huge fans that approach. Here in War Robots team community managers are all on their own. We, too, are decision makers, working both in players’ and product’s interests. We know many things others don’t. We have key product metrics on our hands while providing tons of data by ourselves.

For all of it to work, we have to stick  to certain principles. In this article, I’ll attempt to outline a general framework that will help you not only finding common ground with a multi-million player base but actually turning your back-and-forth communication into a healthy process from which everyone can benefit.

Negativity is hard to avoid. Even the abstract Best Game Ever would have to face hateful speech in social media over, supposedly, pettiest things. And the further the project goes, the more you’ll have to withstand.

After years working with different communities, I didn’t find anything better than to change the way I look at the hate itself. Let’s get back to the question from the beginning. Do haters actually hate? 

There’s one paradoxical, yet game-changing insight:

Those berating you, care about your game more than anyone else. 

They care so much, they just cannot contain themselves — and they aren’t to blame. Try putting yourself in their shoes. Would you be happy if the game where you spent your best years was going in a direction you don’t agree with? I definitely wouldn’t.

Let’s use a trite-yet-illustrative human relationships parallel. People change, and whether or not you and your partner will accept each other exactly as you became — on that depends if you will stay together. The difference is, with human-human relationships you can break up if things don’t work out. It will be painful, it will be hard, but nobody will die (most likely). But if you break up with your community, your game is usually doomed as there is no one else to bother.

Good news? You will never please every single side of your multifaceted player base anyway. So just accept this and go with the flow.

Resiliency is the trait you have to develop as a CM. Take into account what I said above: people on the internet are unhappy, but only because they love your game, not because they want to make your life at work miserable.

Sometimes this will make them say horrible things. False things. You might want to call them out for that. To prove them wrong, to make them feel bad for what they’re saying, to literally demolish them…

Hush now, hold your horses. Before acting, take a moment and observe the situation through player’s eyes.

One general rule that will make a difference: never argue. You’ve been told this many times perhaps, but I’ll still emphasize it. Passive aggressiveness doesn’t cut it either — you won’t make the situation better if you try to fight back in any form. Even if you win, if you prove someone wrong — it won’t make anyone feel better.

Instead, listen. Ask questions. Understand what is the actual driver of people’s unhappiness.

When we are upset, we all struggle to find out what makes us feel this way. By getting to the core of the issue you can find that precious tiny straw in players rationale, pulling which will help you steer the conversation onto the constructive course.

Most importantly: when talking to players, ask for feels and causes, not the solutions. The solution is up for developers and designers to figure out, as only they have the whole picture on their hands. Your job is to expand this picture with your insights into players’ minds. The Mom’s Test (http://momtestbook.com) by Rob Fitzpatrick is probably the best book on that matter: clear, concise and helps to ask the right questions. I strongly suggest you read it.

Empathy helps you to address the right things at  the right time. But it works even better if it is supported by data.

Data allows us to translate everything from the language of a player to the language of a product. We don’t just come to the producer all like “uhh some people don’t like it so you have to change it”. Such claims only worth something when we can support them with a clear idea of who these people are. 

• How many of them there is — five or five thousands? 
• How long ago they started playing — a month or maybe three years ago? 
• How active are they? Are they casually running a couple matches per week or diving deep for many hours daily?

…and so on. It is a huge mistake to believe that all players are the same — which, however, is widely spread. There’s nothing easier than to catch false positives from some small yet vocal group.

To illustrate that I often refer to the game called Wildstar. This game has an incredibly captivating concept: an MMORPG for hardcore players remembering the old World of Warcraft days. Believing that this is the huge market to cater to, its developers spent nine years making it. Nine freaking years!

Did it pay off? Hardly. Wildstar is still around and is pretty good… however it never got as big as it could’ve been (which is unfortunate). As it turned out, nostalgic players ready to grind away weeks straight just to get an access to the raid dungeon weren’t the biggest part of WoW community. They were the loudest.

And now, how do you pinpoint the difference between “loud” and “numerous”? You know the answer. Data.

We use stats provided by social platforms augmenting them by third-party services when native analytics are not enough. Social media mining tools free our hands when it comes to collecting general sentiment on new features and the situation as a whole.

Your community can provide with much more numbers you might initially think. Places like FeverBee blog might be a good place to start digging for inspiration.

The bigger your community grows, the more you want to zoom out and observe it from the level of pure stats. But you should never stop approaching people personally: every show of humanity can go a long way.

With that in mind metrics must support your actions, not command them. You are working with people, and there’s a lot of weird stuff happening behind the scenes that you cannot explain just by looking at graphs.

Personal contacts with our players helped us catch and fix any issues before they started to show up on any metrics — like drastic metagame shifts or potentially game-breaking exploits. But these contacts aren’t just about building the intelligence network. It might be convenient to think about them this way, but there’s another huge reason to keep up with your pilots/summoners/tenno (however you prefer to call your lads and gents).

Here is that reason: you should always realize that your players are people. It sounds obvious, but when you’re operating the game with millions of monthly players it is easy to start seeing them merely as numbers in your dashboards. When quantity takes over, you might become completely desensitized to people’s feelings, and once it happens nothing I said above matters anymore.

Seeing players in person gives you a so much needed reboot and sets you back on track.

This April we invited a bunch of players to our office. It was a much less ambitious event than the one from two years ago (back them we invited top clan leaders to join the first ever official tournament), but scaling it down allowed us to keep things as informal as possible. High profile War Robots youtuber Adrian Chong came to us with a long lecture on the state of the game from player’s perspective, but that was the only “official” part of that event. After that, we were just hanging out and chatting. About everything. Literally.

And heck, that was incredible — insightful and… sobering in a way. Bringing players to our place allowed us to remind the development team that War Robots pilots are much more than suppliers of feedback and requests — but real genuine people for whom our game plays a huge role in their lives and whatever we do affects them a lot more than it might seem from our side.

There are players who want to dig into inner workings. The most hardcore followers. They save entire worlds by bringing closed projects back to life (like it happened with Star Wars Galaxies or Asheron’s Call), help funding passion projects of immense scale on Kickstarter and so on. But they definitely aren’t the most people you meet on your Facebook or Reddit page. Most people prefer having a much simpler time in their virtual worlds. And that’s okay!

But that is also why I am strongly convinced that there’s no need to ever draw players’ attention on video games being a business. People have enough “business” in their lives already — why should we also bother them with ours?

It is always better to underpromise than underdeliver. If there’s even the slightest chance something won’t go according to plan, don’t make the announcement.

But if something goes wrong, resort to one simple trick.

Honesty is your trump card. If you screwed up, admit it. Own it. Players’ trust is the most important asset of yours — if your audience trusts you, they will forgive many things. They know nobody is perfect.

It’s okay sometimes to say that “we did that to drive sales” when you push another monetized feature. People might get emotional at times, but they aren’t dumb. They will understand. But only if there’s a real trust between you and them.

Getting the trust back is much harder than building it from scratch. Figure out what kind of relationships you want to have with your players — and start cultivating them right away. Set the boundaries, the amount of attention you’re going to commit, then stick to the plan. Firmly. Every time you deviate, you lose your trust points.

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Working with the community can go a long way. Remember though: if you are speaking to the community, you aren’t here to turn every dream real. First and foremost, you are here to understand what the dream actually is.

It is also up to you to keep providing everyone with great entertainment while protecting them from the nitty-gritty of making this entertainment tick. Find stories to tell. Build engaging activities. Or just give people ideas on how to deal with things they don’t like so they don’t hinder their enjoyment.

Whatever you do, just keep the communication going.

Help the game experience to extend to the outside world. This is something that is absolutely in your power. Bring people together. Help them create. If you manage to do it, it will bring absolutely beautiful results, transcending all the business-related discourse and turning your game into something truly magical.

This October XRDC is coming to San Francisco, and it promises to be the premier conference for AR, VR, and MR innovation! 

As part of XRDC’s Education & Training track of talks, Boeing lead technical integrator Eric Spalding will be presenting a fascinating session all about “VR/AR Challenges for Training Environments” that promises to dig deep into Spalding’s work leading an R&D team researching AR and VR training in aerospace industries.

According to Spalding, AR and VR technologies could be extraordinarily disruptive to how training is performed. For the first time, students can be immersed in an environment that is easily deployable at low cost and without the dangers of real hardware.

However, for broad adoption, there are challenges to overcome that entertainment applications can more easily avoid, such as density of environments and interaction haptics.

With that in mind, Spalding’s XRDC presentation will provide an overview of various challenges facing AR/VR adoption in the training space and challenges attendees to develop solutions that could increase the overall AR/VR market. It promises to be fascinating if you’re at all interested (or invested) in the AR/VR/MR space, so don’t miss it!

XRDC is happening October 29th and 30th in San Francisco at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. Now that registration is open, you’ll want to look over XRDC passes and prices and register early to get the best deal! 

For more information about XRDC, which is produced by organizers of the Game Developers Conference, check out the official XRDC website. You can also subscribe to regular XRDC updates via email, Twitter and Facebook.

Gamasutra, XRDC, and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas