Call for Speakers

The Call for Speakers for ION 2008 is now closed. The Advisory Board thanks everyone who submitted proposals, and looks forward to making final selections for presentation at ION.

ION's goal is to continue to be the most informative technical conference in the industry. In our second year, we hope to achieve that goal with world-class speakers and information packed sessions, focusing entirely on developers and the challenges they face in our changing and expanding market.

ION offers its speakers tremendous opportunities for exposure and recognition. Sessions will attract many technical professionals interested in learning from your expertise and experience. Speakers who are already well established can continue to build their reputation, sharing new expertise and strengthening their already popular presentations. ION provides the following benefits to speakers:

• Complimentary registration to the conference, exhibition, keynotes, and exhibit events. Speakers are generally responsible for their own travel and hotel accommodations.
• Daily access to the exclusive Speaker/VIP Lounge.
• Speaker listing and company reference in the conference program and conference web site.

With the exception of sponsored sessions and roundtables, all ION sessions will be peer reviewed before the conference and publication in the conference proceedings. Peer review is widely used to evaluate the merit of articles contributed to scientific and engineering journals. We use peer review to ensure that sessions are of a high quality, ensure integrity, reduce potential liability, and maximize useful information content of sessions.

We hope that you will be able to participate in this event and look forward to your submission.

Peter Freese
Conference Director
ION 2008

Speaker Guidelines

Prospective speakers should read and understand the acceptable session formats at ION, documented in the ION Speaker Guidelines, particularly with regard to panels and roundtables. These terms have strict meanings at ION, and all sessions must adhere to ION standards.

Areas of Interest

Following is a list of topic areas of interest for ION 2008. You are not limited to these topics; however, preference will be given to talks in these areas.

Top 5 tips for getting your proposal accepted at ION

1. Submit a proposal on one of the many identified areas of interest. The advisory board has put a good deal of thought identifying areas that we feel are relevant to attendees. If your proposal is the only one for an area we are interested in, it will have priority over all the proposals outside our identified topic ideas.
2. Avoid any marketing slant in your proposals, particularly if you represent a service or technology vendor. ION has a very limited number of sponsored sessions, and proposals which appear to be sales pitches in disguise will be rejected.
3. Focus on areas of your expertise. The audience of ION consists of experienced industry leaders who want to hear from experts. Avoid areas where you aren't experienced or recognized as an expert.
4. Spend time writing a quality abstract. A poorly written or overly terse abstract indicates that you aren't willing to prepare in advance. The abstract is the most important part of your proposal and the basis on which it will be judged.
5. Submit your proposal well before the January 21 deadline. By the end of the call for speakers, we will have selected many of the sessions already and your proposal will be competing with every other proposal for a shrinking number of speaker slots.

Biz/Legal Track

• What happens when servers go down on virtual economies?
• Online console games – opportunities, challenges and emerging trends
• Kid friendly games and child protection laws
• Games of chance/skill and recent developments in gambling law
• Dealing with ownership, employment and insurance issues with user content.
• Market adjusted pricing as a means for dealing with piracy
• Legal entanglements companies have gotten into and how they were resolved.
• Where the money goes
  • Various operating costs of running an online game, including bandwidth, datacenter hosting, hardware replacement/maintenance, IT staff, game support staff, merchant fees, chargebacks, etc.
  • How these costs breakdown for existing online games with various scales and monetization models, such as WoW, City of Heroes, Runescape, KartRider, Neopets, etc.
• Sales tax and virtual item sales
• Export law and online game/content delivery
• Content filtering and freedom of speech
• Obligations under ratings systems and "content may change during online play"

Globalization/International Markets

• Emerging markets - we'd like to hear from developers who have entered these markets (successfully and unsuccessfully) as well as regional experts from these markets
  • Brazil
  • Viet Nam
  • India
  • Middle East
• Localizing content
  • Cultural awareness issues
  • Regional content restrictions
  • Creating games for multiple cultural markets
• Efforts by Chinese companies and others to seek financing from US investors
• Working with a foreign publisher.
• Chinese youth: the fastest growing market for games

Programming/Technical Track

• High performance networking
  • Techniques for handling extremely large amounts of latency-sensitive data
• Moving from development to operations
  • Deployment procedures
  • Tips for debugging live problems
  • Recording crashes
  • Alerts for exceptional conditions
  • Dealing with huge numbers of logs
• Build systems for big projects
  • Managing the entire asset pipeline as well
  • Injecting new content dynamically
• Using scrum for big online games
  • Organizing cross-functional teams to get programmers to work more effectively with artists and designers
• Tool chain postmortems
  • What worked and what didn't on tool pipelines for artists, designers, and operators
• Building highly concurrent systems
  • What techniques can be used today to take advantage of 4-8 core systems
  • Distributed processing across separate processors
• Security Considerations
  • How are games commonly exploited?
  • What are the most common programming mistakes that lead to exploitability?
  • What methods exist for detecting exploits?
  • How secure is good enough?
• Artificial Intelligence
  • Pathing algorithms for dynamic worlds
  • Emotion and behavior in NPCs
• Character Visualization
  • Creating customizable characters without sacrificing performance
  • Hiding latency with autonomous character state machines
• Programming and scripting languages for online games
  • Using Python, Lua, Ruby, et al for servers
  • Using Python, Lua, Flash, Javascript, et al for clients
  • What other languages should developers be seriously looking at?
  • What experience have developers had with managed code in games?

Design Track

• Cooperative group gameplay.
  • How can we move beyond the tank/healer/nuker roles?
  • Should we?
• Support roles in combat heavy design.
  • Are some roles and play styles more prone to player burn out?
  • How can we make the healing role fun?
• Moving beyond achievements: persistence and reward options for short session games.
• Techniques for building and telling epic stories in online games.
• Cross-platform online games.
  • Can cross-platform cooperative play be successful?
  • Game design strategies for cross-platform play.
  • Interface strategies for cross-platform play.
• Can procedural content be fun?
  • Randomized environments, randomized goals, and randomized encounters.
  • Methods of implementing procedural content.
  • How do we make procedural content that still feels epic and unique?
• Balancing RMT game economies.
  • Item pricing when players can use game currency and real world (transferred) currency.
  • Gold farming and economic interference.
  • Methods of implementing RMT.
• Creating an end-game.
  • Types of end-games, what works and what doesn’t.
  • How to prepare players for it.
  • How to create an extensible end-game.
  • How to manage the casual end-game and the hardcore end-game. Can they be the same?
• Encounter design: building fun battles, raids, and events in a modern MMO.
• Prototype construction: how to build a simplified version of your game quickly that also reflects the game’s unique style or specific features.
• Strategies for selling a game design vision to the producers and the team.
• Rediscovering the entrepreneurial spirit of design.
  • How to create bold designs while managing risk.
  • How to communicate unusual ideas to risk-averse investors.
  • Challenging standards: knowing what to keep and what to throw away.
• Maintaining design data: how to combat the chaotic build-up of items, creatures, and quests.
• Rapid content design: iteration and play-test cycles to maximize content value and quality.
• Needs of the community and product in a live environment.
• How to transition a design team from production to live.
• Metrics for live designers: community analysis to live data collection.
• Multi-product live strategies: How can we make it easier to manage multiple live titles from the same publisher?
• A sudden change in direction: how to fix major design flaws after the game has launched.

Community Track

• Pre-launch vs. post-launch community management
• When to hire a Community Manager for your game
• Community development
  • Building your games to foster community
• Community planning
  • Customizing your community solution for your game
• Running a beta
  • How your Community Manager can be a key contributor to your success
• Community contractors, outsourcing and volunteers
• Building relationships with fan sites and third party sites
• Live events

Submission Timeline

November 26, 2007

Call for speakers opens. Abstract submission begins.

January 21, 2008

Call for speakers end. No abstracts accepted after this date without prior approval.

February 4, 2008

Sessions selected and speakers notified

May 13, 2008

Conference opens.

Submitting Abstracts

Download the ION Session Proposal form:

Send completed abstracts via email to speak [AT] ionconference.com.

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