1. Games engage and retain users. A lot better than most applications do. Learn more about how to make your application keep your audience glued.

2. Good games are hard to design. See 1.

3. It’s a good time for social game developers to raise money. Have you heard about the rounds SGN, Zynga, and Serious Business raised?

4. New people are playing games for the first time on Facebook. Find out who. (Hint: it’s not your 16 year old cousin staying up all night)

5. Games are just more fun. Who wants to work when you can bite more chumps?

Look forward to seeing you all there!

Justin Smith
Editor, Inside Social Games

1. You. Who knows? You might be the next founder of a company in the gaming space or social web sphere, like InterPlay speakers Jim Greer, CEO and Co-Founder of Kongregate, or Shervin Pishevar, CEO and Co-Founder of Social Gaming Network. At InterPlay, attendees will have the chance to hear from several respected people in the industry, all at one conference. This is the conference that you might be speaking on a panel at one day
2. It’s who you know. In virtually every industry, networking is a business tool that could possibly make or break you. At events such as InterPlay, attendees have the opportunity not only to learn about the social gaming space, but to meet and network with other people just as passionate about the sphere as you are. Like you, they could be the next executives of start-up companies and it wouldn’t hurt to get in good with them now. More importantly, it definitely wouldn’t hurt to network with the professionals who are already leading their own companies in this space, while you’re still in school.
3. Learn what professors don’t teach you in class. There’s a good chance that at InterPlay, you’ll learn a good deal of information that you wouldn’t learn in class. It’s probably rare that someone like Patrick Chanezon from Google will come to one of your classes as a guest lecturer on OpenSocial. Take advantage and give yourself higher footing than your classmates who didn’t attend the event.
4. Get ahead of the game. While the social gaming sphere is somewhat new, hear about the future of the industry and the current challenges and questions it’s facing today, from those who know best and are immersed in it every day. Learn enough information to gauge for yourself if the future of social gaming looks promising enough to tell your parents that you want to work in this industry.
5. Money, money, money. One of the panel discussions is going to be dedicated to the questions of funding and monetizing the social gaming sphere. Hear about the ways that industry leaders are anticipating to make money in social gaming. Is it going to be a lucrative industry or not? And I know we all love a little money.
6. Kill the curiosity. Get any questions you have about the online gaming business answered, or at least debated, by some of the sharpest minds around.
7. See what everyone is talking about. Social gaming is catching on fast. Why? Find out at InterPlay!
8. Breakfast is included. You know that a free meal wouldn’t hurt your checkbook.
9. There’s a way-cool afterparty. Location TBA.
10. Your people will be there. If you’re looking to find like-minded college students that could potentially help you form a company after graduation, this is the place to meet them.

SimCity 3000 was a simulation game, released in 1999, in which the gamer builds and runs his own city, making every single decision about it from start to finish. Every decision had some kind of consequence, and the gamer was able to tell if he was a good mayor by how populated the city became and by another feature I loved — the news ticker that would scroll at the bottom of the screen, displaying important (or sometimes comical) news about the city.

I loved the game for many different reasons:

1. It offered me an escape from the real world (and, being that I was only 12 at the time, my life was ruled by taking orders from adults). In turn, I got to create my own little world in which I called all the shots. I had power over something!

2. It was fun to see what would happen in the city even based on what seemed to be the smallest decisions.

3. I got to create my ideal city, which consisted of theme parks in almost every corner that I could squeeze them into, although they always seemed to catch on fire for some reason… (Maybe that’s why my cities never reached a population of more than 200…)

4. I wanted to make better cities than the ones my older brother made, who introduced me to the game.

5. I wanted to make better cities than the ones my friends made, who I introduced to the game.

The reasoning behind my love for the game brings me to think about one of the key ways games catch on (word of mouth or “virality”) and how this has affected the gaming industry and brought us to the point that we are at today. Whatever it is that brings gamers to this sphere (escapism, control, etc.), it’s got them talking.

Word of mouth has the power to make things spread like wildfire, which is exactly how social networking infiltrated our lives. People saw something they liked, such as Facebook and MySpace, and wanted to be able to use it to connect with their friends, so they sent out invites or told them to join, much like how I enjoyed SimCity and wanted to be able to compare my cities with my friends’ simulated cities. We could either take turns on the computer (but a round of SimCity could last a while) or play separately in our own homes and discuss it later.

In comes my 2008 news ticker scrolling, “Melanie, it’s not 1999 anymore.” Now, with gaming, people no longer have to just tell each other about how or what they do in a game. Thanks to the wonders of technology and the Internet, gaming has changed and allowed people to connect in ways they were never able to before and they can share, discuss, and play each other in real time.

What better way to bring passionate gamers together and expand the gaming industry’s reach than by merging it with another global industry, the social web? The idea is beginning to catch on and is a space that will continue to develop as it spreads like the wildfire that is known as word of mouth, but because social gaming is fairly new, there are many questions to be discussed and answered about the sphere. And I think that’s what we’re going to talk about at Interplay. See ya there.