Ron Meiners - Advisory Board Member Interview

1) Please introduce yourself and tell us why you're so fascinated with Indie game development?

I'm Ron Meiners, a long-time community guy from the "good old" days at Mplayer.com.  I've worked at a number of places, notably iWin, Ubisoft, and Multiverse. 

To me, we're living in really exciting times, with both games and online community really becoming important in people's lives.  It's a revolution really, with experimentation and exciting new developments happening practically every day.  Who would have imagined the tremendous growth of Flash games for example?  Indie game developers, I feel, are living right on that edge, experimenting and coming up with creative new ways to engage people. 

By the way, I think community management is in the same state: it's a frontier, sometimes a wild one, and we're watching the birth of a whole new way for people to interact and form connections.  And it's just going to get bigger.

2) Tell us about your community history and your role in bringing players to casual and Indie games.

I started working in community at Mplayer.com, which was an important and very innovative interactive game site started in 1995.  Among other things, there were lobbies for people to gather, arrange game rules or teams, and just generally hang out.  More, we were one of the first places to have voice chat, so people really got creative, with everything from nightly songfests to online AA meetings. 

Anyway, seeing the amazing new ways that people were interacting online, I just got really excited about it and in working with the communities to make it a satisfying experience for everyone, both community and host site, which I think is one of the keys

I went on from there to iWin, then Ubisoft to work on Uru, various Myst titles, and Splinter Cell.  I still think of myself as a member of the Myst community, and have a lot of very good friends that came from that experience.  But Uru didn't last, which is a whole other story. I went from there to Multiverse, working with a lot of young and indie developers, who used the platform to bring their worlds to life.  I still think that's a really exciting technology, with a lot of potential.

I'm consulting now, as my last job at MyHollywood.com is at an end.  It was a really exciting project, blending casual games and entertainment.  But I've moved on to a number of other projects, still in development.  If it's about community, I'm likely to get psyched about it:  there's so much potential still for creating innovative and exciting new experiences in games and online socializing.

3) IMGDC 3.0 is set to be the most successful Indie conference in the game industry this year. What excites you about the conference?

I think especially in hard times, the role of the indie becomes really important.  They say that the first dot com crash opened the door to a tremendous new surge of creativity, as people had time to create new experiences and new sites and products.  I think that's true, when everyone's at a nine to five, there's less impetus for creativity.  When you've got time, and incentive, creating the great new thing becomes much more likely.

So this year's conference I think will be really important, in a way, and I'm really excited to see who will be there and what they'll be working on.  I think we have a chance to define ourselves as a group in a new way, and maybe strengthen our position, or encourage new development.

4) Will you be speaking at IMGDC 3.0? If so, what exciting topics do you have to share with those who attend?

I will be speaking this year, leading a round table with a couple of other awesome community folks, and we'll be starting with the basics of how to build a great community.  I'm thinking that with indies a lot of teams will be small, or even a solo creator, so having a guide to working with community might be helpful for folks who don't have the resources to bring on a full time community rep. 

Now, I want to say too, if you can bring in a community person, by all means do it, like any profession, a good CM will have experience, knowledge of best practices, and a whole lot of answers it's likely to take you some time to figure out on your own.  But for many indies that's just not an option starting out, so the round table will be starting out with the basics of building and managing community.  But it will be an open format, so if there are more advanced questions that people bring, we'll do our best to help solve them.  It should be fun and hopefully useful for people.

5) If there were three things you could say about IMGDC 3.0 that defined the conference and encourages industry members to attend, what would they be?

First, as an indie, I think it's crucial to have access to people who have faced the problems you're solving and have solved them.

Second, it's all about the networking!  Well, at least, there's a lot that get so much easier when you know people throughout the industry, in various facets or with different skills or whatever.  By all means, go make contact with other indies.  Plus, it's always great to party a little with people who understand what you do.

And third... go for the buzz.  Seriously, there's nothing like seeing what others are doing and talking about what you're doing to get you all excited again about making awesome games.  Go for the inspiration and the excitement and creativity, go to remember why you started doing this crazy stuff in the first place, and in a setting that hasn't been taken over by the corporate bottom line.

6) You have mentioned previously how the passion of the community is parallel to that of the developer. How does this relationship differ with Indie games?

Well, I think the connection is much more direct.  I mean, most corporations have other interests than the kind of inspiration and excitement that drive the indie developers.  They've got financial considerations, and the people there have other motivations, security or success or whatever.  All of which are fine, but most indies don't do what they're doing for those reasons.  Their passion for the creativity or uniqueness of a game is closer to what drives communities.

7) What can the community look forward to in the next few years from Indie developers?

Great question!  Honestly, I think there's a huge revolution just starting to happen (again) in online social interaction.  The whole "web 2.0" thing was driven by some new, mostly very light, technologies that gave users new ways to connect and to contribute to the content flow of the entire community. 

Thus far, however, very few of these technologies, or even these ideas, have made their way into games.  Spore's a good example - there's a very rudimentary mechanism for the players to contribute content.  But what if you had a feed update of how your race fared against others?  And maybe could make refinements in your next generation based on that?  What if there were twitter streams for your race or in your guild, in an MMO? 

Like that...  there are, I think, some tremendous opportunities to leverage new technologies, and create new technologies, that revolutionize socilizing in games.  Just around the corner!  And likely, the indies will be doing it, they're the ones who take the chances.

8) What games are you playing right now? What community tools are these games using that you like, and why?

Well, I'm a dad now, and that's really cut into my game playing time!  But it's a trade I'm making happily.  So mostly these days I'm playing little flash games: they're quick, and there's a lot of really interesting and creative game design going on there.  People trying all sorts of new ideas, which is very exciting to me.  I think that we've basically just scratched the surface of what games can be, and there's finally some really interesting innovation going on.

I still do check in to WoW from time to time, but it's a social thing more than anything else, to stay in touch with some old friends.  I do think WoW has done some good stuff lately, trying to broaden the range of experiences that might be interesting to their long-term players.  I think the awards and some of the automatic updates they've incorporated help spark interaction in the guild, which I think is a step in the right direction.

9) Thank you Ron for sharing with us your thoughts about the industry and IMGDC 3.0!

Well, right now is a tough time everywhere, even for our industry, but I do think there are aspects that really favor the indies heavily.  Indies have more flexibility, they can run leaner, and especially in tough times, there's a sort of "why not" attitude that leads to trying new things.  So I wouldn't be surprised if this time creates some new paradigms in game design, out of indie developers.

And I'm really excited about this year's conference.  IMGDC has grown and gotten better every year, and I'm sure this one will be no exception.  There simply isn't another conference that is oriented to indie game developers the same way, and I think it has a lot to offer, as I mentioned above.  Plus it's in Las Vegas this year, gotta love that.

Hope to see you there!