Yesterday, I attended the first day of the NY Games Conference sponsored by Digital Media Wire. It had all the trappings of a conference for and by people trying to make a buck off of a niche without really immersing themselves in the niche. Yet even from the beginning there were indications that it might turn out to be a little bit more than that.

On a screen to the side was Mozes. Mozes is like a white-labeled microblog. There were instructions on how to send text messages that would show up on the screen. I had tested Mozes sometime ago but never found a use for it. So, this provided another good opportunity to test it out.

The cellphone coverage in the hall was weak, so I couldn’t send text messages from my phone. However, Mozes also supports a web interface, and after a little bit of work, I managed to get my account set up on Mozes and start sending some messages. I’m not sure if the messages were being moderated, or if the system was horribly slow, but it seemed to take forever for my messages to appear, and half the time the web interface said the message couldn’t be sent at all.

Because of this, the backchannel never really took off, which is unfortunate, because I suspect there were some very bright people in the crowd whom I would have enjoyed chatting with while the presentations were going on.

The first presentation was a panel of analysts talking about gaming trends. 75% of homes with children have game consoles. 55% of homes without children have game consoles. The Set Top Box market is changing and there is more competition for whose silicon gets connected to the main display in the living room. People are using Wii’s for physical therapy. When will consumers tire of the subscription model? Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band make music the hottest genre in the gaming industry right now. Gaming on mobile devices is a growing trend, especially on phones that support full HTML, yet teenagers who are normally the leaders in gaming have second hand phones not capable of much gaming right now. There were plenty of other interesting tidbits, but this pretty much summarizes the hour into a paragraph.

The second presentation was a debate about the future of the game console. The crowd was very strongly supporting the game console as the ‘Entertainment Hub of the Future’. However, Alex St. John, CEO and Founder of Wild Tangent and John Welch, CEO and Co-Founder of Playfirst made very strong arguments that the game console is going the way of the arcade game. They cost too much to develop and rarely provide adequate returns to investors. The development environment is costly and this discourages innovative game development. Alex St. John went so far as to suggest that we have seen the last generation of the game console.

Clearly, there is something to be said for open development platforms and I posed a question about the role of Linux as a potential gaming platform, which received no response.

The next panel was entitled ‘Get a (Virtual) Life – The Challenges and Opportunites for Monetizing Virtual Worlds and MMOGs’. This was a good overview panel, mapping out the space between MMOGs, Virtual Worlds and Avatar based sites. Monetization methods included subscription models, buying items using virtual microcurrencies, in world advertising and in world product integration. Differences between the U.S. markets, European markets and Asian markets were explored with some interesting discussions of the role of cellphone based payments in the European markets. Attorney Sean Kane, who gave a great presentation at Virtual Worlds New York, added valuable insights into some of the legal issues.

After all the recognized experts in the field of gaming spoke, Jacquie Lane of C&R research led a panel of the real experts. Eight teenagers spoke about their use of games. Jacquie asked questions ranging from what they do when they’re not gaming to which games the like best, how they find out about the games and how they pay for them. The top activity of these teenagers when they were not gaming was hanging with friends, followed by sports and music. There was a brief discussion about the social aspects of gaming and I wished that discussion could have been pursued further.

The final keynote of the day was from a iPhone game developer. He spoke about using OpenGL and OpenAL and I thought back to the panel about the future of the console and the role of open development platforms. The speaker claimed that the learning curve for iPhone development was very low. You could go to Apple’s website, download the development kit, upload your games at the iPhone Apps store and be on your way.

He explored the user interface, using the accelerometer as an input device with pros and cons of different methodologies. It almost makes me want to get an iPhone just to play with the development environment, although I do wonder how this will compare with Android development.

With the final presentation over, everyone moved upstairs for cocktails. I had a great discussion with folks from Games for Change, Stripes Gamer, Next Island and various payment providers for online gaming systems. Each of these discussions, as well as many of the panels probably deserve blog posts of their own, but this is supposed to be a summary post, so the details will have to wait.

All in all, the first day of the NY Games conferences failed to meet expectations. I expected a lot of suits talking about how to make a buck off of worlds they hadn’t visited. Instead, I found a lot of valuable information and I look forward to day two.