The Game

In ConfQuest, GDC attendees were cast as player characters and monsters in an immense dungeon crawl through the event venue, with players accosting monsters for loot and employing a number of special abilities. The cheesy fantasy and sci-fi sendups didn't stop hundreds of players from embarking on the ConfQuest campaign.

The Design

ConfQuest turned the GDC into a massively multiplayer role-playing game, with surprisingly hardcore groups of players roaming the conference in search of the volunteers who were playing monsters. In designing ConfQuest, we faced some of the core design challenges of any multiplayer RPG, including class balancing, item economy exploits, and even griefing players.